None of them realized how much of the work Mark had done. Each looked only at the result, knowing it to be the aggregated industry and leisure of the neighbors, laboring as best they might and as opportunity offered. This was no hindrance to Mark’s satisfaction. He had wanted to help, not to make a parade of his help, or to have what he had done appreciated. He thought the little preacher, the “skimpy saint,” as his unfriends called him, had a definite idea of what he had done. In the stress of this man’s lofty ideals he could compromise with little that failed to reach them. He was forever stretching onward and upward. But Mark noted a kindling in his intent eye one day, while “the chinking” was being put in, the small diagonal slats between the logs of the wall on which the clay of the “daubing” was to be plastered. “Did you do all this side?” he had asked. As Mark answered “Yes,” he felt his heart swell with responsive pride to win even this infrequent look of approval, and he went on to claim more. “Don’t tell nobody,” he said, glancing up from his kneeling posture by the side of the wall. “But I done that corner, too, over thar by the door. Old Joel Ruggles done it fust, but the old man’s eyesight’s dim, an’ his hand onstiddy, an’ ’twar all crooked an’ onreg’lar, so _unbeknown_ ter _him_ I kem hyar early one day an’ did it over,--though he don’t know it,--so ez ’twould be ekal--all of a piece.” The “skimpy saint” now hardly seemed to care to glance at the work. He still stood with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, looking down at him with eyes in which Mark perceived new meanings. “You can sense, then, the worth of hevin’ all things of a piece with the best. See ter it, Mark, that ye keep yer life all of a piece with this good work--with the best that’s in ye.” So Mark understood. But nowadays he hardly felt all of a piece with the good work he had done on the church walls, against so many discouragements, laboring early and late, seeking earnestly some means that might be within his limited power. Oftentimes, after the church was finished, he went and stood and gazed at it, realizing its stanch validity, without shortcomings, without distortions--all substantial and regular, with none of the discrepancies and inadequacies of his moral structure. While silently and meditatively recalling all these facts as he sat this night of early spring among the widely unrelated surroundings of the still, the shadowy group of moonshiners about him, Mark Yates looked hard at Panther Brice’s sharp features, showing, in the thread of white light from the closed door of the furnace, with startling distinctness against the darkness, like some curiously carved cameo. He never understood the rush of feeling that constrained him to speak, and afterward, when he thought of it, his temerity surprised him.