Jeremiah Beaumont was born in 1801 in Glasgow County, Kentucky, on the edge of the section known as the Barrens. That name does not do less than a wrong to the land, for the first settlers who came found a high, shelving and rolling country covered with grass where elk grazed peacefully and where there was no need for the ax to clear a field for the plow.

"No man shall call him blackguard, and were you not old and sottish and my own grandfather, I would show you that I am my father's son."

Before Corinthian McClardy came his "feats were told and his fame norated before him from farm to farm and creek to creek." He had garnered four hundred souls at one meeting, but also, with bare hands, he had wrenched the dirk away from a bully and trod it underfoot.

At a great meeting in Alabama an infidel had pestered him past endurance and he had boiled over the edge of his cart and seized the man to lift him by leg and neck high in the air and shout, "What shall we do, oh Israel!" and some unnamed worshipper had yelled, "Stomp the son-of-a-bitch and praise God!" According to report, the notion appeared for an instant to find favor in the preacher's eyes, but he controlled himself, and screaming, "Let the dead bough be cast into the fire!" heaved the middle-weight scoffer out of the ring and into bed with a broken arm.

"Yes," she replies, "if. . ."

"If what?" he demanded . . . "If what?" he insisted.

"Kill Fort!" she said.

"I killed Cassius Fort, in darkness and deceit, and that was a crime. But I do not seek expiation merely for that. Nor for what I did to Rachel, greater crime as it is, to go to her not for her sake but my own and to defile her mind, and torture her until she cried for Fort's blood. . . . Nor that I had committed a thousand particular crimes. . . . No, that crime for which I seek expiation is never lost. It is always there. It is unpardonable. It is the crime of self; the crime of life, the crime is I."

"There must be a way I have missed," he says, and looks back on his story. "There must be a way whereby the word becomes flesh. There must be a way whereby the flesh becomes word. Whereby loneliness becomes communion without contamination. Whereby contamination becomes purity without exile. There must be a way, but I may not have it now. All I can have now is knowledge. . . . But if we can know the terrible logic of life, if we can only know that life tells no lies in the end, for all the lies, single and particular, will at last speak together in a great chorus of truth in many voices. . . . [Knowledge] is not redemption, but is almost better than redemption. . . . I may not have redemption. I no longer seek to justify. I seek only to suffer. I will shake the hangman's hand, and will call him my brother, at last."