“There, boy, if I ain’t mistaken, that’s the best work for Zion that I done for some time.  Now be off to your rest!”

“Good night, Bishop, and thank you for being kind to me!  The Church Poet called me the Lute of the Holy Ghost, but I feel to-night, that I must be another Lion of the Lord.  Good night!”

He went out of the firelight and stumbled through the dark to his own wagons.  But when he came to them he could not stop.  Under all the exhilaration he had been conscious of the great pain within him, drugged for the moment, but never wholly stifled.  Now the stimulus of the drink had gone, and the pain had awakened to be his master.

He went past the wagons and out on to the prairie that stretched away, a sea of silvery gray in the moonlight.  As he walked, the whole stupendous load of sorrow settled upon him.  His breath caught and his eyes burned with the tears that lay behind them.  He walked faster to flee from it, but it came upon him more heavily until it made a breaking load,—­the loss of his sister by worse than death, his father and mother driven out at night and their home burned, his father killed by a mob whose aim had lacked even the dignity of the murderer’s—­for they had seemingly intended but a brutal piece of horse-play; his mother dead from exposure due to Gentile persecutions; the girl he had loved taken from him by Gentile persuasions.  If only she had been left him so that now he could put his head down upon her shoulder, slight as that shoulder was, and feel the supreme soothing of a woman’s touch; if only the hurts had not all come at once!  The pain sickened him.  He was far out on the prairie now, away from the sleeping encampment, and he threw himself down to give way to his grief.  Almost silently he wept, yet with sobs that choked him and cramped him from head to foot.  He called to his mother and to his father and to the sister who had gone before them, crying their names over and over in the night.  But under all his sorrow he felt as great a rage against the Gentile nation that had driven them into the wilderness.

When the spasm of grief had passed, he still lay there a long time.  Then becoming chilled he walked again over the prairie, watching the moon go down and darkness come to make the stars brighter, and then the day show gray in the east.  And as he walked against his sorrow, the burden of his thought came to be:  “God has tried me more than most men; therefore he expects more of me; and my reward shall be greater.  New visions shall be given to me, and a new power, and this poor, hunted, plundered remnant of Israel shall find me their staff.  Much has been taken from me, but much will be given unto me.”

And under this ran a minor strain born of the rage that still burned within him: 

“But, oh, the day of wrath that shall dawn on yonder Gentiles!”

So did he chasten himself through the night; and when the morning came he took his place in the train, strangely exalted by this new sense of the singular favour that was to be conferred upon him.