“There!—­here are three bits—­every cent I’ve got with me,” she said indignantly, shoving it in his hand.  “Well, Peter Cartwright, if your mother could know—­”

But the young backwoodsman, whose fame was already filling the wilderness, and was to fill the whole Christian world, now pressed on riding fast, and was soon beyond her kind scolding.

“Well, ’pon my word!  Did anybody ever see the like of that!” she cried, seeing that Ruth had followed her to the door.  “That boy don’t know half the time whether he has had anything to eat or not.  And it’s just exactly the same to him when he’s got money and when he hasn’t.”

The girl did not hear what Miss Penelope said.  Her heart was responding, as it always did, to everything great or heroic, and she looked after this boy preacher with newly opened eyes.  She suddenly saw as by a flash of white light, that he and the other pioneer men of God—­these soldiers of the cross who were bearing it through the trackless wilderness—­were of the greatest.  Her dim eyes followed the young man—­this brave bearer of the awful burden of the divine mission—­watching him press on to the river.  She thought of the many rivers that he must swim, the forests that he must thread, the savages that he must contend against, the wild beasts that he must conquer, the plague that he must defy, the shelterless nights that he must sleep under the trees—­freezing, starving, struggling through winter’s cold and summer’s heat, and all for the love of God and the good of mankind.

VIII

THE LOG TEMPLE OF JUSTICE

Most of those dauntless soldiers, who first bore the cross through the wilderness were as ready to fight as to pray—­as they had to be.  No power of earth or evil which he had been able to combat could have turned young Peter Cartwright that day or have held him back.  Pressing on without rest or food, he was in time to preach.  When this duty was done, he returned over the Shawnee Crossing and rode straight to the court-house.  To go there was in his eyes the next service due the Word.

The court-house was a single large, low room built of rough logs, and standing in the depths of the primeval forest.  Great trees arched their branches over its roof and the immemorial “Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes,” went up through their heavy dark tops.  It must have been strange thus to hear this formal summons before the bar of human justice, strange indeed to see the precise motion of man’s law in so wild a spot.  Roundabout there still stretched the wilderness which is subject only to nature’s law—­the one immutable law which takes no heed of justice or mercy; which recks neither man’s needs nor his deserts.