Horses were hitched to the fence from the front gate all the way round to the side entrance. The mountain people seemed to have left their various occupations to subtly enjoy the spectacle of a common man like themselves who had reached too far after forbidden fruit and lay maimed and torn before them. It was a sort of feast at which the baser part of their spiritual natures was fed, and, starved as they were, it tasted good. Many of them had never aspired to bettering their lot even with small ventures such as buying Jersey cows at double the value of common cattle when it was reported that the former gave four times as much milk and ate less, and to these cautious individuals Bishop's visible writhing was sweet confirmation of their own judgment. Their disapproval of the old man's effort to hurry Providence could not have been better shown than in the failure of them all to comment on the rascally conduct of the Atlanta lawyer; they even chuckled over that part of the incident. To their minds Perkins was a sort of far-off personification of a necessary evil--who, like the devil himself, was evidently created to show mortals their limitations. They were not going to say what the lawyer had a right to do or should avoid doing, for they didn't pretend to know; but they did know what their old neighbor ought to have done, and if they didn't tell him so to his face they would let him see it by their actions. Yes, Bishop was a different thing altogether. He belonged to them and theirs. He led in their meetings, prayed in public, and had till now headed the list in all charitable movements. The Reverend Charles B. Dole, a tall, spare man of sixty, who preached the first, second, third, and fourth Sundays of each month in four different meetinghouses within a day's ride of Bishop's, came around as the guest of the farm-house as often as his circuit would permit. He was called the “fightin' preacher,” because he had had several fearless hand-to-hand encounters with certain moonshiners whose conduct he had ventured to call ungodly, because unlawful. On the second Saturday after Bishop's mishap, as Dole was to preach the next day at Rock Crest meetinghouse, he rode up as usual and turned his horse into the stable and fed him with his own hands. Then he joined Abner Daniel on the veranda. Abner had seen him ride up and purposely buried his head in his newspaper to keep from offering to take the horse, for Abner did not like the preacher “any to hurt,” as he would have put it. Dole did not care much for Abner either. They had engaged in several doctrinal discussions in which the preacher had waxed furious over some of Daniel's views, which he described as decidedly unorthodox. Daniel had kept his temper beautifully and had the appearance of being amused through it all, and this Dole found harder to forgive than anything Abner had said.