“But what good does it do if you won’t pay attention?”

“Oh, well, I can’t learn a new religion all at once.  It’s like riding a new saddle.  You put one on and ’drag the cinches up and lash them, and you think it’s going to be fine, and you don’t see why it isn’t.  But you find out that you have to ride it a little at a time and break it in.  Now, you take a fresh start with me to-morrow.”

“Of course I’m going to try.”

“And it isn’t as if I was regular out-and-out sinful.  My adopted father, Ezra Calkins, he’s a good man.  But, now I think of it, I don’t know what church he ever did belong to.  He’ll go to any of ’em,—­don’t make any difference which,—­Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic; he says he can get all he’s looking for out of any of ’em, and he kind of likes to change off now and then.  But he’s a good man.  He won’t hire any one that cusses too bad or is hard on animals, and he won’t even let the freighters work on Sunday.  He brought me up not to drink or gamble, or go round with low folks and all like that, and not to swear except when you’re driving cattle and have to.  ‘Keep clean inside and out,’ he says, ‘and then you’re safe,’ he says.  ’Then tie up to some good church for company, if you want to, not thinking bad of the others, just because you didn’t happen to join them.  Or it don’t hurt any to graze a little on all the ranges,’ he says.  And he sent me to public school and brought me up pretty well, so you can see I’m not plumb wicked.  Now after you get me coming, I may be easier than you think.”

She resolved to pray for some special gift to meet his needs.  If he were not really sinful, there was all the more reason why he should be saved into the Kingdom.  The sun went below the western rim of the valley as they walked, and the cooling air was full of the fresh summer scents from field and garden and orchard.

Down the road behind them, a half-hour later, swung the tall, loose-jointed figure of Seth Wright, his homespun coat across his arm, his bearskin cap in his hand, his heated brow raised to the cooling breeze.  His ruffle of neck whiskers, virtuously white, looked in the dying sunlight quite as if a halo he had worn was dropped under his chin.  A little past the Rae place he met Joel returning from the village.

“Evening, Brother Rae!  You ain’t looking right tol’lable.”

“It’s true, Brother Seth.  I’ve thought lately that I’m standing in the end of my days.”

“Peart up, peart up, man!  Look at me,—­sixty-eight years come December, never an ache nor a pain, and got all my own teeth.  Take another wife.  That keeps a man young if he’s got jedgment.”  He glanced back toward the Rae house.