His effect upon the females of his flock
was hysterical and sensational. Women prematurely aged by frontier
drudgery and child-bearing, girls who had known only the rigors and
pains of a half-equipped, ill-nourished youth in their battling with the
hard realities of nature around them, all found a strange fascination in
the extravagant glories and privileges of the unseen world he pictured
to them, which they might have found in the fairy tales and nursery
legends of civilized children, had they known them. Personally he was
not attractive; his thin pointed face, and bushy hair rising on
either side of his square forehead in two rounded knots, and his long,
straggling, wiry beard dropping from a strong neck and shoulders,
were indeed of a common Southwestern type; yet in him they suggested
something more. This was voiced by a miner who attended his first
service, and as the Reverend Mr. Withholder rose in the pulpit, the
former was heard to audibly ejaculate, "Dod blasted!--if it ain't
Billy!" But when on the following Sunday, to everybody's astonishment,
Polly Harkness, in a new white muslin frock and broad-brimmed Leghorn
hat, appeared before the church door with the real Billy, and exchanged
conversation with the preacher, the likeness was appalling.
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