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The official looked with interest at it; he held up suddenly Purdee's grant and read aloud, "From Crystal Spring seven hundred poles northwest to a stake in the middle of the river." He examined, too, the original plat of survey which he had taken to guide him, and also the plat made when Squire Bates sold to Grinnell's father; "northwest" they all agreed.
Ephraim Blinks with his fiddle had stopped there on his way to play at some neighboring merry-making, and had acquainted them with the result of processioning Purdee's land. "We'll go down thar an' live!" cried his wife, with a gush of joyful tears. "Arter all our scratch-in' along like ten-toed chickens all this time, we'll hev comfort an' plenty! We'll live in Grinnell's good house!
He suddenly recognized the fact that he had been chiefly restrained from repeating the words by an unrealized terror lest they prove true lest something his father claimed was not his, indeed. But the expression of anger on Purdee's face was merged first in blank astonishment, then in perplexed cogitation, then in renewed and overpowering amazement.
But ter think o' our trials, an' how pore we hev been!" "This air the Purdees' day!" cried the grandmother, her face flushed with the semblance of youth. "Arter all ez hev kem an' gone, the jedg-mint o' the Lord hev descended on Grinnell, an' he air cast out. An' his fields, an' house, an' bin, an' barn, air Purdee's!"
Their intention, the promptings of curiosity, had flagged during the long tramp and the gradual waning of the influence of the jug. The coincidence of meeting Purdee here revived their interest. Grinnell, remembering the ancient feud, held back, being unlikely to elicit Purdee's views in the face of their contradiction. The blacksmith and the young fiddler took their way down toward him.
His religious experiences thenceforth, his vacillations of hope and despair, had been often elaborated amongst the brethren. But his was a conventional soul; its expression was in the formulae and platitudes of the camp-meeting. They sank into oblivion in the excitement attendant upon Purdee's wild utterances from the mystic script of the rocks.
Purdee's fantasy may have been a poor thing, but, although he could calmly enough close its eyes, and straighten its limbs, and bury it decently from out the offended view of fact, he felt that he should mourn it in his heart as long as he should live. And he was bereaved. There is a certain stage in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy.
And indeed Purdee's possessions were wider far than even that divergent line which the county surveyor ran out might seem to warrant; for on the mountain-tops largest realms of solemn thought were open to him. He levied tribute upon the liberties of an enthused imagination. He exulted in the freedom of the expanding spaces of a spiritual perception of the spiritual things.
He was sure that by the terms of his deed, which his father had from its vendor, Squire Bates, his line included the Moses' tables on which Purdee had built so fallacious a repute of holiness. He looked once more at the paper "thence from Crystal Spring with Purdee's line north seven hundred poles to a stake in the middle of the river." Purdee too was all a-quiver with eagerness.
There was evidently a clerical error on the part of the scrivener who had written Grinnell's deed. In a moment the harassed man saw that through the processioning of Purdee's land he had lost heavily in the extent of his supposed possessions. He it was who had claimed what was rightfully another's.
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