FullReads

However, as Mr. Pill warmed to his work, the girls grew sober enough. He awed them, and frightened them with the savagery of his voice and manner. His small gray eyes were like daggers unsheathed, and his small, round head took on a cat-like ferocity, as he strode to and fro, hurling out his warnings and commands in a hoarse howl that terrified the sinner, and drew ‘amens’ of admiration from the saints.

“Atavism; he has gone back to the era of the medicine man,” Radbourn murmured.

As the speaker went on, foam came upon his thin lips; his lifted hand had prophecy and threatening in it. His eyes reflected flames; his voice had now the tone of the implacable, vindictive judge. He gloated on the pictures that his words called up. By the power of his imagination the walls widened, the floor was no longer felt, the crowded room grew still as death, every eye fixed on the speaker’s face.

“I tell you, you must repent or die. I can see the great judgment angel now!” he said, stopping suddenly and pointing above the stove-pipe. “I can see him as he stands weighing your souls as a man ‘ud weigh wheat and chaff. Wheat goes into the Father’s garner; chaff is blown to hell’s devouring flame! I can see him now! He seizes a poor, damned, struggling soul by the neck, he holds him over the flaming forge of hell till his bones melt like wax; he shrivels like thread in a flame of a candle; he is nothing but a charred husk, and the angel flings him back into outer darkness; life was not in him.”

It was this astonishing figure, powerfully acted, that scared poor Tom Dixon into crying out for mercy. The effect on the rest was awful. To see so great a sinner fall terror-stricken seemed like a providential stroke of confirmatory evidence, and nearly a dozen other young people fell crying. Whereat the old people burst out into amens with unspeakable fervor. But the preacher, the wild light still in his eyes, tore up and down, crying above the tumult:

“The Lord is come with power! His hand is visible here. Shout aloud and spare not. Fall before him as dust to his feet! Hypocrites, vipers, scoffers! the lash o’ the Lord is on ye!”

In the intense pause which followed as he waited with expectant, uplifted face–a pause so deep even the sobbing sinners held their breath–a dry, drawling, utterly matter-of-fact voice broke the tense hush.

“S-a-y, Pill, ain’t you a bearun’ down on the boys a leetle too hard?”

The preacher’s extended arm fell as if life had gone out of it. His face flushed and paled; the people laughed hysterically, some of them the tears of terror still on their cheeks; but Radbourn said, “Bravo, Bacon!”

Pill recovered himself.

“Not hard enough for you, neighbor Bacon.”

Bacon rose, retaining the same dry, prosaic tone:

“I ain’t bitin’ that kind of a hook, an’ I ain’t goin’ to be yanked into heaven when I c’n slide into hell. Waal! I must be goin’; I’ve got a new-milk’s cow that needs tendin’ to.”

The effect of all this was indescribable. From being at the very mouth of the furnace, quivering with fear and captive to morbid imaginings, Bacon’s dry intonation had brought them all back to earth again. They saw a little of the absurdity of the whole situation.

Pill was beaten for the first time in his life. He had been struck below the belt by a good-natured giant. The best he could do, as Bacon shuffled calmly out, was to stammer: “Will some one please sing?” And while they sang, he stood in deep thought. Just as the last verse was quivering into silence, the full, deep tones of Radbourn’s voice rose above the bustle of feet and clatter of seats:

“And all that he preaches in the name of Him who came bringing peace and good-will to men.”