Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/151

 ing the word of Uriah's harsh God into the wilderness. But it was a life neither as pleasant nor as comfortable as life had been in the days of the Prophet, for there was nothing about the voice or the face or the body of Uriah which stirred men to tears of repentance and women to frenzies of hysteria. Uriah was merely repellent and cold. Gifts of money and of food must have been slender and infrequent and Annie, it appears, beyond pumping the wheezy melodion for the services, did nothing to help her brother. Nevertheless in those days a man of God was looked upon as touched by a Divine fire that set him aside from other men, and so Uriah was tolerated and respected.

They accomplished most in remote and lonely communities where the arrival of a traveling preacher was the peak of excitement from one year's end to another, where souls were craving salvation as a change from the monotonies of harsh weather and dreary landscape. But Annie Spragg contributed nothing save that uncertain touch upon the melodion. Even that disturbing power of seduction come down to her from the Prophet she seemed to have armored and locked away in the depths of her wounded soul. More and more she became a solitary, more and more she wandered through woods and fields, taking for her friends only the birds and the animals.

At some period during their long wanderings (and they went as far west as Boise and as far east as Carthage) Uriah came at last to be ordained a legitimate preacher, qualified by his church and fit to be given a flock and a house where he might rest