"I know now why I love honesty, why I despise those common things beneath me--why I am not afraid--why I struck that boy as I did this morning--why--" he walked into the little shed room that was his own and came back with a long single barrel pistol in his hand and fondled it lovingly--"why all my life I have been able to shoot this as I have--" He held in his hand a long, single barrel, rifle-bored duelling pistol--of the type used by gentlemen at the beginning of the century. Where he had got it she did not know, but always it had been his plaything. "O Jimmie--you would not--" exclaimed the woman rising and reaching for it. "Tush--" he said bitterly--"tush--that's the way Richard Travis talks, ain't it? Does not my very voice sound like his? No--but I expect you now, mother"--he said it softly--"tell me--tell me all about it." For a moment Margaret Adams was staggered. She only shook her head. He looked at her cynically--then bitterly. A dangerous flash leaped into his eyes. "Then, by God," he cried fiercely, "this moment will I walk over to his house with this pistol in my hand and I will ask him. If he fails to tell me--damn him--I dare him--" She jumped up and seized him in her arms. "Promise me that if I tell you all--all, Jimmy, when you are fifteen--promise me--will you be patient now--with poor mother, who loves you so?" And she kissed him fondly again and again. He looked into her eyes and saw all her suffering there. The bitterness went out of his. "I'll promise, mother," he said simply, and walked back into his little room. CHAPTER VIII HARD-SHELL SUNDAY "This bein' Hard-shell Sunday," said the Bishop that afternoon when his congregation met, "cattle of that faith will come up to the front rack for fodder. Elder Butts will he'p me conduct these exercises." "It's been so long sence I've been in a Hard-shell lodge, I may be a little rusty on the grip an' pass word, but I'm a member in good standin' if I am rusty." There was some laughing at this, from the other members, and after the Hard-shells had come to the front the Bishop caught the infection and went on with a sly wink at the others. "The fact is, I've sometimes been mighty sorry I jined any other lodge; for makin' honorable exception, the other churches don't know the diff'r'nce betwixt twenty-year-old Lincoln County an' Michigan pine-top. "The Hard-shells was the fust church I jined, as I sed. I hadn't sampled none of the others"--he whispered aside--"an' I didn't know there was any better licker in the jug. But the Baptists is a little riper, the Presbyterians is much mellower, an' compared to all of them the 'Piscopalians rises to the excellence of syllabub an' champagne.