The Bishop looked at him inquiringly. He had never before heard of little Jack.
“I—I dunno', Jack,” he said. “You'll have to tell me all. I hain't seed you sence you started in your robber career after the war—sence I buried yo' father,” he added. “An' a fine, brave man he was, Jack—a fine, brave man—an' I've wondered how sech a man's son could ever do as you've done.”
“Come,” said the other—“I'll tell you. Come, an' say a prayer over little Jack fust. You must do it”—he said almost fiercely—“I won't bury him without a prayer—him that was an angel an' all I had on earth. Hitch yo' hoss just outer the road, in the thicket, an' follow me.”
The Bishop did as he was told, and Jack Bracken led the way down a rocky gulch under the shaggy sides of Sand Mountain, furzed with scraggy trees and thick with underbrush and weeds.
It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily along, in a wabbling, awkward gait, never once looking back to see if his companion followed.
For a half mile they went through what the Bishop had always thought was an almost impenetrable cattle trail. At last they wound around a curve on the densely wooded side of the mountain, beyond which lay the broad river breathing out frosty mist and vapor from its sleeping bosom.
Following a dry gulch until it ended abruptly at the river's bluff, around the mouth of which great loose rocks lay as they had been washed by the waters of many centuries, and bushes grew about, the path terminated abruptly. It overlooked the river romantically, with a natural rock gallery in front.
Jack Bracken stopped and sat down on one of the rocks. From underneath he drew forth a lantern and prepared to light it. “This is my home,” he said laconically.
The Bishop looked around: “Well, Jack, but this is part of my own leetle forty-acre farm. Why, thar's my cabin up yander. We've wound in an' aroun' the back of my place down by the river! I never seed this hole befo'.”
“I knew it was yo's,” said the outlaw quietly. “That's why I come here. Many a Sunday night I've slipped up to the little church winder an' heard you preach—me an' po' little Jack. Oh, he loved to hear the Bible read an' he never forgot nothin' you ever said. He knowed all about Joseph an' Moses an' Jesus, an' last night when he died o' that croup befo' I c'ud get him help or anything, he wanted you, an' he said he was goin' to the lan' where you said Jesus was—”