Читать книгу My Wayward Pardner; or, My Trials with Josiah, America, the Widow Bump, and Etcetery онлайн

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A JUDGMENT SEAT.

Old Cobb is well off, but he and Kellup works hard, and fares hard. They stent themselves on clothes, and I don’t s’pose they allow themselves hardly enough to eat and drink. And all the literary feasts and recreations they allow themselves is to set round in stores and groceries, on dry-goods boxes and butter-tubs, a-findin’ fault with the government, spittin’ tobacco-juice at the stove, and fixin’ the doom of sinners. Kellup is harder on ’em than the old man is. Old Cobb thinks there won’t be more’n half the world saved; Kellup thinks there won’t be more than a quarter, if there is that.

They argue powerful. Have come to hands and blows frequent. And once Kellup knocked the old man down, he was so mad and out of patience to think the old man couldn’t see as he see about the Judgment. You know there is sights and sights said on that subject now and wrote on it; and Kellup and the old man will borrow books and papers that are wrote on it, some on one side and some on the other, and then they’ll quarrel agin over them. And they’ve tried to draw me into their arguments time and agin. But I have told ’em that I was a master hand to work where I was needed most, and I didn’t seem to be needed so much a judgin’ the world, and settlin’ on jest how many was a goin’ to be saved or lost, as I did a mindin’ my own business, and tryin’ to read my own title clear to mansions in the skies. Says I: “I find it a tuckerin’ job to take care of one sinner as she ort to be took care of, and it would make me ravin’ crazy if I had to take care of the hull universe.”