FullReads

So the bishop read, and Lin listened. And all the while this good clergyman was perplexed how to speak–or if indeed to speak at this time at all–to the heart of the man beside him for whom the parable had gone so sorely wrong. When the reading was done, Lin had not taken his eyes from the bishop’s face.

“How long has that there been wrote?” he asked.

He was told about how long.

“Mr. Bishop,” said Lin, “I ain’t got good knowledge of the Bible, and I never figured it to be a book much on to facts. And I tell you I’m more plumb beat about it’s having that elder brother, and him being angry, down in black and white two thousand years ago, than–than if I’d seen a man turn water into wine, for I’d have knowed that ain’t so. But the elder brother is facts–dead-sure facts. And they knowed about that, and put it down just the same as life two thousand years ago!”

“Well,” said the bishop, wisely ignoring the challenge as to miracles, “I am a good twenty years older than you, and all that time I’ve been finding more facts in the Bible every day I have lived.”

Lin meditated. “I guess that could be,” he said. “Yes; after that yu’ve been a-readin’, and what I know for myself that I didn’t know till lately, I guess that could be.”

Then the bishop talked with exceeding care, nor did he ask uncomfortable things, or moralize visibly. Thus he came to hear how it had fared with Lin his friend, and Lin forgot altogether about its being a parson he was delivering the fulness of his heart to. “And come to think,” he concluded, “it weren’t home I had went to back East, layin’ round them big cities, where a man can’t help but feel strange all the week. No, sir! Yu’ can blow in a thousand dollars like I did in New York, and it’ll not give yu’ any more home feelin’ than what cattle has put in a stock-yard. Nor it wouldn’t have in Boston neither. Now this country here” (he waved his hand towards the endless sage-brush), “seein’ it onced more, I know where my home is, and I wouldn’t live nowheres else. Only I ain’t got no father watching for me to come up Wind River.”

The cow-puncher stated this merely as a fact, and without any note of self-pity. But the bishops face grew very tender, and he looked away from Lin. Knowing his man–for had he not seen many of this kind in his desert diocese?–he forbore to make any text from that last sentence the cow-puncher had spoken. Lin talked cheerfully on about what he should now do. The round-up must be somewhere near Du Noir Creek. He would join it this season, but next he should work over to the Powder River country. More business was over there, and better chances for a man to take up some land and have a ranch of his own. As they got out at Fort Washakie, the bishop handed him a small book, in which he had turned several leaves down, carefully avoiding any page that related of miracles.

“You need not read it through, you know,” he said, smiling; “just read where I have marked, and see if you don’t find some more facts. Goodbye–and always come and see me.”

The next morning he watched Lin riding slowly out of the post towards Wind River, leading a single pack-horse. By-and-by the little moving dot went over the ridge. And as the bishop walked back into the parade-ground, thinking over the possibilities in that untrained manly soul, he shook his head sorrowfully.