Suddenly Spurrier closed his hands over his face and for the first time in years he prayed.
“Almighty Father,” he pleaded, “give her back to me! Give me one other chance—and exact whatever price Thy wisdom designates.”
To Toby Austin’s meager farm, which abutted on that of Dyke Cappeze, that afternoon had trudged Bud Hawkins. In all the mountain region thereabout his name was well known and any man of whom you had asked information would have told you that Bud was “the poorest and the righteousest man that ever rode circuit.”
For Bud was among other things a preacher. To 183 use his own words, “I farms some, I heals bodies some, an’ I gospels some.” And in each of his avocations he followed faithfully the lights of his conscience.
His own farm lay a long way off, and now he was here as a visitor. This afternoon he fared over to the house of Dyke Cappeze as was his custom when in that neighborhood. He regarded Cappeze as a righteous man and a “wrastler with all evil,” and he came bearing the greetings of a brotherhood of effort.
The sun was low when he arrived, and the old lawyer confessed to a mild anxiety because of Glory’s failure to return before the hour which her clean-cut regularity fixed as the time of starting the supper preparations.
“She took a carrier pigeon over to Aunt Erie Toppit’s,” explained Dyke, “and I looked for her back before now.”
“I sometimes ’lows, Brother Cappeze,” asserted the visitor with an enthusiasm of interest, “thet in these hyar days of sin when God don’t show Hisself in signs an’ miracles no more, erbout ther clostest thing ter a miracle we’ve got left, air ther fashion one of them birds kin go up in ther air from any place ye sots hit free at an’ foller ther Almighty’s finger pointin’ home.”
Cappeze told him that there was just now only one pigeon in the dovecote, where the pair belonged, but that one he offered to show, and idly be led the way to the place back above the henroosts.