projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was
plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle.
The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip
hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it
shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were
deep, rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught from many a vigil.
It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that face, some
fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
Tonight, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power
in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that
sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that
transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition,
under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an
artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa
Skinner tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's God
was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for those of
his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star schoolhouse that night.
Poor exiles of all nations; men from the south and the north, peasants
from almost every country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous,
night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with
whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men
sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for
the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with
a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for
some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free
Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but
the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of e