For a moment this astonishing speech was followed by absolute silence.

Then, as if with one accord, the men all cheered in admiration.

"Let's git the parson back right off," cried the carpenter. "I kin build the finest steeple ever was!"

"Send a gang to fetch him here to-day!" said Webber.

"I wouldn't lose no time, or he may git stuck on Fremont, and never want to budge," added Lufkins.

Field and half a dozen more concurred.

"I'll be one to go myself," said the blacksmith, promptly. "Two or three others can come along, and we'll git him if we have to steal him--wife, little gals, and all!"

But the party was yet unformed for the trip when the news of the council's intentions was spread throughout the camp, and an ugly feature of the life in the mines was revealed.

The gambler, Parky, sufficiently recovered from the wound in his arm to be out of his house, and planning a secret revenge against old Jim and his friends, was more than merely opposed to the plan which had come from the shop of Webber.

"It don't go down," said he to a crowd, with a sneer at the parson and with oaths for Bone. "I own some Borealis property myself, and don't you fergit I'll make things too hot for any preacher to settle in the camp. And I 'ain't yet finished with the gang that thought they was smart on New-Year's eve--just chew that up with your cud of tobacker!"

With half a dozen ruffians at his back--the sc.u.m of prisons, gambling-dens, and low resorts--he summed up a menace not to be estimated lightly. Many citizens feared to incur his wrath; many were weak, and therefore as likely to gather to his side as not, under the pressure he could put upon them.

The camp was suddenly ripe for a struggle. Right and decency, or lawlessness and violence would speedily conquer. There could be no half-way measures. If Webber and his following had been persuaded before that Parson Stowe should have a place in the town, they were grimly determined on the project now.

The blacksmith it was who strung up once again a bar of steel before his shop and rang it with his hammer.

There were forty men who answered to the summons. And when they had finished the council of war within the shop, the work of an upward lift had been accomplished. A supplement was added to the work of signing a short pet.i.tion requesting Parson Stowe to come among them, and this latter took the form of a mandate addressed to the gambler and his backing of outlaws, thieves, and roughs. It was brief, but the weight of its words was mighty.

"The s.p.a.ce you're using in Borealis is wanted for decenter purposes,"

it read. "We give you twenty-four hours to clear out. Git!--and then G.o.d have mercy on your souls if any one of the gang is found in Borealis!"

This was all there was, except for a fearful drawing of a coffin and a skull. And such an array of inky names, scrawled with obvious pains and distinctness, was on the paper that argument itself was plainly hand in hand with a noose of rope.

Opposition to an army of forty wrathful and determined men would have been but suicide. Parky nodded when he read the note. He knew the game was closed. He sold all his interests in the camp for what they would bring and bought a pair of horses and a carriage.

In groups and pairs his henchmen--suddenly thrown over by their leader to hustle for themselves--sneaked away from the town, many of them leaving immediately in their dread of the grim reign of law now come upon the camp. Parky, for his part, waited in some deliberation, and then drove away with a sneer upon his lips when at last his time was growing uncomfortably short.

Decency had won--the moral slate of the camp was clean!

CHAPTER XXIII

A DAY OF JOY

There came a day--never to be forgotten in the annals of Borealis--when, to the ringing of the bar of steel, Parson Stowe, with his pretty little wife and the three little red-capped youngsters, rode once more into town to make their home with their big, rough friends.

Fifty awkward men of the mines roared l.u.s.tily with cheering. Fifty great voices then combined in a sweet, old song that rang through the snow-clad hills:

"Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on.

The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on."

And the first official acts of the wholesome young parson were conducted in the "church" that Bone had given to the town when the happy little Skeezucks was christened "Carson Boone" and the drawling old Jim and the fond Miss Doc were united as man and wife.

"If only I'd known what a heart she's got, I'd asked her before," the miner drawled. "But, boys, it's never too late to pray for sense."

The moment of it all, however, which the men would remember till the final call of the trumpet was that in which the three little girls, in their bright-red caps, came in at the door of the Dennihan home. They would never forget the look on the face of their motherless, quaint little waif as he held forth both his tiny arms to the vision and cried out:

"Bruvver Jim!"

THE END