He broke down—he could not say it.
Stepping into the mouth of the cave, he struck a match, when out of sight of the entrance way, and stepping from stone to stone he guided the Bishop down some twenty feet, following the channel the water had cut on its way underground to the river. Here another opening entered into the dry channel, and into it he stepped.
It was a nicely turned cave—a natural room,—arched above with beautiful white lime-rock, the stalactites hanging in pointed clusters, their starry points twinkling above like stars in a winter sky. Underneath, the soft sand made a clean, warm floor, and the entire cave was so beautiful that the old man could do nothing but look and admire, as the light fell on stalagmite and ghostly columns and white sanded floors.
“Beautiful,” he said—“Jack, you cudn't he'p gettin' relig'un here.”
“Little Jack loved 'em,” said the outlaw. “He'd lay here ev'y night befo' he'd go to sleep an' look up an' call it his heaven; an' he said that big column thar was the great white throne, an' them big things up yander with wings was angels. He had all them other columns named for the fellers you preached about—Moses an' Aaron an' Joseph an' all of 'em, an' that kind o' double one lookin' like a woman holding her child, he called Mary an' little Jesus.”
“He's gone to a prettier heaven than this,” said the Bishop looking down on the little figure, with face as pale and white as any of the columns around him, neatly dressed and wrapped, save his face, in an old oil cloth and lying on the little bed that sat in a corner.
The old man sat down very tenderly by the little dead boy and, pulling out a testament from his pocket, read to the outlaw, whose whole soul was centered in all he said, the comforting chapter which Miss Alice had that night read to the old negro: “Let not your hearts be troubled....”
He explained as he read, and told the father how little Jack was now in one of the many mansions and far better off than living in a cave, the child of an outlaw, for the Bishop did not mince his words. He dwelt on it, that God had taken the little boy for love of him, and to give him a better home and perhaps as a means of changing the father, and when he said the last prayer over the dead child asking for forgiveness for the father's sins, that he might meet the little one in heaven, the heart of the outlaw burst with grief and repentance within him.
He fell at the old man's feet, on his knees—he laid his big shaggy head in the Bishop's lap and wept as he had never wept before.
“There can't be—you don't mean,” he said—“that there is forgiveness for me—that I can so live that I'll see little Jack again!”