Hallelujah Jones was in his element. With his wheezy melodeon, his gasoline flare and his wild earnestness, he crowded the main street of the little mining-town, making the engagement of the "San Francisco Amazons" at the clapboard "opera house" a losing venture. The effete civilization of wealthy bailiwicks did not draw forth his powers as did the open and unveneered debaucheries of less restricted settlements. Against these he could inveigh with surety, at least, of an appreciative audience.
He had not lacked for listeners here, for he was a new sensation. His battered music-box, with its huge painted text, was far and away more attractive than the thumping pianolas of the saloons or the Brobdignagian gramophone of the dance-hall, and his old-fashioned songs were enthusiastically encored. When he lit his flare in the court-house square at dusk on the second evening, the office of the Mountain Valley House was emptied and the bar-rooms and gaming-tables well-nigh deserted of their patrons.
Jessica had seen the mustering crowd from the hotel entrance. Mrs. Halloran had welcomed her errand that day and given her her best room, a chamber overlooking the street. She had persuaded her visitor to spend the afternoon and insisted that she stay to supper, "just to see how she would like it for a steady diet." Now, as Jessica passed along toward the mountain road, the spectacle chained her feet on the outskirts of the gathering. She watched and listened with a preoccupied mind; she was thinking that on her way to the sanatorium she would cross to the cabin for a good-night word with the man upon whom her every thought centered.
As it happened, however, Harry was at that moment very near her. Alone on the mountain, the perplexing conflict of feeling had again descended upon him. He had fought it, but it had prevailed, and at nightfall had driven him down to the town, where the street preacher now held forth. He stood alone, unnoted, a little distance away, near the court-house steps, where, by reason of the crowd, Jessica could see neither him nor the dog which sniffed at the heels of the circle of bystanders as if to inquire casually of salvation.
Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher, shaking back his long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and struck up a gospel song:
"My days are gliding swiftly by,
And I, a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
These hours of toil and danger.
For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand,