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Updated: June 25, 2025
Except for the opening from the road, the space was walled with a circle of living green through which the sun dappled the benches with quivering disks of yellow light and, high above, great poplars and oaks arched their mighty heads. It was an open-air "meeting-house" where the circuit-rider preached during his summer circuit and there the trial was to take place.
There was no service sung or spoken over the dead, for the circuit-rider was then months away; so, unnoticed, Chad stood behind the big poplar, watching the neighbors gently let down into the shallow trench a home-made coffin, rudely hollowed from the half of a bee-gum log, and, unnoticed, slipped away at the first muffled stroke of the dirt doubling his fists into his eyes and stumbling against the gnarled bodies of laurel and rhododendron until, out in a clear sunny space, he dropped on a thick, velvet mat of moss and sobbed himself to sleep.
His dwarfed intelligence, gauged to one idea, might be satisfied to wait only if waiting promised a climax. And as for the other's returning this new-found deliverer who was so thoroughly of the mountains, yet whose dialect just now had savored of the "circuit-rider" type she felt able to cope with that exigency after they were outside.
"But that's a common custom in some parts of the mountains, Nan. I've seen it when a circuit-rider had come through, and was going to hold church somewhere; nearly all who possessed shoes would carry them across their shoulders that way during their long walk to attend, and then sit on the meetinghouse steps and put them on. Shoes have to last a long time up there," she added wistfully.
There were still sparsely settled places, too, which needed the ministrations of the Methodist circuit-rider.
It is hardly possible that what happened, next day, could happen anywhere except among simple people of the hills. Briefly, the old Squire and the circuit-rider had brought old Joel to the point of saying, the night before, that he would give Jack up to be killed, if he could be proven guilty. But the old hunter cried with an oath: "You've got to prove him guilty."
"What did you say his name was? " Sherd Raines, the feller that's goin' to be our circuit-rider." He remembered the peculiar name. So this was Easter's lover. Clayton looked at the young mountaineer, curiously at first, and then with growing interest. His quiet air of authority among his fellows was like a birthright; it seemed assumed and accepted unconsciously.
He was converted after the old way; that is to say, he was "powerfully" converted. A circuit-rider preached the sermon that converted him. His anguish was awful. The midnight hour found him in tears. The Ohio forest resounded with his cries for mercy. When he found peace, it swelled into rapture.
"Ah," said old Gid, without changing his tone, and as if he were continuing a moral discourse, "thirty-five years ago we heard an old circuit-rider preach at Gum Springs, and while we could not subscribe to his fiery doctrine, being inclined to the broader and more enlightened faith of the Episcopal church, yet the fervor and sincerity of his utterances made a lasting impression on us.
Next time ther circuit-rider holds big meetin' I'm comin' through ter ther mourners' bench an' howl out sanctimony so loud I'll bust everybody's eardrums," and the big man laughed sneeringly. Yet an hour later Opdyke was greasing and loading his squirrel gun.
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