The people of both sides had supposed that Dylks was sitting behind the pulpit, as his habit was, with his head out of sight bowed in meditation. But when Enraghty, after a few words, sat down to await the coming of the Spirit, suddenly the minister whose turn to preach would have come that night, sprang to his full height in the pulpit and denounced Enraghty's pretense. The believers rose shouting to their feet, and crying, “He is my God!” stormed out of the Temple in the night, where their voices were heard repeating, “He is my God!” till they swelled together in the hymn which was their confession of Dylks. A few of the unbelievers remained in the Temple, amazed, but the greater part followed the believers into the night.
They had the courage of their triumph through Dylks's failure to work the miracle he had promised, and then his failure to show himself in the Temple; but they pushed on with no definite purpose except perhaps to break up some meeting of his followers, when one of the Hounds, yelping and baying in acceptance of their nickname, broke upon them from the woods they were passing with word that they had found Dylks in Enraghty's house, where the believers were already gathering.
“We've treed him,” he said, “The whole pack's round the place, and there's no limb in reach for him to jump to. I reckon it'll be the best coon hunt we've ever had in Leatherwood, yit.”
Redfield put himself in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness which the disembodied voices broke upon. “Enraghty's house? Then we've got him. Come on!”
The women of the unbelievers had fallen behind and finally gone home, but all the believers, the women as well as the men, had followed their apostle, and now their voices, in praying and singing, came from the house still hidden by a strip of woodland. In the bewilderment which had fallen upon David Gillespie amid the tumultuous rush from the Temple, he had been parted from his daughter; now he fumbled forward on the feet of an old man, and found himself beside Redfield. “I want you to let me at him first, Jim. I just want one hair of his head.”
“Why, don't you know it's death to touch him?” Redfield jeered.
“I know that,” Gillespie assented in the same mood. “But I'll risk dying for that one hair.”
“What do you want with one hair? I'll get you a handful,” Redfield said.
“One'll do to work the miracle I'm after.”
“What miracle? None o' your seamless raiment, is it?”