“I saw him coming down the walk,” observed Squire Tomple, “and I thought he looked rather peculiar, so I just stepped across the street; I don’t like to get into a row with men in that fix.”
“Of course getting into a row was the only thing that could be done,” said Crupp, who had apparently been carefully reading a posted notice of a sheriff’s sale.
The Squire did not enjoy the tone in which Crupp’s remark was delivered; but before he could reason with the new reformer, the Reverend Timotheus Brown dashed into the fray in defense of a beloved idea, which the rival pastor had seemed covertly to assail.
“The reason such natures aren’t divinely guided,” said he, in a voice which suggested nutmeg-graters to the acute sensibilities of Parson Wedgewell, “is that they don’t implicitly submit themselves to the Divine will.”
“A man can do nothing unless the Spirit draw him,” said Parson Wedgewell valiantly.
“That’s rather hard on a fellow, though, isn’t it?” soliloquized Fred Macdonald.
“Not a bit of it,” spoke out Father Baguss, who had been scenting the battle from an inner room. “Bless the Lord! the parables of the lost sheep that the shepherd left the rest of the flock to look for, and the lost coin that the woman hunted for, wasn’t told for nothin’. The Lord knows how to ’tend to his own business.”
“And nobody else can do a thing to help the Lord along, can he?” said Crupp, passing his arm through the postmaster’s window, and extracting from his box a copy of the Louisville Journal (then the only paper of prominence in a large section of Western country); “all that men have to do in such cases is just to talk.”
Crupp departed, encountering on the way the wide-open countenance of Tom Adams, who was waiting for Deacon Jones’s mail. The two pastors preserved silence, that of Mr. Brown being extremely dignified, with a visible trace of acerbity, while that of Mr. Wedgewell was strongly suggestive of mental unquiet. The distribution of the small mail, which had arrived soon after the conversation began, gave everybody an excuse to depart—an excuse of which most of them availed themselves at once, Squire Tomple having first changed the direction of the conversation by inquiring particularly of Father Baguss as to the number and probable weight of the porkers which the old man was fattening for the winter market. The subject lasted only until the two men reached the door, however, and then each sympathized with the other over the wounds received at the hands, or tongue, of the unsentimental and irreligious Crupp. Yet the more they talked of Crupp, the less they seemed to realize their pain.