The cold that winter was more persistent and severe in the mountains than down in Ashurst.

At Lockhaven the river had been frozen over for a month, even above the bridge and the mills, where the current was swiftest. Long lines of sawdust, which had been coiling and whirling in the eddies, or stretching across the black seething water, were caught in the ice, or blown about with the powdered snow over its surface.

Rafts could not come down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been sawed into long rough planks, and piled in the lumber-yards, ready to be rafted as soon as the thaw came. The cold, still air was sweet with the fragrance of fresh pine boards, and the ground about the mills was covered with sawdust, so that footsteps fell as silently as though on velvet, instead of ringing sharp against the frozen ground.

John Ward, walking wearily home from a long visit to a sick woman, came, as he crossed the lumber-yards, upon a group of raftsmen; they had not heard his approach, and were talking loudly, with frequent bursts of drunken laughter.

It was towards evening; the sky had been threatening all day, and when the clouds lifted suddenly in the west, blown aside like tumultuous folds of a gray curtain, the red sun sent a flood of color across the wintry landscape; the bare branches of the trees were touched with light, and the pools of black, clear ice gleamed with frosty fire. John's face had caught the radiance.

He had come up to the men so silently that he had been standing beside them a moment before they noticed him, and then Tom Davis, with a start of drunken fear, tried to hide the bottle which he held.

"Damn you, mate, you're spillin' it!" cried one of the others, making an unsteady lunge forward to seize the bottle.

"Let up, let up," said Tom thickly. "Don't ye see the preacher?" Though Davis was not one of his flock, he had the same reverence for the preacher which his congregation felt. All Lockhaven loved and feared John Ward.

John had not spoken, even though a little boy, building block houses on a heap of sawdust near the men, had come up and taken his hand with a look of confident affection.

The man who had saved the whiskey stumbled to his feet, and leaning against a pile of lumber stood open-mouthed, waiting for the preacher's rebuke; but Davis hung his head, and began to fumble for a pipe in his sagging coat pocket; with clumsy fingers, scattering the tobacco from his little bag, he tried to fill it.

"Tom," the preacher said, at last, "I want you to come home with me, now. And Jim, you will give me that bottle."

"I can't go home, preacher. I've got to buy some things. She said I was to buy some things for the brats."

"Have you bought them?" John asked. Tom gave a silly laugh.

"Not yet, preacher, not yet."

"Listen, men," John said, with sudden sternness. "You have let this child see you on the road to hell. If he can remember this sight, it will save his soul."

Tom Davis shrank as the preacher said "hell." He gave a maudlin cry, and almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin' to reform." John had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope, nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of sobriety. "I'll come along wi' you," he went on, swaying back and forth, and steadying himself with a hand on the lumber against which he had been leaning. "This is the last time, preacher. You won't see me this way no more."

Here he hiccoughed, and then laughed, but remembering himself instantly, drew his forehead into a scowl.

The other men slunk away, for the minister had taken the bottle, and Tom Davis was following him through the narrow passages between the great piles of boards, towards his house.

The boy had gone back to his block house; the pile of sawdust in the sheltered corner was more comfortable and not more cheerless than his own home.

John left Davis at his door. The man looked cowed, but there was no shame in his face, and no sense of sin. It was unpleasant to be caught by the preacher, and he was frightened by that awful word, which it was the constant effort of his numb, helpless brain to forget.

John went on alone. He walked slowly, with his eyes fixed absently on the ground, thinking. "Poor Davis," he said, "poor fellow!" The man's future seemed quite hopeless to the preacher, and, thinking of it, he recalled Mrs. Davis's regret that he had not spoken of hell in his sermon.

John sighed. His grief at Helen's unbelief was growing in his silence; yet he realized the inconsistency of his love in hiding his sorrow from her.

"It is robbing her, not to let her share it," he thought, "but I dare not speak to her yet."

More than once during the winter he had tried to show her the truth and the beauty of various doctrines, generally that of reprobation, but she had always evaded discussion; sometimes lightly, for it seemed such a small matter to her, but always firmly.

The preacher loitered, stopping to look at the river and the gaunt line of mills against the sky. He left the path, and went down to the edge of the white ice, so full of air bubbles, it seemed like solid snow, and listened to the gurgle of the hurrying water underneath.

A shed was built close to the stream, to shelter a hand fire-engine. It had not been used for so long that the row of buckets beside it, which were for dipping up water to fill it, were warped and cracked, their iron bands rusty, and out of one or two the bottom had fallen. The door of the shed creaked on its one hinge, and John looked up surprised to see how dark it had grown, then he turned towards home.

"Yes," he said to himself, "I must show her her danger. It will grieve her to force an argument upon her, and I don't think she has had one unhappy hour since we were married; but even if it were not for her own soul's sake, I must not let my people starve for the bread of life, to spare her. I must not be silent concerning the danger of the sinner. But it will trouble her,—it will trouble her."

John had dallied with temptation so long, that it had grown bold, and did not always hide under the plea of wisdom, but openly dared him to inflict the pain of grieving his wife upon himself. He still delayed, yet there were moments when he knew himself a coward, and had to summon every argument of the past to his defense. But before he reached the parsonage door he had lapsed into such tender thoughts of Helen that he said again, "Not quite yet; it seems to annoy her so to argue upon such things. I must leave it until I win her to truth by the force of its own constraining beauty. Little by little I will draw her attention to it. And I must gradually make my sermons more emphatic."

Helen met him at the door, and drew him into the house. "You are so late," she said, pressing his chill fingers against her warm cheek, and chafing them between her hands.

He stopped to kiss her before he took his coat off, smiling at her happiness and his own.

"How raw and cold it is!" she said. "Come into the study; I have a beautiful fire for you. Is it going to snow, do you think? How is your sick woman?"

"Better," he answered, as he followed her into the room. "Oh, Helen, it is good to be at home. I have not seen you since noon."

She laughed, and then insisted that he should sit still, and let her bring his supper into the study, and eat it there by the fire. He watched her with a delicious luxury of rest and content; for he was very tired and very happy.

She put a little table beside him, covered with a large napkin; and then she brought a loaf of brown bread and some honey, with a mould of yellow butter, and last a little covered dish of chicken.

"I broiled that for you myself," she explained proudly; "and I did not mean to give you coffee, but what do you think?—the whole canister of tea has disappeared. When Alfaretta went to get it for my supper, it had gone."

"Oh," John said, smiling, while Helen began to pour some cream into his coffee from a flat little silver jug, "I forgot to mention it: the fact is, I took that tea with me this afternoon,—I thought probably they had none in the house; and I wish you could have seen the woman's joy at the sight of it. I cooked some for her,—she told me how," he said deprecatingly, for Helen laughed; "and she said it was very good, too," he added.

But Helen refused to believe that possible. "It was politeness, John," she cried gayly, "and because, I suppose, you presented her with my lacquered canister."

"I did leave it," John admitted; "I never thought of it." But he forgot even to ask forgiveness, as she bent towards him, resting her hand on his shoulder while she put his cup beside him.

"The fire has flushed your cheek," he said, touching it softly, the lover's awe shining in his eyes; with John it had never been lost in the assured possession of the husband. Helen looked at him, smiling a little, but she did not speak. Silence with her told sometimes more than words.

"It has been such a long afternoon," he said. "I was glad to hurry home; perhaps that is the reason I forgot the canister."

"Shall I send you back for it?" She put her lips for a moment against his hand, and then, glancing out at the night for sheer joy at the warmth and light within, she added, "Why, what is that glow, John? It looks like fire."

He turned, and then pushed back his chair and went to the window.

"It does look like fire," he said anxiously.

Helen had followed him, and they watched together a strange light, rising and falling, and then brightening again all along the sky. Even as they looked the upper heavens began to pulsate and throb with faint crimson.

"It is fire!" John exclaimed. "Let me get my coat. I must go."

"Oh, not now," Helen said. "You must finish your supper; and you are so tired, John!"

But he was already at the door and reaching for his hat.

"It must be the lumber-yards, and the river is frozen!"

"Wait!" Helen cried. "Let me get my cloak. I will go if you do," and a moment later the parsonage door banged behind them, and they hurried out into the darkness.

The street which led to the lumber-yards had been silent and deserted when John passed through it half an hour before, but now all Lockhaven seemed to throng it.

The preacher and his wife could hear the snapping and crackling of flames even before they turned the last corner and saw the blaze, which, sweeping up into the cold air, began to mutter before it broke with a savage roar. They caught sight of Gifford's broad shoulders in the crowd, which stood, fascinated and appalled, watching the destruction of what to most of them meant work and wages.

"Oh, Giff!" Helen said when they reached his side, "why don't they do something? Have they tried to put it out?"

"It's no use to try now," Gifford answered. "They didn't discover it in time. It has made such headway, that the only thing to do is to see that it burns out, without setting fire to any of the houses. Fortunately the wind is towards the river."

John shook his head; he was too breathless to speak for a moment; then he said, "Something must be done."

"There is no use, Mr. Ward," Gifford explained. But John scarcely heard him; his people's comfort, their morality almost,—for poverty meant deeper sin to most of them,—was burning up in those great square piles of planks.

"Men," he shouted, "men, the engine! To the river! Run! run!"

"Nothing can be done," Gifford said, as the crowd broke, following the preacher, who was far ahead of all; but he too started, as though to join them, and then checked himself, and went back into the deserted street, walking up and down, a self-constituted patrol.

Almost every man had gone to the river. Tom Davis, however, with Molly beside him, stood lolling against a tree, sobered, indeed, by the shock of the fire, but scarcely steady enough on his legs to run. Another, who was a cripple, swaying to and fro on his crutches with excitement, broke into a storm of oaths because his companion did not do the work for which he was himself too helpless. But Tom only gazed with bleared eyes at the fire, and tried to stand up straight.

The little crowd of women about Helen had been silenced at first by the tumult and glare, but now broke into wild lamentations, and entreaties that Heaven would send the engine soon, wringing their hands, and sobbing, and frightening the children that clung about their skirts even more than the fire itself.

"How did it start?" Helen said, turning to the woman next to her, who, shivering with excitement, held a baby in her arms, who gazed at the fire with wide, tranquil eyes, as though it had been gotten up for his entertainment.

"They say," answered the woman, tossing her head in the direction of Tom Davis,—"they say him and some other fellows was in 'mong the lumber this afternoon, drinkin', you know, and smokin'. Most likely a match dropped, or ashes from their pipes. Drunken men ain't reasonable about them things," she added, with the simplicity of experience. "They don't stop to think they're burnin' up money, an' whiskey too; for Dobbs don't trust 'em, now the mill is shut down."

"Yes," said another woman who stood by, "them men! what do they care? You," she shouted, shaking her fist at Tom,—"you'll starve us all, will ye? an' your poor wife, just up from her sick bed! I do' know as she'll be much worse off, though, when he is out of work," she added, turning to Helen—"fer every blessed copper he has goes to the saloon."

"Yer man's as bad as me," Tom protested, stung by her taunts and the jeers of the cripple.

"An' who is it as leads him on?" screamed the woman. "An' if he does take a drop sometimes, it wasn't him as was in the lumber-yard this afternoon, a-settin' fire to the boards, an' burnin' up the food and comfort o' the whole town!"

Tom hurled a torrent of profanity at the woman and the cripple collectively, and then stumbled towards the road with the crowd, for the fire was approaching the side of the yard where they stood, and beating them back into the village street.

The air was filled with the appalling roar and scream of the flames; showers of sparks were flung up against the black sky, as with a tremendous crash the inside of one of the piles would collapse; and still the engine did not come.

"Hurry! hurry!" the women shouted with hoarse, terrified voices, and some ran to the edge of the bluff and looked down at the river.

The men were hurrying; but as they drew the long-unused engine from its shed, an axle broke, and with stiff fingers they tried to mend it. Some had had to run for axes to break the ice, and then they pushed and jostled each other about the square hole they had cut, to dip up the dark, swift water underneath; and all the while the sky behind them grew a fiercer red, and the very ice glared with the leaping flames. At last, pulling and pushing, they brought the little engine up the slope, and then with a great shout dragged it into the outskirts of the yard. They pumped furiously, and a small jet of water was played upon the nearest pile of boards. A hissing cloud of steam almost hid the volunteer firemen, but the flames leaped and tossed against the sky, and the sparks were sucked up into the cold air, and whirled in sheets across the river.

John Ward came breathlessly towards his wife. "Are you all right, Helen? You seemed too near; come back a little further." Then, suddenly seeing the woman beside her with the baby in her arms, he stopped, and looked about. "Where's your boy, Mrs. Nevins?" he said. The woman glanced around her.

"I—I'm not just sure, preacher."

"Have you seen him since six o'clock?"

"No—I—I ain't," the woman answered. There was something in John's face which terrified her, though the mere absence of her son gave her no uneasiness.

"Go back, Helen," he said, quickly,—"go as far as that second house, or I shall not feel sure you are safe. Mrs. Nevins, we must look for Charley. I am afraid—he was in the lumber-yard this afternoon"—

John did not wait to hear the woman's shriek; he turned and ran from group to group, looking for the boy whom he had seen building block houses on the pile of sawdust; but the mother, pushing her baby into a neighbor's arms, ran up and down like a mad woman.

"My boy!" she cried; "Charley! Charley! He's in the fire,—my boy's in the fire!"

Tom Davis had heard the hurried words of the preacher, and the mother's cries roused all the manhood drink had left. He hesitated a moment, and then pushing Molly towards the cripple whose taunts still rung in his ears, "Take care of the brat!" he said, and pulling off his coat, which he wrapped about his head to guard himself from the falling boards, he stooped almost double, and with his left arm bent before his face, and his right extended to feel his way, he ran towards the fire, and disappeared in the blinding smoke.

Even Mrs. Nevins was silenced for a moment of shuddering suspense; and when she tossed her arms into the air again, and shrieked, it was because John Ward came towards her with Charley trotting at his side.

"You should have looked after the child," the preacher said sternly. "I found him on the other side of the yard, near the fire-engine."

Mrs. Nevins caught the boy in her arms in a paroxysm of rage and joy; and then she thought of Tom.

"Oh, preacher," she cried, "preacher! he's run in after him, Tom Davis has!"

"There?" John said, pointing to the fire. "God help him!"

There was no human help possible. Tom had run down between two long piles of boards, not yet in flames, but already a sheet of fire swept madly across the open space. They could only look at each other, dumb with their own helplessness, and wait. How long this horror of expectation lasted no one knew, but at last, as if from the very mouth of hell, Tom Davis came, staggering and swaying,—his singed coat still rolled about his head, and his hands stretched blindly out.

John Ward ran towards him, and even the cripple pressed forward to take his hand. But with unseeing eyes he stood a moment, and then fell forward on his face. They lifted him, and carried him back into the street, away from the glare of light; there were plenty of kindly hands and pitying words, for most of the crowd had gathered about him; even the men who had brought the engine followed, for their efforts to subdue the fire were perfectly futile.

They laid him down on the stiff frozen grass by the roadside; but Molly clung so tightly about his neck, that the preacher could scarcely move her to put his hand upon Tom's heart; Helen lifted the little girl, and laid her own wet cheek against the child's.

The group of men and women stood awed and silent about the prostrate form, waiting for John to raise his head from the broad, still breast; when he lifted it, they knew all was over.

Whether the shock of the heat and tumult, coming upon the stupor of intoxication, and paralyzing the action of the heart, or whether a blow from a burning plank, had killed him, no one could know. The poor sodden, bloated body was suddenly invested with the dignity of death; and how death had come was for a little while a secondary thought.

"He is dead," John said. "He has died like a brave man!"

He stood looking down at the body for some moments, and no one spoke. Then, as there was a stir among those who stood near, and some one whispered that Mrs. Davis must be told, the preacher looked away from the dead man's face.

"Poor soul," he said, "poor soul!"

A few light flakes of snow were beginning to fall in that still, uncertain way which heralds a storm; some touched the dead face with pure white fingers, as though they would hide the degraded body from any eyes less kind than God's.

Helen, who had gone further back into the street that Molly might not look again at her father, came to John's side.

"I will take Molly home with me," she said; "tell Mrs. Davis where she is."

"Gifford is here to go with you?" John asked, with that quick tenderness which never left him. Then he turned away to help in carrying the dead man to his home.

The silent procession, with its awful burden, went back through the streets, lighted yet by the pulsing glare of the fire. John walked beside the still figure with his head bent upon his breast. That first impulse of human exultation in a brave deed was gone; there was a horror of pity instead. Just before they reached Tom's home, he stopped, by a gesture, the men who bore the body.

"Oh, my people," he said, his hands stretched out to them, the snow falling softly on his bared head, "God speaks to you from the lips of this dead man. Listen to his words: the day or the hour knoweth no man; and are you ready to face the judgment-seat of Christ? Oh, be not deceived, be not deceived! Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

It was long past midnight when the knot of men about Tom Davis's door dispersed; the excitement of the fire faded before that frank interest in death, which such people have no hesitation in expressing. Society veils it with decent reserve, and calls it morbid and vulgar, yet it is ineradicably human, and circumstances alone decide whether it shall be confessed.

But when the preacher came out of the house, all was quiet and deserted. The snow, driving in white sheets down the mountains, was tinged with a faint glow, where, in a blinding mist it whirled across the yards; it had come too late to save the lumber, but it had checked and deadened the flames, so that the few unburned planks only smouldered slowly into ashes.

John had told Mrs. Davis of her loss with that wonderful gentleness which characterized all his dealings with sorrow. He found her trying to quiet her baby, when he went in, leaving outside in the softly falling snow that ghastly burden which the men bore. She looked up with startled, questioning eyes as he entered. He took the child out of her arms, and hushed it upon his breast, and then, with one of her shaking hands held firm in his, he told her.

Afterwards, it seemed to her that the sorrow in his face had told her, and that she knew his message before he spoke.

Mrs. Davis had not broken into loud weeping when she heard her husband's fate, and she was very calm, when John saw her again, after all had been done which was needful for the dead; only moving nervously about, trying to put the room into an unusual order. John could not bear to leave her; knowing what love is, his sympathy for her grief was almost grief itself; yet he had said all that he could say to comfort her, all that he could of Tom's bravery in rushing into the fire, and it seemed useless to stay. But as he rose to go, putting the child, who had fallen asleep in his arms, down on the bed, Mrs. Davis stopped him.

She stood straightening the sheet which covered Tom's face, creasing its folds between her fingers, and pulling it a little on this side or that.

"Mr. Ward," she said, "he was drunk, Tom was."

"I know it," he answered gently.

"He went out with some money this forenoon," she went on; "he was to buy some things for the young ones. He didn't mean to drink; he didn't mean to go near the saloon. I know it. Mrs. Shea, she came in a bit after he went, and she said she seen him comin' out of the saloon, drunk. But he didn't mean it. Then you brought him home. But, bein' started, preacher, he could not help it, an' he'd been round to Dobbs's again, 'fore he seen the fire."

"Yes," John said.

Still smoothing the straight whiteness of the sheet, she said, with a tremor in her voice:—

"If he didn't want to, preacher—if he didn't mean to—perhaps it wasn't a sin? and him dying in it!"

Her voice broke, and she knelt down and hid her face in the dead man's breast. She did not think of him now as the man that beat her when he was drunk, and starved the children; he was the young lover again. The dull, brutal man and the fretful, faded woman had been boy and girl once, and had had their little romance, like happier husbands and wives.

John did not answer her, but a mist of tears gathered in his eyes.

Mrs. Davis raised her head and looked at him. "Tell me, you don't think it will be counted a sin to him, do you? You don't think he died in sin?" she asked almost fiercely.

"I wish I could say I did not," he answered.

She threw her hands up over her head with a shrill cry.

"You don't think he's lost? Say you don't, preacher,—say you don't!"

John took her hands in his. "Try and think," he said gently, "how brave Tom was, how nobly he faced death to save Charley. Leave the judgments of God to God; they are not for us to think of."

But she would not be put off in that way. Too weak to kneel, she had sunk upon the floor, leaning still against the bed, with one thin, gaunt arm thrown across her husband's body.

"You think," she demanded, "that my Tom's lost because he was drunk to-night?"

"No," he said, "I do not think that, Mrs. Davis."

"Is he saved?" she cried, her voice shrill with eagerness.

John was silent. She clutched his arm with her thin fingers, and shook it in her excitement; her pinched, terrified face was close to his.

"He wasn't never converted,—I know that,—but would the Lord have cut him off, sudden-like, in his sin, if He wasn't goin' to save him?"

"We can only trust his wisdom and his goodness."

"But you think he was cut off in his sins—you think—my Tom's lost!"

The preacher did not speak, but the passionate pity in his eyes told her. She put her hands up to her throat as though she were suffocating, and her face grew ghastly.

"Remember, God knows what is best for his children," John said. "He sends this grief of Tom's death to you in his infinite wisdom. He loves you,—He knows best."

"Do you mean," asked the woman slowly, "that it was best fer Tom he should die?"

"I mean this sorrow may be best for you," he answered tenderly. "God knows what you need. He sends sorrow to draw our souls nearer to Him."

"Oh," she exclaimed, her voice broken and hoarse, "I don't want no good fer me, if Tom has to die fer it. An' why should He love me instead o' Tom? Oh, I don't want his love, as wouldn't give Tom another chance! He might 'a' been converted this next revival, fer you would 'a' preached hell,—I know you would, then. No, I don't want no good as comes that way. Oh, preacher, you ain't going to say you think my Tom's burning in hell this night, and me living to be made better by it? Oh, no, no, no!" She crawled to his feet, and clasped his knees with her shaking arms. "Say he isn't,—say he isn't!"

But the presence of that dead man asserted the hopelessness of John's creed; no human pity could dim his faith, and he had no words of comfort for the distracted woman who clung to him. He could only lift her and try to soothe her, but she did not seem to hear him until he put her baby in her arms; at the touch of its little soft face against her drawn cheek, she trembled violently, and then came the merciful relief of tears. She did not ask the preacher again to say that her husband was not lost; she had no hope that he would tell her anything but what she already knew. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." She tried, poor thing, to find some comfort in the words he spoke of God's love for her; listening with a pathetic silence which wrung his heart.

When John left her, beating his way home through the blinding snow, his face was as haggard as her own. He could not escape from the ultimate conclusion of his creed,—"He that believeth not shall be damned." Yet he loved and trusted completely. His confidence in God's justice could not be shaken; but it was with almost a groan that he said, "O my God, my God, justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne; mercy and truth shall go before thy face! But justice with mercy,—justice first!"