Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/112

 in villages and crossroads, wiping out the evil spread by the Prophet.

The burden of his father's sin was a thing which never left him.

He was a tall man, raw-boned in the parlance of the country, with great wrists and knuckles and kneebones. Save for his great strength—he could straighten horseshoes and bend bars of iron—he had nothing in common with the Prophet. It was as if Nature had taken an impish delight in making father and son so unlike each other. Uriah's hair was sandy red and sparse; Uriah's lips were thin and always drawn a little, as if there was some pain forever gnawing him from within. His skin was pale and dry and covered with freckles; and his beard, which he shaved, was thin and scraggly. In his face there were deep furrows that seemed cut there by a careless chisel. His pale blue eyes had a way of wavering and shifting restlessly, so that they appeared never to be looking directly into the eyes of any person. It may have been the sense of his father's sin, the shame of being a son of the Prophet, which made him fearful and uneasy, for he was a sensitive man who suffered agonies. It was the soul of a woman in the body of a giant. And he was shy and silent and had no friends, for he believed that people were forever whispering about the doings of his father.

He came to Cordova to learn what he must learn, a man already on his way to middle age, to listen to sermons and read the teachings of Wesley with adolescent boys come out of the prairies and cornfields, all like himself believing themselves chosen