Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some
mysterious psychic force. Here and there among this cowering,
sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs
of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind,
which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed “the
Light.” On the floor, before the mourners’ bench, lay the
unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her
last resort. This “trance” state is the highest evidence of grace
among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God.
Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and
vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used
to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes
of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most
ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of
Nature’s eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over
the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then
brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the
nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel
trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged
furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness
of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a
vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that
face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost
transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion,
and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a
certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which
all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which
seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have
become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the
founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he
stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.
It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner’s
God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for
those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star
schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the
south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe,
most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway.
Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt
hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and
saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of
an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
