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An Apostle Of The Tules
by
“Well?” he said, hesitatingly.
“Do you know Kate Somers?” asked Gideon.
Hamlin opened his brown eyes. “Yes.”
“Can you send for her?”
“What, HERE?”
“Yes, here.”
“What for?”
“To marry him,” said Gideon, gently. “There’s no time to lose.”
“To MARRY him?”
“He wishes it.”
“But say–oh, come, now,” said Hamlin confidentially, leaning back with his hands on the top of a chair. “Ain’t this playing it a little–just a LITTLE–too low down? Of course you mean well, and all that; but come, now, say–couldn’t you just let up on him there? Why, she”–Hamlin softly closed the door–“she’s got no character.”
“The more reason he should give her one.”
A cynical knowledge of matrimony imparted to him by the wives of others evidently colored Mr. Hamlin’s views. “Well, perhaps it’s all the same if he’s going to die. But isn’t it rather rough on HER? I don’t know,” he added, reflectively; “she was sniveling round here a little while ago, until I sent her away.”
“You sent her away!” echoed Gideon.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because YOU were here.”
Nevertheless Mr. Hamlin departed, and in half an hour reappeared with two brilliantly dressed women. One, hysterical, tearful, frightened, and pallid, was the destined bride; the other, highly colored, excited, and pleasedly observant, was her friend. Two men hastily summoned from the anteroom as witnesses completed the group that moved into the bedroom and gathered round the bed.
The ceremony was simple and brief. It was well, for of all who took part in it none was more shaken by emotion than the officiating priest. The brilliant dresses of the women, the contrast of their painted faces with the waxen pallor of the dying man; the terrible incongruity of their voices, inflections, expressions, and familiarity; the mingled perfume of cosmetics and the faint odor of wine; the eyes of the younger woman following his movements with strange absorption, so affected him that he was glad when he could fall on his knees at last and bury his face in the pillow of the sufferer. The hand that had been placed in the bride’s cold fingers slipped from them and mechanically sought Gideon’s again. The significance of the unconscious act brought the first spontaneous tears into the woman’s eyes. It was his last act, for when Gideon’s voice was again lifted in prayer, the spirit for whom it was offered had risen with it, as it were, still lovingly hand in hand, from the earth forever.
The funeral was arranged for two days later, and Gideon found that his services had been so seriously yet so humbly counted upon by the friends of the dead man that he could scarce find it in his heart to tell them that it was the function of the local preacher–an older and more experienced man than himself. “If it is,” said Jack Hamlin, coolly, “I’m afraid he won’t get a yaller dog to come to his church; but if you say you’ll preach at the grave, there ain’t a man, woman, or child that will be kept away. Don’t you go back on your luck, now; it’s something awful and nigger-like. You’ve got this crowd where the hair is short; excuse me, but it’s so. Talk of revivals! You could give that one-horse show in Tasajara a hundred points, and skunk them easily.” Indeed, had Gideon been accessible to vanity, the spontaneous homage he met with everywhere would have touched him more sympathetically and kindly than it did; but in the utter unconsciousness of his own power and the quality they worshiped in him, he felt alarmed and impatient of what he believed to be their weak sympathy with his own human weakness. In the depth of his unselfish heart, lit, it must be confessed, only by the scant, inefficient lamp of his youthful experience, he really believed he had failed in his apostolic mission because he had been unable to touch the hearts of the Vigilantes by oral appeal and argument. Feeling thus the reverence of these irreligious people that surrounded him, the facile yielding of their habits and prejudices to his half-uttered wish, appeared to him only a temptation of the flesh. No one had sought him after the manner of the camp-meeting; he had converted the wounded man through a common weakness of their humanity. More than that, he was conscious of a growing fascination for the truthfulness and sincerity of that class; particularly of Mr. Jack Hamlin, whose conversion he felt he could never attempt, yet whose strange friendship alternately thrilled and frightened him.