This was the real, awful “Struggle in the Dark.”  A human soul fighting with heaven in sight, but certain of slipping inevitably into hell!  It was the same old battle.  The Image of God fought with the Image of the Devil.  It was the same fight that Paul described so dramatically when he represented the Spirit as contending with the Flesh.  Paul also called this dreadful something the Old Adam, and I suppose Darwin would call it the remains of the Wild Beast.  But call it what you will, it is the battle that every well-endowed soul must fight at some point.  And to Ralph it seemed that the final victory of the Evil, the Old Adam, the Flesh, the Wild Beast, the Devil, was certain.  For, was not the pure, unconscious face of Hannah on the Devil’s side?  And so the battle had just as well be given up at once, for it must be lost in the end.

But to Ralph, lying there in the still darkness, with his conscience as wide awake as if it were the Day of Doom, there seemed something so terrible in this overflow of the better nature which he knew to be inevitable as soon as the voice of conscience became blunted, that he looked about for help.  He did not at first think of God; but there came into his thoughts the memory of a travel-worn Galilean peasant, hungry, sleepy, weary, tempted, tried, like other men, but having a strange, divine Victory in him by which everything evil was vanquished at his coming.  He remembered how He had reached out a Hand to every helpless one, how He was the Helper of every weak one.  And out of the depths of his soul he cried to the Helper, and found comfort.  Not victory, but, what is better, strength.  And so, without a thought of the niceties of theological distinctions, without dreaming that it was the beginning of a religious experience, he found what he needed, help.  And the Helper gave His beloved sleep.

CHAPTER IX.

HAS GOD FORGOTTEN SHOCKY?

“Pap wants to know ef you would spend to-morry and Sunday at our house?” said one of Squire Hawkins’s girls, on the very next evening, which was Friday.  The old Squire was thoughtful enough to remember that Ralph would not find it very pleasant “boarding out” all the time he was entitled to spend at Pete Jones’s.  For in view of the fact that Mr. Pete Jones sent seven children to the school, the “master” in Flat Creek district was bound to spend two weeks in that comfortable place, sleeping in a preoccupied bed, in the “furdest corner,” with insufficient cover, under an insufficient roof, and eating floating islands of salt pork fished out of oceans of hot lard.  Ralph was not slow to accept the relief offered by the hospitable justice of the peace, whose principal business seemed to be the adjustment of the pieces of which he was composed.  And as Shocky traveled the same road, Ralph took advantage of the opportunity to talk with him.  The master could not dismiss Hannah wholly from his mind.  He would at least read the mystery of her life, if Shocky could be prevailed on to furnish the clue.