The manliness in a character like Morton's must react, if depressed too far; and he now notified those who were to help him interrupt the meeting that if any disturbance were made, he should take it on himself to punish the offender. He would not fight alongside Bill McConkey and Jake Sniger, and he felt like seeking a quarrel with Lumsden, for the sake of justitifying himself to himself. _CHAPTER XIV._ KIKE'S SERMON. During the time that had intervened between Kike's conversion and Magruder's second visit to the settlement, Kike had developed a very considerable gift for earnest speech in the class meetings. In that day every influence in Methodist association contributed to make a preacher of a man of force. The reverence with which a self-denying preacher was regarded by the people was a great compensation for the poverty and toil that pertained to the office. To be a preacher was to be canonized during one's lifetime. The moment a young man showed zeal and fluency he was pitched on by all the brethren and sisters as one whose duty it was to preach the Gospel; he was asked whether he did not feel that he had a divine call; he was set upon watching the movements within him to see whether or not he ought to be among the sons of the prophets. Oftentimes a man was made to feel, in spite of his own better judgment, that he was a veritable Jonah, slinking from duty, and in imminent peril of a whale in the shape of some providential disaster. Kike, indeed, needed none of these urgings to impel him toward the ministry. He was a man of the prophetic temperament--one of those men whose beliefs take hold of them more strongly than the objects of sense. The future life, as preached by the early Methodists, with all its joys and all its awful torments, became the most substantial of realities to him. He was in constant astonishment that people could believe these things theoretically and ignore them in practice. If men were going headlong to perdition, and could be saved and brought into a paradise of eternal bliss by preaching, then what nobler work could there be than that of saving them? And, let a man take what view he may of a future life, Kike's opinion was the right one--no work can be so excellent as that of helping men to better living.