"I'm not changeable, ma'm. The doctrine of gentleness don't apply to a snake, and if that man didn't treat you right he is a snake. And I'm a preacher; I go out among them that needs prayer and I pray; in the night when it seems that everybody else in the world is asleep, I have gone out and knelt down in the dirt and prayed that the pain and the bitterness might be taken from the troubled hearts of my neighbors. I've gone to see many a young feller and begged him to give up fightin'—I've done all that, but if you was to tell me where I could find that man—man that was a brute to you, I'd hunt him and with my fist I would mash the teeth out of his mouth. Where does he live?"
"We must not think of him, Mr. Reverend. And besides, when I speak of him, how do you know that I tell the truth?"
"Ma'm, if a man should inspire you with a lie, it would be proof enough that he is a brute."
She clapped her hands and laughed. "Oh, Troubadour, recite your soul to me!"
"What did you say, ma'm?"
"Oh, nothing." She pointed and Jim saw Tom and Lou enter the vine-hung gulch leading to the place where corn had been ground at night.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPIRIT THAT PLAYED WITH HER.
"This looks like the scenery in a theatre," said Tom, as slowly they walked up the gulch. She asked him what he meant and he explained as best he could the nature of a play-house, where to sweet music and amid flowers the hero told the heroine that he would die for her. She replied that it must be pretty, but that a book which she had read told her that it was wrong to go to such a place. In this book there was a girl, and one night she went with a young man to a theatre and when she came back her mother was dead. Tom suggested that possibly the old lady might have died anyway, but Lou shook her wavy hair till all sorts of witcheries fell out of it.