Listening frantically, I heard the doomed man’s hesitating feet shuffle into the room and the chair groan as he took his seat amid the glum silence. And there I lay, and with Bill I waited I didn’t know for what, some nameless horror that would kill the life in me and make me a dishonored thing all my life--a human too cowardly to cry out the word of warning to another of God’s creatures. And through it all the little child wailed and the woman moaned. Then in the midst of another thick muttering from the head of Old Harpeth, which was followed by a vivid flash, I heard another pair of feet step on the threshold of the cabin. I cowered under the quilt, held my breath, and took the bullet into my own heart--or thought I did. Then high and clear through the flash of the lightning, over the mutterings of the thunder and the scuffle of the men’s feet, accompanied by a glad cry from the moaning woman, there came a voice of an archangel singing in tones of command that thrilled that whole mountain until it seemed to shake with its reverberations: “Stand up! stand up for Jesus! Ye soldiers of the cross; Lift high His royal banner, It must not suffer loss.” I lay still, and something poured into my heart that was a peace made from the glory of the storm, the moan of the woman, and the song of a dawn-bird. Out of the darkness my soul came like--I think I partly expressed it in the first sentence of this confession, if you will turn back and see, Evelyn dear. After the men had sung the wonderful old hymn through to its very last lines, “To him that overcometh A crown of life shall be; He with the King of Glory Shall reign eternally,” Bill and I kept very still and took our “knock-out.” Bill had stuck a knife into a gallant over at Hitch It for offering to exchange snuff-sticks with Malinda Budd, and I could easily detect a decided vein of sympathy in the voice of Leader while he administered a rousing reproof to the knife, but extolled the use of fists in such cases, much to the approval of the rest of the gang. In fact, that was the greatest sermon ever spoken in the English language on the theme of justice, courage, feminine protection, manly dignity, and brotherly love, and it was done in about five minutes, I should say. Every word of it hit Bill fair and square, and me also, to say nothing of all the rest of the world. During the last minute and a half of the discourse the men were indulging in muttered “Ahmens” and “Glory be’s,” and I could hardly restrain myself from throwing off the quilt and--well, you know, Evelyn, that Grandmother Wickliffe was a pillar in the Methodist Church of Hillsboro, and at times of great emotion, during the visit of the presiding elder, she did--shout. Aunt Grace never likes to hear it mentioned.