“Well, I reckon, Squire Withers, a man never gits anything wuth havin’ without a tussle for it; and as to secrets, I don’t believe in them, nohow.”

A square-browed, resolute, silent, middle-aged man, who loved his home better than any amusement, regular at church, at the polls, something richer every Christmas than he had been on the New Year’s preceding—­a man whom everybody liked and few loved much—­such had Allen Golyer grown to be.

* * * * *

If I have lingered too long over this colorless and commonplace picture of rural Western life, it is because I have felt an instinctive reluctance to recount the startling and most improbable incident which fell one night upon this quiet neighborhood, like a thunderbolt out of blue sky.  The story I must tell will be flatly denied and easily refuted.  It is absurd and fantastic, but, unless human evidence is to go for nothing when it testifies of things unusual, the story is true.

At the head of the rocky hollow through which Chaney Creek ran to the river, lived the family who gave the brook its name.  They were among the early pioneers of the county.  In the squatty yellow stone house the present Chaney occupied his grandfather had stood a siege from Black Hawk all one summer day and night, until relieved by the garrison of Fort Edward.  The family had not grown with the growth of the land.  Like many others of the pioneers, they had shown no talent for keeping abreast of the civilization whose guides and skirmishers they had been.  In the progress of a half century they had sold, bit by bit, their section of land, which kept intact would have proved a fortune.  They lived very quietly, working enough to secure their own pork and hominy, and regarding with a sort of impatient scorn every scheme of public or private enterprise that passed under their eyes.

The elder Chaney had married, some years before, at the Mormon town of Nauvoo, the fair-haired daughter of a Swedish mystic, who had come across the sea beguiled by dreams of a perfect theocracy, and who on arriving at the city of the Latter-Day Saints had died, broken-hearted from his lost illusions.

The only dowry that Seraphita Neilsen brought her husband, besides her delicate beauty and her wide blue eyes, was a full set of Swedenborg’s later writings in English.  These became the daily food of the solitary household.  Saul Chaney would read the exalted rhapsodies of the Northern seer for hours together, without the first glimmer of their meaning crossing his brain.  But there was something in the majesty of their language and the solemn roll of their poetical development that irresistibly impressed and attracted him.  Little Gershom, his only child, sitting at his feet, would listen in childish wonder to the strange things his silent, morose and gloomy father found in the well-worn volumes, until his tired eyelids would fall at last over his pale, bulging eyes.