"Yes, I'm the new minister sent around here to keep you fellows in the traces and out of hell-fire. Have y' fled from the wrath?" he asked, in a perfunctory way.
"You are, eh?" said Bacon, referring back to his profession.
"I am just! How do you like that style of barb fence? Ain't the twisted wire better?"
"I s'pose they be, but they cost more."
"Yes, costs more to go to heaven than to hell. You'll think so after I board with you a week. Narrow the road that leads to light, and broad the way that leads—how's your soul anyway, brother?"
"Soul's all right. I find more trouble to keep m' body go'n'."
"Give us your hand; so do I. All the same we must prepare for the next world. We're gettin' old; lay not up your treasures where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break through and steal."
Bacon was thoroughly interested in the preacher, and was studying him carefully. He was tall, straight, and superbly proportioned; broad-shouldered, wide-lunged, and thewed like a Greek racer. His rather small steel-blue eyes twinkled, and his shrewd face and small head, set well back, completed a remarkable figure. He wore his reddish beard in the usual way of Western clergymen, with mustache chopped close.
Bacon spoke slowly:
"You look like a good, husky man to pitch in the barnyard; you've too much muscle f'r preachun'."