Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/76

 Cyrus Spragg, was born of the garments with which man covered his body.

With his family and a little band of followers he set up a kingdom of Nature in the dunes and forests of Michigan. But two things he had failed to consider. The winter came and with it forty-seven Vigilantes from the nearest town. Together they dispersed the little band. Among the followers was Miss Amelia Bossert, the poetess, who early in the summer of the next year bore a son to the glory of the Prophet. The tired wife was released at last from the servitude of her body.

And then again at Cairo, Illinois, God came to him in the shape of a ram speaking with the tongues of angels to warn him against the new deluge. From the back of the great ox-cart he preached repentance and destruction, and beside it he and his followers set about building a clumsy barge that would have sunk as soon as launched. The great ship was finished in November and he settled himself to waiting for the rains to descend and the waters to rise. It is true that in that year the rains came and the rivers in the Middle West rose higher than they had ever risen before; but the Ark remained on dry land. No trickle of water touched it, despite even the prayers of all his band of followers. On the eighth day the river subsided again.

He did not wait for new floods, but told his followers that he had been guilty of error and sin and so had been blind to the true meaning of God's revelation, and packing his family into the cart, he disappeared again, moving toward the west with a small band of eccentric disciples. The Ark re-