Spider looked at me with his face shinin’, an’ I could feel a sort o’ pleasant heat in my own face. The’ was a lift an’ a swing, and a sort of rally-around-the-flag to this voice which got right into ya, an’ made you want to do something.
“’T is thine to save from perils of perdition
The souls for whom the Lord His life laid down;
Beware, lest, slothful to fulfill thy mission,
Thou lose one jewel that should deck His crown.
Publish glad tidings; tidings of peace;
Tidings of Jesus, redemption and release.”
“That feller can sing some,” sez Spider Kelley; but just then the ponies turned back on us an’ by the time we had started ’em on again, the singer had passed on up the trail, so I didn’t make any reply.
I was tryin’ to figure out whether it was the words or the tune or the voice, or what it was that had made my whole body vibrate like a fiddle string. As I said before, I see things in pictures an’ I also remember ’em in pictures: a sound generally calls up a picture to me an’ it ain’t allus a picture anyways connected with the sound itself. This song, for instance, had called to my mind a long procession of marchin’ men with banners wavin’ an’ set faces, shinin’ with a glad sort o’ recklessness. There ain’t no accountin’ for the human mind: I had never seen such a procession in real life, nor even in a picture; but that was what this song out there on the open range suggested to me, an’ I hurried out o’ the cottonwoods eager to measure the singer with my open eyes.
When we climbed up out of the woods, we saw him goin’ up the pass ahead of us with our ponies followin’ behind as though they was part of his outfit. We could just catch glimpses of him; enough to show that he was a big man on a big roan hoss, an’ that he was a ridin’ man in spite o’ the fact that he was wearin’ black clothes made up Eastern style. He was still singin’ his song, an’ I straightened up in my saddle, an’ beat time with my hand as though I held a genuwine sword in it; which is a tool I’ve never had much doin’s with.