He rode a circuit of the valley towns, preaching the good word to all who would gather to listen. And people did listen. They also looked, and the preacher was a fine looking man - all lean and passionate with riveting eyes that caused many a person's heart to beat a little faster if they met his glance. And the glances he sought were those of women.
Study groups were organized in farm houses all up and down the valley. The word was glorified with so much enthusiasm and such transports of fervor that some would rip off their clothing to the greater glory of god. And sometimes in their striving for greater closeness to the Deity they found themselves in carnal communication to the next best thing - the preacher.
And the farm wives went on canning and curing and boiling great cauldrons of laundry and plowing and churning and milking and scything and thinking hungrily of the preacher man as they sliced pie for their husbands.
It couldn't last. A woman walked away from her home and family to follow the preacher - ``I am a disciple,'' she said. Her husband organized a search for the preacher and they hunted him and his mule and his woman all up and down the valley and they did not find them.
The farm woman left the preacher and went on to San Francisco, but still the preacher was on the run. It was eight months after he disappeared when a farmer named Hobus Trant became suspicious of the dogs sniffing under the house all the time.
``Must be raccoons,'' his wife said.
Hobus crawled under the house with a hurricane lantern. First thing he saw - and smelled - were turds and a whole lot of half empty Mason jars. He poked at a bundle of rags and found the preacher man as weak as a kitten and close to dying. They hauled him out and threw him in jail but no one had evidence they could use against him.
They released him in his tatters and he was last seen limping toward the railroad.
No one knew what happened to him. There was a rumor that he went back to Pennsylvania where he came from and took up teaching school.