And if all this be true, as all horsemen know it to be—­even when the bond is strained by cruelty and tainted by gain and stained by blood—­how much closer and stronger must have been the tie between this priest of the wilderness and his friend.  Toby’s loyalty was never tried like the hunter’s by seeing some dumb brother tortured and slain—­and that the hunter feels the test keenly, no one can doubt after seeing the horror in his eloquent eyes.  Toby never had to suffer from a broken heart because of a lost race, or because he shared the disgrace of his rider’s dishonesty, and many noble beasts have seemed to suffer something strangely like this.  Toby never had to lend his strength to the taking of human life, like the trooper’s horse; and the soldier’s horse does not need the power of speech to tell that he suffers almost as much in the spirit as in the flesh from the horrors of the battle-field.  Toby and his friend worked together solely for peace, kindness, and mercy, for the relief of suffering, and the saving of bodies and souls; all and always, solely for the good of the world, of their fellow-creatures, and the glory of God.

Think of what it was that Father Orin and his partner did!  They had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over a strip of country which was more than fifty miles wide and little less than four hundred miles long.  This lay on both sides of the Ohio River, much of it being the trackless forest, so that Father Orin and Toby used the Shawnee Crossing oftener than the Shawnees themselves.  They went unharmed, too, where no other pioneers ever dared go.  Some mysterious power seemed to protect them, as the rude cross drawn on a cabin door is said to have saved the inmates from the savages.  Father Orin and Toby thus travelled about two hundred miles each week all the year through, without stopping for heat or cold.  There was only one church when they first began their labors, and this was the little log chapel; but the members of that small and widely scattered congregation were served with the offices of their religion by the priest at many private houses which were far apart and called “stations.”  There were about thirty of these in Kentucky, several in Indiana and Illinois, and one or two in Tennessee, and Father Orin and Toby visited them all, some as often as once a month and the others as often as possible.  To say Mass and to preach constituted but a part of the duty which called them from place to place.  They went wherever the priest was needed to administer baptism to infants or older persons; they went wherever any one, old or young, required instruction in religion; they went wherever the priest was needed to hear confession; they went far and wide, so that the priest might solemnize marriage for Protestants as well as Catholics; they visited the sick, no matter how distant, in summer and in winter alike, and Toy day or by night; they went at any summons to bury the dead; and they tried to go again, so that the priest might do what he could