“Why, do you think an old soldier like me, hobbling on a wooden leg, is afraid of them thieves? Didn’t I face the Britishers? Didn’t I come home late last Wednesday night? I rather guess I must a took a little too much at Welch’s grocery, and laid down in the middle of the street to rest. The boys thought ’twas funny to crate19 me. I woke up kind o’ cold, ’bout one in the mornin’. ’Bout two o’clock I come up Means’s hill, and didn’t I see Pete Jones, and them others that robbed the Dutchman, and somebody, I dunno who, a-crossin’ the bluegrass paster towards Jones’s?” (Ralph shivered.) “Don’t shake your finger at me, old woman. Tongue is all I’ve got to fight with now; but I’ll fight them thieves tell the sea goes dry, I will. Shocky, gim me a splint.”
“But you wasn’t selfish when you tuck me,” Shocky stuck to his point most positively.
“Yes, I was, you little towheaded fool! I didn’t take you kase I was good, not a bit of it. I hated Bill Jones what keeps the poorhouse, and I knowed him and Pete would get you bound to some of their click, and I didn’t want no more thieves raised; so when your mother hobbled, with you a-leadin’ her, poor blind thing! all the way over here on that winter night, and said, ‘Mr. Pearson, you’re all the friend I’ve got, and I want you to save my boy,’ why, you see I was selfish as ever I could be in takin’ of you. Your mother’s cryin’ sot me a-cryin’ too. We’re all selfish in everything, akordin’ to my tell. Blamed ef we ha’n’t, Miss Hawkins, only sometimes I’d think you was real benev’lent ef I didn’t know we war all selfish.”
XII
The Hardshell Preacher
“They’s preachin’ down to Bethel Meetin’-house today,” said the Squire at breakfast. Twenty years in the West could not cure Squire Hawkins of saying “to” for “at.” “I rather guess as how the old man Bosaw will give pertickeler fits to our folks today.” For Squire Hawkins, having been expelled from the “Hardshell” church of which Mr. Bosaw was pastor, for the grave offense of joining a temperance society, had become a member of the “Reformers,” the very respectable people who now call themselves “Disciples,” but whom the profane will persist in calling “Campbellites.” They had a church in the village of Clifty, three miles away.
I know that explanations are always abominable to story readers, as they are to story writers, but as so many of my readers have never had the inestimable privilege of sitting under the gospel as it is ministered in enlightened neighborhoods like Flat Creek, I find myself under the necessity—need-cessity the Rev. Mr. Bosaw would call it—of rising to explain. Some people think the “Hardshells” a myth, and some sensitive Baptist people at the East resent all allusion to them. But the “Hardshell Baptists,” or, as they are otherwise called, the “Whisky Baptists,” and the “Forty-gallon Baptists,” exist in all the old Western and Southwestern States. They call themselves “Anti-means Baptists” from their Antinomian tenets. Their confession of faith is a caricature of Calvinism, and is expressed by their preachers about as follows: “Ef you’re elected, you’ll be saved; ef you a’n’t, you’ll be damned. God’ll take keer of his elect. It’s a sin to run Sunday-schools, or temp’rince s’cieties, or to send missionaries. You let God’s business alone. What is to be will be, and you can’t hender it.” This writer has attended a Sunday-school, the superintendent of which was solemnly arraigned and expelled from the Hardshell Church for “meddling with God’s business” by holding a Sunday-school. Of course the Hardshells are prodigiously illiterate, and often vicious. Some of their preachers are notorious drunkards. They sing their sermons out sometimes for three hours at a stretch.20
Ralph found that he was to ride the “clay-bank mare,” the only one of the horses that would “carry double,” and that consequently he would have to take Miss Hawkins behind him. If it had been Hannah instead, Ralph might not have objected to this “young Lochinvar” mode of riding with a lady on “the croup,” but Martha Hawkins was another affair. He had only this consolation; his keeping the company of Miss Hawkins might serve to disarm the resentment of Bud. At all events, he had no choice. What designs the Squire had in this arrangement he could not tell; but the clay-bank mare carried him to meeting on that December morning, with Martha Hawkins behind. And as Miss Hawkins was not used to this mode of locomotion, she was in a state of delightful fright every time the horse sank to the knees in the soft, yellow Flat Creek clay.
“We don’t go to church so at the East,” she said. “The mud isn’t so deep at the East. When I was to Bosting—” but Ralph never heard what happened when she was to Bosting, for just as she said Bosting the mare put her foot into a deep hole molded by the foot of the Squire’s horse, and already full of muddy water.
As the mare’s foot went twelve inches down into this track, the muddy water spurted higher than Miss Hawkins’s head, and mottled her dress with golden spots of clay. She gave a little shriek, and declared that she had never “seen it so at the East.”
The journey seemed a little long to Ralph, who found that the subjects upon which he and Miss Hawkins could converse were few; but Miss Martha was determined to keep things going, and once, when the conversation had died out entirely, she made a desperate effort to renew it by remarking, as they met a man on horseback, “That horse switches his tail just as they do at the East. When I
