Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/77

 mained, a curiosity which farmers drove miles to see, and at last it was carried off piecemeal for firewood by the negroes who lived on the riverbanks.

In the spring of the following year the little caravan led by the Prophet came suddenly upon "the spot where three rivers joined their waters." He was no longer a young man and no longer quite a charlatan. At sixty-one he had come to believe in himself as others believed in him. The thing he had created took possession of him. The site where three rivers joined their waters was the spot indicated by him in a prophecy thirty years earlier. He had not believed it then, and now it had come true. It was as if God had chosen him, after all. Here he unyoked the oxen for the last time. This was the New Jerusalem.

It was a fertile country, green and well watered, with deep black soil, though it was a flat country and treeless and bare. The land was to be had for the taking. At this time there were in his train seven grown sons and nineteen followers, men and women, and among them they claimed land larger in area than all Judea. Cyrus Spragg became the ruler and the patriarch and throughout the prairie country those who had been awaiting a sign heard of the New Jerusalem and left their homes and flocked to join him. They came for days and weeks in wagons and ox-carts, on foot and on horseback, a restless, emotional people seeking the compensation of a romantic faith. 