“It’s daylight now,” said Sim Ripson, hurriedly, after looking out of his window at the end of the bar. He was a good storekeeper, was Sim Ripson, and he knew how to mix drinks, but he had an unconquerable aversion to washing blood stains out of the floor. The two gamblers rushed out of the door, pistols in hand, and the crowd followed, each man talking at the top of his voice, and betting on the chances of the combatants. Suddenly, above all the noise, they heard a cracked soprano voice singing with some unauthorized flatting and sharping: “Another six days’ work is done, Another Sabbath is begun. Return, my soul, enjoy thy rest, Improve the day thy God has blessed.” Redwing stopped, and dropped his head to one side, as if expecting more; Flipp stopped; everybody did. Arkansas Bill, whose good habits had been laid aside late Saturday afternoon, exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be blowed!” Bill didn’t mean anything of the sort, but the tone in which he said it expressed precisely the feeling of the crowd. The voice was again heard: “Oh, that our thoughts and thanks may rise, As grateful incense to the skies; And draw from heaven that sweet repose Which none but he that feels it knows.” Redwing turned abruptly on his heel. “Keep the ounces,” said he. “Ther’s an old woman to hum that thinks a sight o’ me—I reckon, myself, I’m good fur somethin’ besides fillin’ a hole in the ground.” That night Sim Ripson complained that it had been the poorest Sunday he had ever had at Tough Case; the boys drank, but it was a sort of nerveless, unbusinesslike way that Sim Ripson greatly regretted; and very few bets were settled in Sim Ripson’s principal stock in trade. When Sim finally learned the cause of his trouble, he promptly announced his intention of converting Mrs. Blizzer to common sense, and as he had argued Uncle Ben, first into a perfect frenzy and then into silence, the crowd considered Mrs. Blizzer’s faith doomed. Monday morning, bright and early, as men with aching heads were taking their morning bitters, Mrs. Blizzer appeared at Sim Ripson’s store, and purchased a bar of soap. “Boys heerd ye singin’ yesterday,” said Sim. “Yes?” inquired Mrs. Blizzer. “Yes—all of ’em delighted,” said Sim, gallantly. “But ye don’t believe in no sich stuff, I s’pose, do ye?” “What stuff?” asked Mrs. Blizzer. “Why, ’bout heaven an’ hell, an’ the Bible, an’ all them things. Do ye know what the Greek fur hell meant? An’ do ye know the Bible’s all the time contradictin’ itself? I can show ye——” “I tell you what I _do_ know, Mr. Ripson,” said the woman; “I know some things in my heart that no mortal bein’ never told me, an’ they couldn’t be skeered out by all the dictionaries an’ commentators a-goin; that’s what I know.”