Barbara looked at him with shining eyes.
“You’ll have a wonderful sermon,” she said. “I know you, dear. Go to your hills—”
“From whence,” broke in the Reverend Absalom, his voice changing, “cometh help.”
So away he went in the early morning, knapsack well filled, blankets rolled, and a megaphone dangling from each side of his excellent horse.
Yes, he was glad to leave domesticity and towns behind him; glad to be away from the sound of voices and from the need of proprieties. He was a hill man, after all, he told himself, and lifting his face to the sky he thanked God that he was. They satisfied him, these ancient mountains which once had been lofty peaks and which through all the changing centuries had crumbled and shrunken till they were the friendly little mountains that he knew. They were so old—so old and so full of secrets. And they satisfied his restless, longing, laughing, dreaming soul, the curious soul of Absalom Summers, which differed from all the other souls on earth. Yes, he mused, each soul must differ from another, as the stars in heaven differ.
On he rode through the long day, thinking, dreaming, living a deep and silent life. At night he made his meal, fed his horse, smoked his pipe and thought of his sermon. The stars rolled over him in their silent and majestic courses, and beneath them he knelt to pray for his wife and babe, those inestimably dear treasures of his, those lovely creatures of the hearth-side. They liked their roof; he liked his sky. Well, blessings on them, and might he be forgiven if he harbored too wild a nature in his bosom! It was not a silent prayer that the Reverend Absalom put up. Far from it. He shouted to the whispering pines; he addressed the distant stars; he felt as if he must send his voice beyond the barriers of silence and reach his God. For that was the kind of man the Reverend Absalom was.
Then, as trusting as a child in his mother’s arms, he laid him down to sleep. For he felt the “Everlasting Arms” about him.
The next morning he arose at sunup and went singing on his way. He breakfasted at about seven o’clock, and stimulated by his powerful cup of coffee—which, truth to tell, was a fearsome liquid—he pushed onward. The road he had chosen was difficult to keep and hard to traverse. There were, of course, easier ways of reaching Longstreet Mountain, but in order to reach them he would have had to take a train, and nothing was further from his inclination at present than riding by steam. He wanted just what he was having, the heave of good horseflesh beneath him.
The day passed without events other than the sort he desired: the lift of a bird from a bush, the rippling of a stream across his path, the nosing of the horse at the ford, a burst of laurel blossoms in a sunny path. He went on, whistling and singing. Oftenest it was his old, best-loved hymn: “A mighty fortress is our Lord.”
Along late in the afternoon a mist began to gather over the mountain. It blurred everything delicately; it put a soft, filmy veil over the face of the landscape and enhanced its beauty by so doing. But after a while it began to be a bit eerie. As the wanderer cooked his evening meal it seemed as if shadowy white figures drew near, bending over him, and then flitting away as he arose. It did no more than amuse him, of course. He knew the tricks of the mountain mist. But he couldn’t help remembering how terrified he had been once as a child when he had been out on a night much like this, and had had a five mile walk alone with a lantern in his hand, which seemed to summon ghostly figures from the roadside.