The Friar stood with his hands clasped in front of him, and his eyes fixed sort o’ dreamy-like on the distance. It was a perfect day, one o’ those days ’at can’t happen anywhere except in our mountains in the fall o’ the year, and my mind drifted off to some lines the Friar was fond of rehearsin’, “Where every prospect pleases, an’ only man is vile.” Then I saw a change come to the Friar’s face, and he began to chant the one which begins: “Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days.”
He chanted slow, and the words didn’t mean much to us; but the solemn voice of him dragged across our hearts like a chain. One line of it has haunted me ever since. It seems to suggest a hundred thoughts which I can’t quite lay my hand on, and every time I get sad or discouraged, it begins to boom inside me until I see ’at my lot ain’t so much different from the rest; and I buck up and get back in the game again: “For I am a stranger with Thee and a sojourner as all my fathers were.”
The Friar didn’t preach us a long talk, and most of it circled about his favorite text, that a man’s real children were those who inherited his character, rather than those who inherited his blood. Once he raised his finger and pointed it at us and sez: “You were fond o’ this boy; but did you love him for his good, or did you love him for your own selfishness? I knew him not save through the dark glass of reputation; yet after looking into his dead features, to-day, I think I know him well. Death tells, sometimes, what Life has hid away. I did not see in his face the hard, deep lines of stealthy sin; I saw the open face of a child, tired out after a day wasted in thoughtless and impulsive play; but comin’ home at nightfall to have his small cares rubbed away by a lovin’ hand—and then, to fall asleep.”
O’ course, the Friar landed on us good and plenty; but this was the part of his talk which stuck to us after the scoldin’ part was all forgotten. When he was through he said a short prayer, and sang in a low tone the one beginnin’, “One sweetly solemn thought.” His eyes were glistenin’ through a mist when he finished this, and he climbed down from the ledge, hurried over to his pinto, and rode off without sayin’ another word.
We all sat silent for quite a spell, and then Spider and I got up and nodded good day to ’em. The Cross-branders also got up and shook ’emselves, and started down with us—all except Olaf. He sat there on a stone with his fingers run into his hair, and his face hid in his hands. Olaf had had regular religion when he was a child; and it had come back to him up there on the ledge. They say it’s worse ’n a relapse o’ the typhoid fever when it hits ya that way. I know this much, Olaf was doubled up worse ’n if he’d had the colic; and from that time on, the Ty Jones outfit looked mighty worldly to him.
Even Spider Kelley was savin’ of his nonsense until we got in sight of the Diamond Dot again.
[CHAPTER TWENTY—QUARRELING FOR PEACE]
We had a visitor once, which was a business man. One of his chief diversities was to compare sedentary occupations with what he called the joyous, carefree outdoor life. He said ’at sedentary came from sedan-chair, and meant to sit down at your work. I rode the range next spring until I felt more sedentary ’n an engineer; and sometimes at night it used to strain my intellect to split the difference between myself an’ my saddle.
I got out o’ humor an’ depressed and downright gloomy. Fact is, I was on the point o’ rollin’ up my spare socks and givin’ Jabez a chance to save my board money, when I heard a sound ’at jerked me up through the scum and gave me a glimpse o’ the sky again. I was ridin’ in about dusk, and I had hung back o’ the dust the other fellers had kicked up, so I could be alone and enjoy my misery, when I heard this inspirin’ noise.
Ol’ Tank Williams once tried to learn to play on a split clarinet a feller had give him, and at first I thought he had found where we had buried it, and had resumed his musical studies; but this outrage came from an instrument a feller has to be mighty cautious about buryin’. It was a human voice, and these were the words it was screechin’: