“Didn’t Christ prove it?” cried Mr. Fowler quickly.

“No!” replied Mrs. Falkner.  “He believed it Himself and He lived like He believed it, but He didn’t prove it.”

Fowler jumped to his feet.  “He proved it over and over; by fulfilling the prophecies, by the miracles He performed and by returning after death.”

“How do you know He returned after death?” asked Mrs. Falkner.

“The Bible says so.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Falkner.  “The Bible is just history, most of it hearsay.  And I read in the Atlantic the other day that Napoleon said that history was just a lie agreed upon.”

“This is blasphemy!” shouted Mr. Fowler.  “This is—­”

“Wait!” Peter interrupted with a firm hand.  “Every one is to say what they decently please.  You’ll never get anywhere in this valley, if you show yourself shocked by anything anybody says.”

“I don’t want to shock the preacher, Peter,”—­Mrs. Falkner’s beautiful face was wistful—­“I’d like to have his faith.  I sure-gawd would!  But!  I just want to make him see that to folks like us in Lost Chief who read and think and look at these hills a lot, the Bible never could prove a hereafter to us.”

“But the Bible is the inspired word of God,” insisted Fowler.

“Who says so?” asked Mrs. Falkner.

“The Bible.”

“Good heavens, isn’t that childish?” she appealed to the congregation.  “Seems to me only God could prove that and we don’t even know He exists.”

There was silence in the room.  Douglas, looking over the backs of many familiar heads, felt a curious yearning affection for these neighbors who so far had met his experiment so kindly.  Then his eyes turned to the aspens without the window and beyond these to the far red clouds over Fire Mesa.  The first snow of the season was beginning to sift through the trees.  He wished that he had the courage to ask Mrs. Falkner what she thought of Inez’ poem: 

A fire mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell—­

but he would rather have cut out his tongue than repeat the verse before this audience.

Mr. Fowler was running his fingers through his beard, glancing hesitatingly from Douglas to Peter.

“Well, is it the sense of this meeting,” asked the postmaster, “to let the preacher tell us how he feels about it?”

“Go to it, old wrangler,” said Charleton.  “I can spout the Persian Poet to ’em if you run short of Bible stuff.”

“Baa—­a—­a!” bleated a small boy in the back of the room.

“I’m going to give the first young one that makes a disturbance a dose of aspen switch,” said Grandma Brown.

There was a general chuckle that quieted as Mr. Fowler began to speak.