The Seekers

Summary

In a clapboard hamlet stitched together by psalms and sawdust, nurse Ruth Heck drifts through candle-lit sickrooms like a vigilant angel, her orphan’s heart soldered to the creed of a sect that calls itself—without irony—The Seekers. While she stitches wounds and soothes fevers, her younger brother Lem bends steel in a sweltering foundry, sparks prickling his cheeks like electric fleas. One dusk, a pair of swaggering drifters filch Lem’s tools, cracks the local vault, and vanish; the sheriff claps the wrong lad in irons, sentencing Ruth’s only kin to fifteen years of granite silence. Three winters later, guilt has gnawed her gaunt; Rev. Timothy Hood, sensing her marrow-deep fatigue, dispatches Ruth to Canaan Mountain, a sister-settlement clinging to a cloud-bruised ridge. There Sheriff John Mount—stoic, broad-shouldered, heir to the village pulpit—meets her wagon. On a wind-whipped Sabbath, a sotted brute levels a rust-flecked revolver at his cowering wife; Ruth, swift as mercury, interposes herself, saving John’s life and forging a bond that blossoms into betrothal. Yet destiny, capricious puppeteer, uncorks a new twist: Lem, packed like contraband inside a convict’s crate, rattles out of prison, tumbles free, and staggers into Ruth’s arms beneath a cathedral of moonlit pines. A gossip’s spying eye whips the village into froth; John, torn between trust and duty, tails Ruth to the barn, discovers the fugitive, and prepares to haul him back. Ruth’s desperation detonates—she swings an iron chain, fells her fiancé, spirits Lem away, then dashes into a barn now blooming with flame. She drags John from the inferno; he, honor-scarred, claims the fire as his own clumsy fault. Months of penance follow: Ruth scrubs floors to repay a fifty-dollar debt, while John nurses both bruised temples and a bruised heart. At last the village elders decree a lottery to seed a new upland colony; names swirl in a cedar box until—by a sleight of divine rigging—Ruth’s slip is drawn, binding the estranged lovers to a shared, uncertain odyssey. Far away in a clanging metropolis, Lem sets type amid ink-stained chaos until a belated headline blares his innocence; the governor’s pardon arrives like sunrise after eclipse, absolving the escape and inviting him home. The final image: Ruth and John, silhouetted against an amber horizon, rattling toward tomorrow in a sun-bleached buggy, while somewhere in the distance a free man walks without chains.

Synopsis

Ruth and Lem Heck are orphans. Ruth is a nurse in a small town populated by a religious sect called "The Seekers." Their object is to seek those that are needy and administer to their needs. Ruth and Lem live with Rev. Hood. Lem is apprentice in a machine shop. Two crooks in the machine shop rob the village bank with Lem's tools, which they stole. Lem is accused and sentenced to jail for 15 years. After three years, Ruth laments the absence of her brother, whose health is failing. Rev. Timothy Hood heeds the call of another little village of the same sect to send them a nurse and sends Ruth. She arrives at the little village of Canaan Mountain and is met by Sheriff John Mount, the son of Rev. Israel Mount, with whom she is to live. One Sabbath a drunken brute is abusing his wife at the church door. John, trying to aid the wife, is about to be shot by the husband, when he is saved by Ruth. John and Ruth help the wife and gain her friendship. Later, the sheriff and Ruth become engaged. Lem, her brother, is shipped out of jail by an old convict who places him in a huge packing box which he is filling. Lem makes his escape from the baggage train and meets Ruth in the woods. A gossip sees them in each other's arms and spreads the news that Ruth is untrue to John, her betrothed. He refuses to believe the tales. Ruth hides Lem in the barn and continues to visit him at night. John starts to get suspicious. It happens that Ruth is compelled to borrow $50 from Rev. Mount and signs a note for it, promising to work off the debt. She goes to the barn and John follows her and sees her give Lem the money. He confronts them, and Ruth tells the truth. They plead for liberty, but John's sense of duty is greater, and he starts to take Lem back. The men fight, and, as John is about to overpower Lem, Ruth strikes him over the head with an iron chain, knocking him unconscious. Ruth helps her brother to escape, and when she returns to the barn she finds it in flames. She rescues John, who tells the crowd of villagers who have gathered that he knocked the lamp over by accident. Several months pass. Ruth works off the debt, and the lovers are estranged. The customary time arrives to send a young couple to another part of the mountains to populate a new settlement. The couple are chosen by lottery. John is the young man chosen and Rev. Mount realizes that Ruth and John are torn with anxiety as to who will be the chosen wife. When the day comes, the maidens cast their names in the box, and the Rev. Mount so fixes the lottery that Ruth's slip is picked. In a big city Lem is at work in a printing shop. At every sound he starts guiltily, thinking that someone will arrest him. A man rushes in with a slip of paper and tells Lem to rush it out in type for the next edition. Lem reads the paper, and it is an account of his acquittal and the full confession of the two crooks who robbed the bank. The State has pardoned his escape and only want news of his whereabouts. Lem is happy that he is finally free. Ruth and John continue on their way over the mountains in the old buggy.