advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.
Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience
with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to
play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular
abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church
organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very
incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures
and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.
Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago,
and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son.
But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which
are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide. He
slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
Genereau’s saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
Chevalier’s dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play
the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all
the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too
busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such
occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
cities and knew the ways of town-folk, who had never worked in the
fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were
not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been
fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his
pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that
dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more
was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in
time it would track him down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the
fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening
to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out
of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the
screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of
Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled
there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
good-by, and he went there no more.
The final barrier between Eric and his mother’s faith was his
violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and
art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin. It
