Bud could not help it. He laughed out hysterically. And then the old face, still smiling, looked surprised at the window and said: "Go home, Bud. God is the Great Doctor, an' He has told me she shall live." Then, as he turned to go, his heart stood still, for he heard Shiloh say in her little piping child voice, but, oh, so distinctly, and so sweetly, like a bird in the forest: "Pap, sech a sweet dream--an' I went right up to the gate of heaven an' the angel smiled an' kissed me an' sed: "'Go back, little Shiloh--not yet--not yet!'" Then Bud slipped off in the dawn of the coming light. CHAPTER XXIII GOD WILL PROVIDE In a few days Shiloh was up, but the mere shadow of a little waif, following the old man around the place. She needed rest and good food and clothes; and Bull Run and Seven Days and Appomattox and Atlanta needed them, and where to get them was the problem which confronted the grandfather. Shiloh's narrow escape from death had forever settled the child-labor question with him--he would starve, "by the Grace of God," as he expressed it, before one of them should ever go into the mill again. He had a bitter quarrel about it with Mrs. Watts; but the good old man's fighting blood was up at last--that hatred of child-slavery, which had been so long choked by the smoke of want, now burst into a blaze when the shock of it came in Shiloh's collapse--a blaze which was indeed destined "to light the valley with a torch of fire." On the third day Jud Carpenter came out to see about it; but at sight of him the old man took down from the rack over the hall door the rifle he had carried through the war, and with a determined gesture he stopped the employment agent at the gate: "I am a man of God, Jud Carpenter," he said in a strange voice, rounded with a deadly determination, "but in the name of God an' humanity, if you come into that gate after my little 'uns, I'll kill you in yo' tracks, jes' as a bis'n bull 'ud stamp the life out of a prowlin' coyote." And Jud Carpenter went back to town and spread the report that the old man was a maniac, that he had lost his mind since Shiloh came so near dying. The problem which confronted the old man was serious. "O Jack, Jack," he said one night, "if I jes' had some of that gold you had!" Jack replied by laying ten silver dollars in the old man's hand. "I earned it,"--he said simply--"this week--shoeing horses--it's the sweetest money I ever got." "Why, Jack," said the Bishop--"this will feed us for a week. Come here, Tabitha," he called cheerily--"come an' see what happens to them that cast their bread upon the waters. We tuck in this outcast an' now behold our bread come back ag'in." The old woman came up and took it gingerly. She bit each dollar to test it, remarking finally: "Why, hit's genuwine!"-- Jack laughed. "Why, hit's mo' money'n I've seed fur years," she said--"I won't hafter hunt fur 'sang roots to-morrow."