Whitwell looked at Jackson.  “That the idee you got?”

“I guess he’s right,” said Jackson.  “There’s something a little about it in Job, and something in the Psalms:  but not a great deal.”

“And we got it from them Egyptian d——­”

“I don’t say that,” Westover interposed.  “But they had it before we had.  As we imagine it, we got it though Christianity.”

Jombateeste, who had taken his pipe out of his mouth in a controversial manner, put it back again.

Westover added, “But there’s no question but the Egyptians believed in the life hereafter, and in future rewards and punishments for the deeds done in the body, thousands of years before our era.”

“Well, I’m dumned,” said Whitwell.

Jombateeste took his pipe out again.  “Hit show they got good sense.  They know—­they feel it in their bone—­what goin’ ’appen—­when you dead.  Me, I guess they got some prophet find it hout for them; then they goin’ take the credit.”

“I guess that’s something so, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell.  “It don’t stand to reason that folks without any alphabet, as you may say, and only a lot of pictures for words, like Injuns, could figure out the immortality of the soul.  They got the idee by inspiration somehow.  Why, here!  It’s like this.  Them Pharaohs must have always been clawin’ out for the Hebrews before they got a hold of Joseph, and when they found out the true doctrine, they hushed up where they got it, and their priests went on teachin’ it as if it was their own.”

“That’s w’at I say.  Got it from the ’Ebrew.”

“Well, it don’t matter a great deal where they got it, so they got it,” said Jackson, as he rose.

“I believe I’ll go with you,” said Westover.

“All there is about it,” said the sick man, solemnly, with a frail effort to straighten himself, to which his sunken chest would not respond, “is this:  no man ever did figure that out for himself.  A man sees folks die, and as far as his senses go, they don’t live again.  But somehow he knows they do; and his knowledge comes from somewhere else; it’s inspired—­”

“That’s w’at I say,” Jombateeste hastened to interpose.  “Got it from the ’Ebrew.  Feel it in ’is bone.”

Out under the stars Jackson and Westover silently mounted the hill-side together.  At one of the thank-you-marms in the road the sick man stopped, like a weary horse, to breathe.  He took off his hat and wiped the sweat of weakness that had gathered upon his forehead, and looked round the sky, powdered with the constellations and the planets.  “It’s sightly,” he whispered.

“Yes, it is fine,” Westover assented.  “But the stars of our Northern nights are nothing to what you’ll see in Egypt.”

Jackson repeated, vaguely:  “Egypt!  Where I should like to go is Mars.”  He fixed his eyes on the flaming planets, in a long stare.  “But I suppose they have their own troubles, same as we do.  They must get sick and die, like the rest of us.  But I should like to know more about ’em.  You believe it’s inhabited, don’t you?”