ago—it was at camp-meeting and the shouters were dancing like mad—he had promised his sainted mother to read the Bible through if she would quit agonizing over his soul, but the promise he never kept. Small print was hard on his young eyes that were so quick to see a cow, and he put the matter off until such a time as he should break a leg or get sick or otherwise find time to spare. Well, he had all the time there was, now, and it would give him something to do. "Say, Pardner," he observed, as the missionary pressed a sheaf of tracts upon him at parting, "is this the best you can do? I was powerful interested in them stories—how about a Bible?" Bibles were a scarce article in those parts, but Pecos got one, and after laying bets with various flippant prisoners, he read it from cover to cover, religiously. Then, just to show his bringing up, he went back and read over all the big wars and fights and the troubles of Moses in the wilderness. Still there was time to spare and he read of Daniel and Nehemiah and the prophets who had cried unto Israel. It was a poor beginning, but somehow when he was reading the Bible he forgot the heat and the vileness of the jail and won back his self-respect. In that long catalogue of priests and prophets and leaders of the people what one was there, from Joseph to Jesus, who had not been cast into prison? The universality of their fate seemed to cheer him and give him something in common—perhaps they were of some kin with the apostles of the revolution. And in the long, suffocating nights he would think back to the mud-streaked adobe house that he had called home and hear his mother patting softly on her knees and singing: "Oh, come to Jesus, come to Jesus—" with a little Texas _yupe_ at the end of every line. So he wore the summer's heat away, and with the return of cool weather his mind went back to his case.