“Brother Dylks,” the minister repeated, and he came down, and gave him the right hand of fellowship.
The Gillespies looked on with their different indifference. Dylks turned to them: “Shall I speak?”
“Speak!” the girl said, but her father said nothing.
Dylks ran quickly up the pulpit steps: “We will join in prayer!” he called out, and he held the congregation, now returned to their places, in the spell of a quick, short supplication. He ended it with the Lord's Prayer; then he said, “Let us sing,” and line after line he gave out the hymn,
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay.”
He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture, as a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon. His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their Bibles by heart sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven, threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong witchery of the man's voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him:
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay.”
It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking cry of “Salvation!”
Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. “You can have him,” he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, “if he wants to go with you.” He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold, almost dumb; it seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had him under her father's roof. As for her father, they had no patience with him for not putting in a word to claim the stranger while the others were pressing him to come home with them. In spite of the indifference of Gillespie and his girl, Dylks elected to remain with them, and when he could pull himself from the crowd he went away into the night between them.
When Matthew Braile made his escape with his wife from the crowd and began to walk home through the dim, hot night, he said, “Is Jane Gillespie any particular hand at fried chicken?”