“It wouldn’t do, Betty. I must mix with these people—show myself willing to be one of them in ordinary ways. Respect for the cloth cannot be won among these open-hearted folk by finnicky manners. I must be one of them. I must show them that I am a man as well as a preacher.”
She could not agree; but at least she was wise enough not to oppose—at this time—his evident acceptance of Joe Hurley’s advice. She saw in the latter more clearly than ever a dangerous ally for her brother.
Hunt’s abundant cheerfulness—even over the coarse supper-fare and the absence of napkins—closed his sister’s lips even more firmly. The two had come to Canyon Pass with diametrically opposed mental attitudes. Hunt was prepared to accept things as they should find them, but nothing in Canyon Pass, or about it or its inhabitants, could please Betty.
As darkness fell the town grew noisier, for it was a Saturday night. Betty, looking from her window, saw only flaring oil lamps and gasoline torches illuminating the street. The men who passed up and down were much rougher in appearance and of tongue than those she had watched under similar circumstances in Crescent City. There were almost no women in sight.
Men spoke harshly, or shouted ribaldries to one another. Indeed, the girl from the East scarcely understood the language they used. Miserably she crept to bed. She had locked her door after her brother left her, and she even dragged the pine washstand against it as a barricade.
The Wild Rose Hotel itself was no quiet abode on this night. There was a bar, and although it was at the other end of the house, the noise of the shouting, the rude songs, the stamping and quarreling therein made Betty shake in her bed until long after midnight. She had no idea that her brother went to bed, fell asleep in a minute, and slept as peacefully as a baby until almost sunrise.
A Sabbath dawn could be as calm at Canyon Pass as at Ditson Corners. The pearl-gray light of the new day washed the sleep from the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s eyes. He arose to lean on his elbow and gaze through a window that, curtainless, looked out on Mulligan Lane. There were some frowsy buildings within sight—evidently dwellings of a kind—but the parson lifted his eyes to the hills feeling with the psalmist that “whence cometh my strength.”
They stood—those hills—in serrated ranks from the far east to the point where the sudden uplift of the canyon wall on that side of the river closed the outlook. Even Old Graylock of his familiar Berkshires had not the magnificence of these peaks. He was impressed again as he already had been with the difference merely in size between these western hills and the Berkshires, let alone the vast dissimilarity in their contour.
The eminences of western Massachusetts for the most part slope away into wooded and pastured ridges, which themselves melt into the lush lowlands. Their crowns do not seem so imposing as these western peaks because of their configuration.
His window was open. Suddenly he became aware of voices below it at the back of the hotel.