“Oh, then there were some there that didn't believe it! Well, I suppose nothing less than more miracles will do for them. Who were they?”
“Well, of course, there was Jim Redfield; he's been ag'inst him from the first; and there was old George Nixon, and there was Hughey Blake, and a passel of the Hounds that I don't count.”
“Why, certainly not; the Hounds would doubt anything. But I'm surprised at Redfield and Nixon and Hughey Blake. What reason did they give for the faith that wasn't in them? When a man stood up and snorted like a horse and said he was God, why didn't they believe him? Or the other fellows that didn't snort, but said they knew it was God from a sound that he made?”
“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire Braile!” Sally gurgled. She did not yield quite with Abel's helplessness at a joke, but the Squire's blasphemous irony had its force with her too, though she felt it right to bring herself back to her religious conviction with the warning, “Some day you'll go too fur.”
“Yes, I'm always expecting the lightning to strike in the wrong place. Didn't Nixon or Redfield or Hughey Blake say anything? Or did they just look ashamed of you, down there on your knees before a man that you worshiped for a God because he snorted like a horse? Didn't anybody in their senses say anything, or couldn't those that were out of their senses hear anything but their own ravings?”
The old man had pleased himself with his mockeries, but now he let the scorn which his irony had hidden blaze out. “Wasn't anybody ashamed of it all? Weren't you ashamed yourself, Sally?”
“Well, I dunno,” Sally said, easing herself from one foot to another and shifting the milk-bucket from her right hand to her left. “Where everybody is goun' one way, you don't know what to think exactly. Jane Gillespie was there, and she went on as bad as the best.”
“Jane Gillespie?”
“Yes. She come with me, and she was goun' to come home with me, as fur's the door, and she would ha' done it, if it hadn't ha' been for her father. He bruk through the believers and drug her up from the floor where she was kneelun' and stoopun' her forehead over to the ground, and pulled her out through the crowd. 'You come home with me!' says he, kind o' harsh like; and if it hadn't ha' been for Nancy Billuns's Joey I'd ha' had to git through the woods alone, and the dear knows I'm always skeered enough. But Joey and Benny Hingston they come with me, or I don't feel as if I'd been here to tell it.”
“You'd have been safe from the devil, though; he stayed with Dylks. Didn't David say anything to the girl?”