Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/68

 covered wagon. Each night brought souls to God. Each night brought singing and weeping. In that little town all came to God save one old man whose deafness shut him out from the sonorous beauty of Cyrus Spragg's voice and whose blindness hung a veil between him and fire in the preacher's eyes. They came to him, each one, in secret to ask forgiveness from their sins. He was to them the Prophet of God.

He left at last with his ox-cart and chickens and goats, his wife and children, and he took with him a store of food and a young heifer bred and due to calve the following spring, and on the day he left a little crowd followed the covered wagon for three miles beyond the village, and in it were women weeping and crying out hysterically. When at last he took leave of them at the ford in a muddy prairie stream, he stood on the back of the wagon and made a long prayer while they knelt on the frozen turf. And when he had finished he said, "And God came to His servant in a dream and said, 'Go ye into the wilderness and when ye find a place where three streams meet, there shall ye found a new kingdom which shall be called the New Jerusalem. And it shall flourish and flow with milk and honey, and to all the faithful the founding of the kingdom will be revealed by a sign, and the faithful shall sell all and leave their homes and firesides, their wives and husbands, nay even their children, and come at last into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Then he blessed them all and taking up the long wand by which he guided the oxen, set out through the water to cross the ford. One woman, the plump