Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/203

 away from the street," Uncle Alf waved aside with a tolerant hand.

"The grapes of wrath are heavy in the vineyard, sister," he droned in his high nasal whine. "Alpheus, servant of the Lord, goeth forth to the harvest."

Forth he went; straight out of the jail door and down the middle of Main Street. He was hatless. His heavy mane of snowy hair lifted high from his forehead and fell over his ears to mingle with a cascading beard. From the tangle of beard his eyes, deep-set in hollows under a hawk's beak of a nose, glowed hot as slag in a retort. He strode raptly, as one following some sign in the heavens; his head was tilted back, and his gnarled old hands were stretched before him as the hands of a groping child in the dark. A fearsome man out of the wilderness, he; another John Baptist, come to cry: "Make straight the way." In Main Street's inflamed imagination the appearance of this apocalyptic figure carried the awesome savor of divine intervention; here was the raw spirit of the wilderness made manifest.

Uncle Alf strode down the middle of the street a full block, seeing no one, seemingly unconscious of the presence of any man. At