“I think her name was Alison Steel.”

“What ken ye of Alison Steel?” he asked fiercely.  “Quick, man, what word have ye frae Alison?”

“You sent me with a letter to her.  D’you not mind your last days in Edinburgh, before they shipped you to the Plantations?”

“It comes back to me,” he cried.  “Ay, it comes back.  To think I should live to hear of Alison!  What did she say?”

“Just this.  That John Gib was a decent man if he would resist the devil of pride.  She charged me to tell you that you would never be out of her prayers, and that she would live to be proud of you.  ’John will never shame his kin,’ quoth she.”

“Said she so?” he said musingly.  “She was aye a kind body.  We were to be married at Martinmas, I mind, if the Lord hadna called me.”

“You’ve need of her prayers,” I said, “and of the prayers of every Christian soul on earth.  I came here yestereen to find you mouthing blasphemies, and howling like a mad tyke amid a parcel of heathen.  And they tell me you’re to lead your savages on Virginia, and give that smiling land to fire and sword.  Think you Alison Steel would not be black ashamed if she heard the horrid tale?”

“’Twas the Lord’s commands,” he said gloomily, but there was no conviction in his words.

I changed my tone.  “Do you dare to speak such blasphemy?” I cried.  “The Lord’s commands!  The devil’s commands!  The devil of your own sinful pride!  You are like the false prophets that made Israel to sin.  What brings you, a white man, at the head of murderous savages?”

“Israel would not hearken, so I turned to the Gentiles,” said he.

“And what are you going to make of your Gentiles?  Do you think you’ve put much Christianity into the heart of the gentry that were watching your antics last night?”

“They have glimmerings of grace,” he said.

“Glimmerings of moonshine!  They are bent on murder, and so are you, and you call that the Lord’s commands.  You would sacrifice your own folk to the heathen hordes.  God forgive you, John Gib, for you are no Christian, and no Scot, and no man.”

“Virginia is an idolatrous land,” said he; but he could not look up at me.

“And are your Indians not idolaters?  Are you no idolater, with your burnt offerings and heathen gibberish?  You worship a Baal and a Moloch worse than any Midianite, for you adore the devils of your own rotten heart.”

The big man, with all the madness out of him, put his towsy head in his hands, and a sob shook his great shoulders.

“Listen to me, John Gib.  I am come from your own country-side to save you from a hellish wickedness, I know the length and breadth of Virginia, and the land is full of Scots, men of the Covenant you have forsworn, who are living an honest life on their bits of farms, and worshipping the God you have forsaken.  There are women there like Alison Steel, and there are men there like yourself before you hearkened to the devil.  Will you bring death to your own folk, with whom you once shared the hope of salvation?  By the land we both have left, and the kindly souls we both have known, and the prayers you said at your mother’s knee, and the love of Christ who died for us, I adjure you to flee this great sin.  For it is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and that knows no forgiveness.”