The Wild Rose Hotel itself was no quiet abode on this night. There was a bar, and although it was at the other end of the house, the noise of the shouting, the rude songs, the stamping and quarreling therein made Betty shake in her bed until long after midnight. She had no idea that her brother went to bed, fell asleep in a minute, and slept as peacefully as a baby until almost sunrise. A Sabbath dawn could be as calm at Canyon Pass as at Ditson Corners. The pearl-gray light of the new day washed the sleep from the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s eyes. He arose to lean on his elbow and gaze through a window that, curtainless, looked out on Mulligan Lane. There were some frowsy buildings within sight—evidently dwellings of a kind—but the parson lifted his eyes to the hills feeling with the psalmist that “whence cometh my strength.” They stood—those hills—in serrated ranks from the far east to the point where the sudden uplift of the canyon wall on that side of the river closed the outlook. Even Old Graylock of his familiar Berkshires had not the magnificence of these peaks. He was impressed again as he already had been with the difference merely in size between these western hills and the Berkshires, let alone the vast dissimilarity in their contour. The eminences of western Massachusetts for the most part slope away into wooded and pastured ridges, which themselves melt into the lush lowlands. Their crowns do not seem so imposing as these western peaks because of their configuration. His window was open. Suddenly he became aware of voices below it at the back of the hotel. Something was going on there—something that revealed the dregs of life to be as mean and offensive here in Canyon Pass as they could be in any place in the whole world. He heard the maundering tones of an intoxicated man and—sharply contrasted—the voice of a woman. “Get up, Sam, and come home.” “Hic! Won’t go home till mawnin’—till mawnin’—hic—doth ’pear.” “Well, morning’s appearing all right, and it’ll catch you here, wallerin’ like a hog in the lane. Come home with me.” “No. I’m a man. I’m—hic!—independent, I am. I’ll go hu-hu-home jest whenever I please.” “Now’s the time to please me, Sam. Get up and come along.” “Couldn’t do it, gal. Couldn’t think—hic!—of it. ’Twould be givin’ up my indepen—dic!—dence. I’m—I’m my own master. Leastways, I am on Sunday when the mine’s shut down. Here I stand——” “But you don’t stand!” ejaculated the woman’s voice sharply. “And I don’t believe you can.” The inebriated man gave no heed to this challenge. “Here I stand,” he repeated. “‘On Jordan’s bank I take my stand, and cast a—hic!—cast a wishtful eye’——” “More’n likely you’ll cast a shoe and won’t get home at all, if I can’t start you,” complained the woman’s voice. Hunt had risen and was scrambling into the more necessary articles of his apparel. He went to the window and looked down into the lane.