"I thank you for your sermon," he said huskily; "I hope to get some help
from that. But you!--you are making things harder for me every word you
utter. You don't understand and I can't tell you."
He took the parson's cool delicate hand in his big hot one.
Alone in the glow of the golden dusk of that day he was sitting outside his
cabin on the brow of the hill, overlooking the town in the valley. How
peaceful it lay in the Sunday evening light! The burden of the parson's
sermon weighed more heavily than ever on his spirit. He had but to turn his
eye down the valley and there, flashing in the sheen of sunset, flowed the
great spring, around the margin of which the first group of Western hunters
had camped for the night and given the place its name from one of the
battle-fields of the Revolution; up the valley he could see the roof under
which the Virginia aristocracy of the Church of England had consecrated
their first poor shrine. What history lay between the finding of that spring
and the building of that altar! Not the winning of the wilderness simply;
not alone its peace. That westward penetrating wedge of iron-browed,
iron-muscled, iron-hearted men, who were now beginning to be known as the
Kentuckians, had not only cleft a road for themselves; they had opened a
fresh highway for the tread of the nation and found a vaster heaven for the
Star of Empire.
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