"O Lord," he groaned presently, "you know I'm not a wolf in sheep's clothing. More like I'm a sheep in a wolf's. Nobody understands it. Not even Luella. I want to tell her, and yet it seems like I hadn't ought to yet awhile. One minute I think one way and the next minute another. O Lord, I _vow_ I don't know what to do!" Then he caught the words of the song. It was not one of the usual hymns that floated out to him across the scent of the apple-boughs, but an old tune that he had heard years ago at a camp-meeting: "John went down to the river Jordan! John went down to the river Jordan! John went down to the river Jordan To wash his sins away!" Little did the congregation think, as they lifted their lusty voices, that with the thread of that old tune lay the unravelling of Bap Sloan's riddle. For this is the scene it brought back to him, out of one of the earliest years of his childhood. There was a white face lying back among the pillows of a great bed, with carved posts and a valance of flowered chintz that smelled faintly of lavender. Somebody had lifted the big family Bible and laid it open on the edge of the bed, and he saw himself, a sober-faced little fellow in brown dress and apron, standing on tiptoe to look at the pictures. That white face on the pillows was his mother's, and this was the only recollection he had of her. Pointing to a queer old engraving, she had told him the story of John the Baptist, adding, with her thin hand on his curls: "And your name is John, too. Little John Baptist, though we don't call you by all of it. I named you that a purpose. Give you a good name, so 't you'd be a good man. Mebbe it's just a whim of mine, but I've thought a good deal about it while I've been lying here sick. Mebbe some day _you'll_ be able to go to the Holy Land, 'way over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended. See the pretty dove?" Even though the baby brain understood but dimly what she said to him, the light in her uplifted eyes filled him with solemn awe, and from that moment the mantle of her ambition rested henceforth on his young shoulders. It was a vague, intangible thing at first, when he used to go back to the old Bible and study the picture in secret. He never understood when it began to fold itself about his life, or how it grew with his years till it completely enveloped him.