University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
THE CONFERENCE AT HICKORY RIDGE.

MORE than two years have passed since Morton
made his great sacrifice. You may see him
now riding up to the Hickory Ridge Church — a
“hewed-log” country meeting-house. He is dressed
in homespun clothes. At the risk of compromising him
forever, I must confess that his coat is straight-breasted—shad-bellied
as the profane call it—and his
best hat a white one with a broad brim. The face
is still fresh, despite the conflicts and hardships of one
year's travel in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky,
and the sickness and exposure of another year in the
malarious cane-brakes of Western Tennessee. Perils of
Indians, perils of floods, perils of alligators, perils of
bad food, perils of cold beds, perils of robbers, perils
of rowdies, perils of fevers, and the weariness of five
thousand miles of horseback riding in a year, with five
or six hundred preachings in the same time, and the
care of numberless scattered churches in the wilderness
have conspired to give sedateness to his countenance.
And yet there is a youthfulness about the
sun-browned cheeks, and a lingering expression of that
sort of humor which Western people call “mischief”
about the eyes, that match but grotesquely with white
hat and shad-bellied coat.

[ILLUSTRATION]

GOING TO CONFERENCE.

[Description: 554EAF. Page 185. In-line engraving of a man dressed in black with a white hat on a white horse.]

He has been a preacher almost ever since he
became a Methodist. How did he get his theological
education? It used to be said that Methodist preachers
were educated by the old ones telling the young
ones all they knew; but besides this oral instruction
Morton carried in his saddle-bags John Wesley's simple,
solid sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns, and a Bible.
Having little of the theory and system of theology, he
was free to take lessons in the larger school of life

and practical observation. For the rest, the free criticism
to which he was subject from other preachers,
and the contact with a few families of refinement, had
obliterated his dialect. Naturally a gentleman at heart,
he had, from the few stately gentlemen that he met,
quickly learned to be a gentleman in manners. He is
regarded as a young man of great promise by the older
brethren; his clear voice is very charming, his strong
and manly speech and his tender feeling are very inspiring,
and on his two circuits he has reported extraordinary
revivals. Some of the old men sagely predict
that “he's got bishop-timber in him,” but no such
ambitious dreams disturb his sleep. He has not “gone
into a decline” on account of Patty. A healthy
nature will bear heavy blows. But there is a pain,
somewhere—everywhere—in his being, when he thinks
of the girl who stood just above him in the spelling-class,
and who looked so divine when she was
spinning her two dozen cuts a day. He does not like
this regretful feeling. He prays to be forgiven for it.
He acknowledges in class-meeting and in love-feast
that he is too much like Lot's wife—he finds his heart
prone to look back toward the objects he once loved.
Often in riding through the stillness of a deep forest
—and the primeval forest is to him the peculiar abode
of the Almighty—his noble voice rings out fervently
and even pathetically with that stanza:

No man can enjoy a joke with more zest than he,
and none can tell a story more effectively in a generation
of preachers who are all good story-tellers. He
loves his work; its dangers and difficulties satisfy the
ambition of his boyhood; and he has had no misgivings,
except when once or twice he has revisited his parents in
the Hissawachee Bottom. Then the longing to see
Patty has seized him and he has been fain to hurry away,
praying to be delivered from every snare of the enemy.

He is not the only man in a straight-breasted coat
who is approaching the country meeting-house. It is
conference-time, and the greetings are hearty and familiar.
Everybody is glad to see everybody, and,
after a year of separation, nobody can afford to stand
on ceremony with anybody else. Morton has hardly
alighted before half a dozen preachers have rushed up
to him and taken him by the hand. A tall brother,
with a grotesque twitch in his face, cries out:

“How do you do, Brother Goodwin? Glad to see
the alligators haven't finished you!”

To which Morton returns a laughing reply; but
suddenly he sees, standing back of the rest and waiting
his turn, a young man with a solemn, sallow face,
pinched by sickness and exposure, and bordered by
the straight black hair that falls on each side of it.
He wears over his clothes a blanket with arm-holes
cut through, and seems to be perpetually awaiting an
ague-chill. Seeing him, Morton pushes the rest aside,
and catches the wan hand in both of his own with a
cry: “Kike, God bless you! How are you, dear old
fellow? You look sick.”

Kike smiled faintly, and Morton threw his arm over
his shoulder and looked in his face. “I am sick,
Mort. Cast down, but not destroyed, you know. I
hope I am ready to be offered up.”

“Not a bit of it. You've got to get better. Offered
up? Why, you aren't fit to offer to an alligator.
Where are you staying?”

“Out there.” Kike pointed to the tents of a
camp-meeting barely visible through the trees. The
people in the neighborhood of the Hickory Ridge
Church, being unable to entertain the Conference in
their homes, had resorted to the device of getting up
a camp-meeting. It was easier to take care of the
preachers out of doors than in. Morton shook his
head as he walked with Kike to the thin canvas tent
under which he had been assigned to sleep. The
white spot on the end of Kike's nose and the blue
lines under his finger-nails told plainly of the on-coming
chill, and Morton hurried away to find some better
shelter for him than under this thin sheet. But
this was hard to do. The few brethren in the neighborhood
had already filled their cabins full of guests,
mostly in infirm health, and Kike, being one of the
younger men, renowned only for his piety and his revivals,
had not been thought of for a place elsewhere
than on the camp-ground. Finding it impossible to
get a more comfortable resting place for his friend,
Morton turned to seek for a physician. The only doctor
in the neighborhood was a Presbyterian minister, retired
from the ministry on account of his impaired health.
To him Morton went to ask for medicine for Kike.

“Dr. Morgan, there is a preacher sick down at
the camp-ground,” said Morton, “and—”

“And you want me to see him,” said the doctor,
in an alert, anticipative fashion, seizing his “pill-bags”
and donning his hat.

When the two rode up to the tent in which Kike
was lodged they found a prayer-meeting of a very
exciting kind going on in the tent adjoining. There
were cries and groans and amens and hallelujahs commingled
in a way quite intelligible to the experienced
ear of Morton, but quite unendurable to the orderly
doctor.

“A bad place for a sick man, sir,” he said to
Morton, with great positiveness.

“I know it is, doctor,” said Morton; “and I've
done my best to get him out of it, but I cannot. See
how thin this tent-cover is.”

“And the malaria of these woods is awful. Camp-meetings,
sir, are always bad. And this fuss is
enough to drive a patient crazy.”

Morton thought the doctor prejudiced, but he said
nothing. They had now reached the corner of the
tent where Kike lay on a straw pallet, holding his
hands to his head. The noise from the prayer-meeting
was more than his weary brain would bear.

“Can you sit on my horse?” said the doctor,
promptly proceeding to lift Kike without even explaining
to him who he was, or where he proposed to take
him.

Morton helped to place Kike in the saddle, but
the poor fellow was shaking so that he could not sit

there. Morton then brought out Dolly—she was all
his own now—and took the slight form of Kike in
his arms, he riding on the croup, and the sick man
in the saddle.

“Where shall I ride to, doctor?”

“To my house,” said the doctor, mounting his own
horse and spurring off to have a bed made ready for
Kike.

As Morton rode up to the doctor's gate, the shaking
Kike roused a little and said, “She's the same fine old
Dolly, Mort.”

“A little more sober. The long rides in the cane-brakes,
and the responsibility of the Methodist itinerancy,
have given her the gravity that belongs to the
ministry.”

Such a bed as Kike found in Dr. Morgan's house!
After the rude bear-skins upon which he had languished
in the backwoods cabins, after the musty feather-beds
in freezing lofts, and the pallets of leaves upon which
he had shivered and scorched and fought fleas and
musquitoes, this clean white bed was like a foretaste
of heaven. But Kike was almost too sick to be
grateful. The poor frame had been kept up by will so
long, that now that he was in a good bed and had
Morton he felt that he could afford to be sick. What
had been ague settled into that wearisome disease
called bilious fever. Morton staid by him nearly all
of the time, looking into the conference now and then
to see the venerable Asbury in the chair, listening to
a grand speech from McKendree, attending on the
third day of the session, when, with the others who had

been preaching two years on probation, he was called
forward to answer the “Questions” always propounded
to “Candidates for admission to the conference.” Kike
only was missing from the list of those who were to
have heard the bishop's exhortations, full of martial
fire, and to have answered his questions in regard to
their spiritual state. For above all gifts of speech or
depths of learning, or acuteness of reasoning, the early
Methodists esteemed devout affections; and no man was
of account for the ministry who was not “groaning to
be made perfect in this life.” The question stands
in the discipline yet, but very many young men who
assent to it groan after nothing so much as a city
church with full galleries.

The strange mystery in which appointments were
involved could not but pique curiosity. Morton having
had one year of mountains, and one year of cane-brakes,
had come to wish for one year of a little more
comfort, and a little better support. There is a
romance about going threadbare and tattered in a
good cause, but even the romance gets threadbare
and tattered if it last too long, and one wishes for a
little sober reality of warm clothes to relieve a romance,
charming enough in itself, but dull when it grows
monotonous.

The awful hour of appointments came on at last.
The brave-hearted men sat down before the bishop,
and before God, not knowing what was to be their
fate. Morton could not guess where he was going. A
miasmatic cane-brake, or a deadly cypress swamp, might
be his doom, or he might—but no, he would not hope

that his lot might fall in Ohio. He was a young man,
and a young man must take his chances. Morton
found himself more anxious about Kike than about
himself. Where would the bishop send the invalid?
With Kike it might be a matter of life and death, and
Kike would not hear to being left without work. He
meant, he said, to cease at once to work and live.

The brethren, still in sublime ignorance of their
destiny, sang fervently that fiery hymn of Charles
Wesley's:

And when they reached the last stanzas there was the
ring of soldiers ready for battle in their martial voices.
That some of them would die from exposure, malaria,
or accident during the next year was probable. Tears
came to their eyes, and they involuntarily began to
grasp the hands of those who stood next them as they
approached the climax of the hymn, which the bishop
read impressively, two lines at a time, for them to
sing:
Then, with suffused eyes, they resumed their seats, and
the venerable Asbury, with calmness and with a voice
faltering with age, made them a brief address; tender
and sympathetic at first, earnest as he proceeded, and
full of ardor and courage at the close.

“When the British Admiralty,” he said, “wanted
some man to take Quebec, they began with the oldest
General first, asking him: `General, will you go and
take Quebec?' To which he made reply, `It is a very
difficult enterprise.' `You may stand aside,' they said.
One after another the Generals answered that they
would, in some more or less indefinite manner, until
the youngest man on the list was reached. `General
Wolfe,' they said, `will you go and take Quebec?'
`I'll do it or die,' he replied.” Here the bishop
paused, looked round about upon them, and added,
with a voice full of emotion, “He went, and did both.
We send you first to take the country allotted to you.
We want only men who are determined to do it or
die! Some of you, dear brethren, will do both. If
you fall, let us hear that you fell like Methodist
preachers at your post, face to the foe, and the shout
of victory on your lips.”

The effect of this speech was beyond description.
There were sobs, and cries of “Amen,” “God grant
it,” “Halleluiah!” from every part of the old log
church. Every man was ready for the hardest place,

if he must. Gravely, as one who trembles at his responsibility,
the bishop brought out his list. No man
looked any more upon his fellow. Every one kept
his eyes fixed upon the paper from which the bishop
read the appointments, until his own name was reached.
Some showed pleasure when their names were called,
some could not conceal a look of pain. When the
reading had proceeded half way down the list, Morton
heard, with a little start, the words slowly enounced
as the bishop's eyes fell on him:

“Jenkinsville Circuit—Morton Goodwin.”

Well, at least Jenkinsville was in Ohio. But it
was in the wickedest part of Ohio. Morton half suspected
that he was indebted to his muscle, his courage,
and his quick wit for the appointment. The
rowdies of Jenkinsville Circuit were worse than the
alligators of Mississippi. But he was young, hopeful
and brave, and rather relished a difficult field than
otherwise. He listened now for Kike's name. It
came at the bottom of the list:

“Pottawottomie Creek — W. T. Smith, Hezekiah
Lumsden.”

The bishop had not dared to entrust a circuit to
a man so sick as Kike was. He had, therefore, sent
him as “second man” or “junior preacher” on a circuit
in the wilderness of Michigan.

The last appointment having been announced, a
simple benediction closed the services, and the brethren
who had foregone houses and homes and fathers and
mothers and wives and children for the kingdom of
heaven's sake saddled their horses, called, one by one, at

Dr. Morgan's to say a brotherly “God bless you!” to
the sick Kike, and rode away, each in his own direction,
and all with a self-immolation to the cause
rarely seen since the Middle-Age.

They rode away, all but Kike, languishing yet with
fever, and Morton, watching by his side.