Redwing stopped, and dropped his head to one side, as if expecting more; Flipp stopped; everybody did.  Arkansas Bill, whose good habits had been laid aside late Saturday afternoon, exclaimed: 

“Well, I’ll be blowed!”

Bill didn’t mean anything of the sort, but the tone in which he said it expressed precisely the feeling of the crowd.  The voice was again heard: 

  “Oh, that our thoughts and thanks may rise,
  As grateful incense to the skies;
  And draw from heaven that sweet repose
  Which none but he that feels it knows.”

Redwing turned abruptly on his heel.

“Keep the ounces,” said he.  “Ther’s an old woman to hum that thinks a sight o’ me—­I reckon, myself, I’m good fur somethin’ besides fillin’ a hole in the ground.”

That night Sim Ripson complained that it had been the poorest Sunday he had ever had at Tough Case; the boys drank, but it was a sort of nerveless, unbusinesslike way that Sim Ripson greatly regretted; and very few bets were settled in Sim Ripson’s principal stock in trade.

When Sim finally learned the cause of his trouble, he promptly announced his intention of converting Mrs. Blizzer to common sense, and as he had argued Uncle Ben, first into a perfect frenzy and then into silence, the crowd considered Mrs. Blizzer’s faith doomed.

Monday morning, bright and early, as men with aching heads were taking their morning bitters, Mrs. Blizzer appeared at Sim Ripson’s store, and purchased a bar of soap.

“Boys heard ye singin’ yesterday,” said Sim.

“Yes?” inquired Mrs. Blizzer.

“Yes—­all of ’em delighted,” said Sim, gallantly.  “But ye don’t believe in no sich stuff, I s’pose, do ye?”

“What stuff?” asked Mrs. Blizzer.

“Why, ‘bout heaven an’ hell, an’ the Bible, an’ all them things.  Do ye know what the Greek fur hell meant?  An’ do ye know the Bible’s all the time contradictin’ itself?” I can show ye—­”

“I tell you what I do know, Mr. Ripson,” said the woman; “I know some things in my heart that no mortal bein’ never told me, an’ they couldn’t be skeered out by all the dictionaries an’ commentators a-goin; that’s what I know.”

And Mrs. Blizzer departed, while the astonished theologian sheepishly admitted that he owed drinks to the crowd.

While the ex-deacon, Uncle Ben, was trying to determine to go home, he found quite a pretty nugget that settled his mind, and he announced that same night, at the store, that all his mining property was for sale, as he was going back East.

“I’ll go with you, Uncle Ben,” said Fourteenth Street.

The crowd was astounded; men of Fourteenth Street’s calibre seldom had pluck enough to go to the mines, and their getting away, or their doing any thing that required manliness, was of still more unfrequent occurrence.