“Then go and tell her at once.”
“It will just do nothing but scare her.”
“Go and tell her at once.”
“I expected you was going to tell me to run away from Trampas. I can’t do that, yu’ know.”
The bishop did know. Never before in all his wilderness work had he faced such a thing. He knew that Trampas was an evil in the country, and that the Virginian was a good. He knew that the cattle thieves-- the rustlers--were gaining, in numbers and audacity; that they led many weak young fellows to ruin; that they elected their men to office, and controlled juries; that they were a staring menace to Wyoming. His heart was with the Virginian. But there was his Gospel, that he preached, and believed, and tried to live. He stood looking at the ground and drawing a finger along his eyebrow. He wished that he might have heard nothing about all this. But he was not one to blink his responsibility as a Christian server of the church militant.
“Am I right,” he now slowly asked, “in believing that you think I am a sincere man?”
“I don’t believe anything about it. I know it.”
“I should run away from Trampas,” said the bishop.
“That ain’t quite fair, seh. We all understand you have got to do the things you tell other folks to do. And you do them, seh. You never talk like anything but a man, and you never set yourself above others. You can saddle your own horses. And I saw yu’ walk unarmed into that White River excitement when those two other parsons was a-foggin’ and a-fannin’ for their own safety. Damn scoundrels!”
The bishop instantly rebuked such language about brothers of his cloth, even though he disapproved both of them and their doctrines. “Every one may be an instrument of Providence,” he concluded.
“Well,” said the Virginian, “if that is so, then Providence makes use of instruments I’d not touch with a ten-foot pole. Now if you was me, seh, and not a bishop, would you run away from Trampas?”
“That’s not quite fair, either!” exclaimed the bishop, with a smile. “Because you are asking me to take another man’s convictions, and yet remain myself.”
“Yes, seh. I am. That’s so. That don’t get at it. I reckon you and I can’t get at it.”
“If the Bible,” said the bishop, “which I believe to be God’s word, was anything to you--”
“It is something to me, seh. I have found fine truths in it.”
“’Thou shalt not kill,’” quoted the bishop. “That is plain.”
The Virginian took his turn at smiling. “Mighty plain to me, seh. Make it plain to Trampas, and there’ll be no killin’. We can’t get at it that way.”
Once more the bishop quoted earnestly. “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’”
“How about instruments of Providence, seh? Why, we can’t get at it that way. If you start usin’ the Bible that way, it will mix you up mighty quick, seh.
“My friend,” the bishop urged, and all his good, warm heart was in it, “my dear fellow--go away for the one night. He’ll change his mind.”