On a cold gray morning in December two members of my flock, Poles who spoke but little English and that little very badly, were on their way to their daily toil in the canning factory. It is a long walk from the Poles’ quarters to the factory, and the workpeople must start early, for one is fined half an hour’s time if one is five minutes late. The short-cut is down the railroad tracks that run through the mill district for which cause we bury a yearly toll of the children of the poor.

Just beyond the freight sheds, signal tower, and water tank, is a grade crossing where so many terrible things have happened that the colored people call that place Dead Man’s Crossin’ and warn you not to go by there of nights because the signal tower is haunted and Things lurk in the rank growth behind the water tank, coming out to show themselves after dark. If you must pass it then you would better turn your coat inside out, pull down your sleeves over your hands, and be very careful to keep three fingers twisted for a Sign. This is a specific against most ha’nts, though by no means able to scare away all of them. Those at Dead Man’s Crossin’ are peculiarly malignant and hard to scare. Maum Jinkey Delette saw one there once, coming down the track faster than an express train, bigger than a cow, and waving both his legs in his hands. Poor old Maum Jinkey was so scared that she chattered her new false teeth out of her mouth, and she never found those teeth to the day of her death, but had to mumble along as best she could without them.

Hurrying by Dead Man’s Crossin’, the workmen stumbled over a man lying beside the tracks; his clothing was torn to shreds, he was wet with the heavy night dew and covered with dirt, cinders, and partly congealed blood, for his right leg had been ground to pulp. Peering at this horrible object in the wan dusk of the early morning, they thought he was dead like most of the others found there.

For a moment the men hesitated, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leave him there to be found and removed by folks with more time at their disposal. One doesn’t like to lose time and be consequently fined, on account of stopping to pick up a dead tramp; particularly when Christmas is drawing near and money so much needed that every penny counts.

The thing on the ground, regaining for a fraction of a second a glint of half-consciousness, quivered, moaned feebly, and lay still again. Humanity prevailing, the Poles looked about for help, but as yet the place was quite deserted. Grumbling, they wrenched a shutter off the Agent’s window, lifted the mangled tramp upon it, and made straight for the Parish House; when accidents such as this happened to men such as this, weren’t the victims incontinently turned over to the Parish House people? Indeed, there wasn’t any place else for them, unless one excepted the rough room at the jail; and the average small town jail ours wasn’t any exception to the rule is a place where a decent veterinary would scruple to put a sick cur. With him the Poles brought his sole luggage, a package tied up in oilskin, which they had found lying partly under him.

We had become accustomed to these sudden inroads of misfortune, so he was carried upstairs to the front Guest Room, fortunately just then empty. The Poles turned over to me the heavy package found with him, stolidly requested a note to the Boss explaining their necessary tardiness, and hurried away. They had done what they had to do, and they had no further interest in him. Nobody had any interest in one of the unknown tramps who got themselves killed or crippled at Dead Man’s Crossin’.

The fellow was shockingly injured and we had some strenuous days and nights with him, for that which had been a leg had to come off at the knee; he had lain in the cold for some hours, he had sustained a frightful shock, and he had lost considerable blood. I am sure that in the hands of any physician less skilled and determined than Westmoreland he must have gone out. But Westmoreland, with his jaw set, followed his code and fenced with death for this apparently worthless and forfeited life, using all his skill and finesse to outwit the great Enemy; in spite of which, so attenuated was the man’s chance that we were astonished when he turned the corner very, very feebly and we didn’t have to place another pine box in the potter’s field, alongside other unmarked mounds whose occupants were other unknown men, grim causes of Dead Man’s Crossin’s sinister name.

The effects of the merciful drugs that had kept him quiet in time wore away. Our man woke up one forenoon clear-headed, if hollow-eyed and mortally weak. He looked about the unfamiliar room with wan curiosity, then his eyes came to Clelie and myself, but he did not return the greetings of either. He just stared; he asked no questions. Presently, very feebly, he tried to move, and found himself a cripple. He fell back upon his pillow, gasping. A horrible scream broke from his lips a scream of brute rage and mortal fear, as of a trapped wild beast. He began to revile heaven and earth, the doctor, myself. Clelie, clapping her hands over her outraged ears, fled as if from fiends. Indeed, never before nor since have I heard such a frightful, inhuman power of profanity, such hideous oaths and threats. When breath failed him he lay spent and trembling, his chest rising and falling to his choking gasps.

“You had better be thankful your life is spared you, young man,” I said a trifle sharply, my nerves being somewhat rasped; for I had helped Westmoreland through more than one dreadful night, and I had sat long hours by his pillow, waiting for what seemed the passing of a soul.

He glared. “Thankful?” he screamed, “Thankful, hell! I’ve got to have two good legs to make any sort of a getaway, haven’t I? Well, have I got ’em? I’m down and out for fair, that’s what! Thankful? You make me sick! Honest to God, when you gas like that I feel like bashing in your brain, if you’ve got any! You and your thankfulness!” He turned his quivering face and stared at the wall, winking. I wondered, heartsick, if I had ever seen a more hopelessly unprepossessing creature.

It was not so much physical, his curious ugliness; the dreadful thing was that it seemed to be his spirit which informed his flesh, an inherent unloveliness of soul upon which the body was modeled, worked out faithfully, and so made visible. Figure to yourself one with the fine shape of the welter-weight, steel-muscled, lithe, powerful, springy, slim in the hips and waist, broad in the shoulders; the arms unusually long, giving him a terrible reach, the head round, well-shaped, covered with thick reddish hair; cold, light, and intelligent eyes, full of animosity and suspicion, reminding you unpleasantly of the rattlesnake’s look, wary, deadly, and ready to strike. When he thought, his forehead wrinkled. His lips shut upon each other formidably and without softness, and the jaws thrust forward with the effect as of balled fists. One ear was slightly larger than the other, having the appearance of a swelling upon the lobe. In this unlovely visage, filled with distrust and concentrated venom, only the nose retained an incongruous and unexpected niceness. It was a good straight nose, yet it had something of the pleasant tiptiltedness of a child’s. It was the sort of nose which should have complemented a mouth formed for spontaneous laughter. It looked lonesome and out of place in that set and lowering countenance, to which the red straggling stubble of beard sprouting over jaws and throat lent a more sinister note.

We had had many a sad and terrible case in our Guest Rooms, but somehow this seemed the saddest, hardest and most hopeless we had yet encountered.

For three weary weeks had we struggled with him, until the doctor, sighing with physical relief, said he was out of danger and needed only such nursing as he was sure to get.

“One does one’s duty as one finds it, of course,” said the big doctor, looking down at the unpromising face on the pillow, and shaking his head. “Yes, yes, yes, one must do what’s right, on the face of it, come what will. There’s no getting around that!” He glanced at me, a shadow in his kind gray eyes. “But there are times, my friend, when I wonder! Now, this morning I had to tell a working man his wife’s got to die. There’s no help and no hope she’s got to die, and she a mother of young children. So I have to try desperately,” said the doctor, rubbing his nose, “to cling tooth and claw to the hope that there is Something behind the scenes that knows the forward-end of things sin and sorrow and disease and suffering and death things and uses them always for some beneficent purpose. But in the meantime the mother dies, and here you and I have been used to save alive a poor useless devil of a one-legged tramp, probably without his consent and against his will, because it had to be and we couldn’t do anything else! Now, why? I can’t help but wonder!”

We looked down again, the two of us, at the face on the pillow. And I wondered also, with even greater cause than the doctor; for I had opened the oilskin package the Poles found, and it had given me occasion for fear, reflection, and prayer. I was startled and alarmed beyond words, for it contained tools of a curious and unusual type, not such tools as workmen carry abroad in the light of day.

There was no one to whom I might confide that unpleasant discovery. I simply could not terrify my mother, nor could I in common decency burden the already overburdened doctor. Nor is our sheriff one to turn to readily; he is not a man whose intelligence or heart one may admire, respect, or depend upon. My guest had come to me with empty pockets and a burglar’s kit; a hint of that, and the sheriff had camped on the Parish House front porch with a Winchester across his knees and handcuffs jingling in his pockets. No, I couldn’t consult the law.

I had yet a deeper and a better reason for waiting, which I find it rather hard to set down in cold words. It is this: that as I grow older I have grown more and more convinced that not fortuitously, not by chance, never without real and inner purposes, are we allowed to come vitally into each other’s lives. I have walked up the steep sides of Calvary to find out that when another wayfarer pauses for a space beside us, it is because one has something to give, the other something to receive.

So, upon reflection, I took that oilskin package weighted down with the seven deadly sins over to the church, and hid it under the statue of St. Stanislaus, whom my Poles love, and before whom they come to kneel and pray for particular favors. I tilted the saint back upon his wooden stand, and thrust that package up to where his hands fold over the sheaf of lilies he carries. St. Stanislaus is a beautiful and most holy youth. No one would ever suspect him of hiding under his brown habit a burglar’s kit!

When I had done this, and stopped to say three Hail Marys for guidance, I went back to the little room called my study, where my books and papers and my butterfly cabinets and collecting outfits were kept, and set myself seriously to studying my files of newspapers, beginning at a date a week preceding my man’s appearance. Then:

Slippy McGee
Makes Good His Name Once More.
Slips One Over On The Police.
Noted Burglar Escapes.

said the glaring headlines in the New York papers. The dispatches were dated from Atlanta, and when I turned to the Atlanta papers I found them, too, headlining the escape of “Slippy McGee.”

I learned that “the slickest crook in America” finding himself somewhat hampered in his native haunts, the seething underworld of New York, because the police suspected him of certain daring and mysterious burglaries although they had no positive proof against him, had chosen to shift his base of operations South for awhile. But the Southern authorities had been urgently warned to look out for him; in consequence they had been so close upon his heels that he had been surrounded while “on a job.” Half an hour later, and he would have gotten away with his plunder; but, although they were actually upon him, by what seemed a miracle of daring and of luck he slipped through their fingers, escaped under their very noses, leaving no clue to his whereabouts. He was supposed to be still in hiding in Atlanta, though as he had no known confederates and always worked alone and unaided, the police were at a loss for information. The man had simply vanished, after his wont, as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. The papers gave rather full accounts of some of his past exploits, from which one gathered that Slippy McGee was a very noted personage in his chosen field. I sat for a long time staring at those papers, and my thoughts were uneasy ones. What should I do?

I presently decided that I could and must question my guest. So far he had volunteered no information beyond the curt statement that his name was John Flint and he was a hobo because he liked the trade. He had been stealing a ride and he had slipped and when he woke up we had him and he hadn’t his leg. And if some people knew how to be obliging they’d make a noise like a hoop and roll away, so’s other people could pound their ear in peace, like that big stiff of a doctor ordered them to do.

As I stood by the bed and studied his sullen, suspicious, unfriendly face, I came to the conclusion that if this were not McGee himself it could very well be some one quite as dangerous.

“Friend,” said I, “we do not as a rule seek information about the guests in these rooms. We do not have to; they explain themselves. I should never question your assertion that your name is Flint, and I sincerely hope it is Flint; but there are reasons why I must and do ask you for certain definite information about yourself.”

The hand lying upon the coverlet balled into a fist.

“If John Flint’s not fancy enough for you,” he suggested truculently, “suppose you call me Percy? Some peach of a moniker, Percy, ain’t it?”

“Percy?”

“Sure, Percy,” he grinned impudently. “But if you got a grouch against Percy, can it, and make me Algy. I don’t mind. It’s not me beefing about monikers; it’s you.”

“I am also,” said I, regarding him steadily and ignoring his flippancy, “I am also obliged to ask you what is your occupation when you are not stealing rides?”

“Looks like it might be answering questions just now, don’t it? What you want to know for? Whatever it is, I’m not able to do it now, am I? But as you’re so naturally bellyaching to know, why, I’ve been in the ring.”

“So I presumed. Thank you,” said I, politely. “And your name is John Flint, or Percy, or Algy, just as I choose. Percy and Algy are rather unusual names for a gentleman who has been in the ring, don’t you think?”

“I think,” he snarled, turned suddenly ferocious, “that I’m named what I dam’ please to be named, and no squeals from skypilots about it, neither. Say! what you driving at, anyhow? If what I tell you ain’t satisfying, suppose you slip over a moniker to suit yourself and go away!”

“Oh! Suppose then,” said I, without taking my eyes from his, “suppose, then, that I chose to call you Slippy McGee?”

I am sure that only his bodily weakness kept him from flying at my throat. As it was, his long arms with the hands upon them outstretched like a beast’s claws, shot out ferociously. His face contracted horribly, and of a sudden the sweat burst out upon it so blindingly that he had to put up an arm and wipe it away. For a moment he lay still, glaring, panting, helpless; while I stood and watched him unmoved.

“Ain’t you the real little Sherlock Holmes, though?” he jeered presently. “Got Old Sleuth skinned for fair and Nick Carter eating out of your hand! You damned skypilot!” His voice cracked. “You’re all alike! Get a man on his back and then put the screws on him!”

I made no reply; only a great compassion for this mistaken and miserable creature surged like a wave over my heart.

“For God’s sake don’t stand there staring like a bughouse owl!” he gritted. “Well, what you going to do? Bawl for the bulls? What put you wise?”

“Help you to get well. No. I opened your bag and looked up the newspapers,” I answered succinctly.

“Huh! A fat lot of good it’ll do me to get well now, won’t it? You think I ought to thank you for butting in and keeping me from dying without knowing anything about it, don’t you? Well, you got another think coming. I don’t. Ever hear of a pegleg in the ring? Ever hear of a one-hoofed dip! A long time I’d be Slippy McGee playing cat-and-mouse with the bulls, if I had to leave some of my legs home when I needed them right there on the job, wouldn’t I? Oh, sure!”

“And was it,” I wondered, “such a fine thing to be Slippy McGee, flying from the police, that one should lament his er disappearance?”

His eyes widened. He regarded me with pity as well as astonishment.

“Didn’t you read the papers?” he wondered in his turn. “There don’t many travel in my class, skypilot! Why, I haven’t got any equals the best of them trail a mile behind. Ask the bulls, if you want to know about Slippy McGee! And I let the happy dust alone. Most dips are dopes, but I was too slick; I cut it out. I knew if the dope once gets you, then the bulls get next. Not for Slippy. I’ve kept my head clear, and that’s how I’ve muddled theirs. They never get next to anything until I’ve cleaned up and dusted. Why, honest to God, I can open any box made, easy as easy, just like I can put it all over any bull alive! That is,” a spasm twisted his face and into his voice crept the acute anguish of the artist deprived of all power to create, “that is, I could until I made that last getaway on a freight, and this happened.”

“I am sorry,” said I soothingly, “that you have lost your leg, of course. But better to lose your leg than your soul, my son. Why, how do you know ”

He writhed. “Can it!” he implored. “Cut it out! Ain’t I up against enough now, for God’s sake? Down and out and nothing to do but have my soul curry-combed and mashfed by a skypilot with both his legs and all his mouth on him! Ain’t it hell, though? Say, you better send for the cops. I’d rather stand for the pen than the preaching. What’d you do with my bag, anyway?”

“But I really have no idea of preaching to you; and I would rather not send for the police afterwards, when you are better, you may do so if you choose. You are a free agent. As for your bag, why it is it is in the keeping of the Church.”

“Huh!” said he, and twisted his mouth cynically. “Huh! Then it’s good-bye tools, I suppose. I’m no churchmember, thank God, but I’ve heard that once the Church gets her clamps on anything worth while all hell can’t pry her loose.”

Now I don’t know why, but at that, suddenly and inexplicably, as if I had glimpsed a ray of light, I felt cheered.

“Why, that’s it exactly!” said I, smiling. “Once the Church gets real hold of a thing or a man worth while, she holds on so fast that all hell can’t pry her loose. Won’t you try to remember that, my son!”

“If it’s a joke, suck the marrow out of it yourself,” said he sourly. “It don’t listen so horrible funny to me. And you haven’t peeped yet about what you’re going to do. I’m waiting to hear. I’m real interested.”

“Why, I really don’t know yet,” said I, still cheerfully. “Suppose we wait and see? Here you are, safe and harmless enough for the present. And God is good; perhaps He knows that you and I may need each other more than you and the police need each other who can tell? I should simply set myself strictly to the task of getting entirely well, if I were you and let it go at that.”

He appeared to reflect; his forehead wrinkled painfully.

“Devil-dodger,” said he, after a pause, “are you just making a noise with your face, or is that on the level?”

“That’s on the level.”

His hard and suspicious eyes bored into me. And as I held his glance, a hint of wonder and amazement crept into his face.

“God A’mighty! I believe him!” he gasped. And then, as if ashamed of that real feeling, he scowled.

“Say, if you’re really on the level, I guess you’d better not be flashing the name of Slippy McGee around promiscuous,” he suggested presently. “It won’t do either you or me any good, see? And say, parson, forget Percy and Algy. How was I to know you’d be so white? And look here: I did know a gink named John Flint, once. Only he was called Reddy, because he’d got such a blazing red head and whiskers. He’s croaked, so he wouldn’t mind me using his moniker, seeing it’s not doing him any good now.”

“Let us agree upon John Flint,” I decided.

“Help yourself,” he agreed, equably.

Clelie, with wrath and disapproval written upon every stiffened line, brought him his broth, which he took with a better grace than I had yet witnessed. He even added a muttered word of thanks.

“It’s funny,” he reflected, when the yellow woman had left the room with the empty bowl, “it’s sure funny, but d’ye know, I’m lots easier in my mind, knowing you know, and not having to think up a hard-luck gag to hand out to you? I hate like hell to have to lie, except of course when I need a smooth spiel for the cops. I guess I’ll snooze a bit now,” he added, as I rose to leave the room. And as I reached the door:

“Parson?”

“Well?”

“Why er come in a bit to-night, will you? That is, if you’ve got time. And look here: don’t you get the notion in your bean I’m just some little old two-by-four guy of a yegg or some poor nut of a dip. I’m not. Why, I’ve been the whole show and manager besides. Yep, I’m Slippy McGee himself.”

He paused, to let this sink into my consciousness. I must confess that I was more profoundly impressed than even he had any idea of. And then, magnanimously, he added: “You’re sure some white man, parson.”

“Thank you, John Flint,” said I, with due modesty.

Heaven knows why I should have been pleased and hopeful, but I was. My guest was a criminal; he hadn’t shown the slightest sign of compunction or of shame; instead, he had betrayed a brazen pride. And yet I felt hopeful. Although I knew I was tacitly concealing a burglar, my conscience remained clear and unclouded, and I had a calm intuitive assurance of right. So deeply did I feel this that when I went over to the church I placed before St. Stanislaus a small lamp full of purest olive oil, which is expensive. I felt that he deserved some compensation for hiding that package under his sheaf of lilies.

The authorities of our small town knew, of course, that another forlorn wretch was being cared for at the Parish House. But had not the Parish House sheltered other such vagabonds? The sheriff saw no reason to give himself the least concern, beyond making the most casual inquiry. If I wanted the fellow, he was only too glad to let me keep him. And who, indeed, would look for a notorious criminal in a Parish House Guest Room? Who would connect that all too common occurrence, a tramp maimed by the railroad, with, the mysterious disappearance of the cracksman, Slippy McGee? So, for the present, I could feel sure that the man was safe.

And in the meantime, in the orderly proceeding of everyday life, while he gained strength under my mother’s wise and careful nursing and Westmoreland’s wise and careful overseeing, there came to him those who were instruments for good my mother first, whom, like Clelie, he never called anything but “Madame” and whom, like Clelie, he presently obeyed with unquestioning and childlike readiness. Now, Madame is a truly wonderful person when she deals with people like him. Never for a moment lowering her own natural and beautiful dignity, but without a hint of condescension, Madame manages to find the just level upon which both can stand as on common ground; then, without noise, she helps, and she conveys the impression that thus noiselessly to help is the only just, natural and beautiful thing for any decent person to do, unless, perhaps, it might be to receive in the like spirit.

Judge Mayne’s son, Laurence, full of a fresh and boyish enthusiasm, was such another instrument. He had a handsome, intelligent face, a straight and beautiful body, and the pleasantest voice in the world. His mother in her last years had been a fretful invalid, and to meet her constant demands the judge and his son had developed an angelic patience with weakness. They were both rather quiet and undemonstrative, this father and son; the older man, in fact had a stern visage at first glance, until one learned to know it as the face of a man trained to restraint and endurance. As for the boy, no one could long resist the shrewd, kind youngster, who could spend an hour with the most unlikely invalid and leave him all the better for it. I was unusually busy just then, Clelie frankly hated and feared the man upstairs, my mother had her hands full, and there were many heavy and lonesome hours which Laurence set himself the task of filling. I left this to the boy himself, offering no suggestions.

“Padre,” said the boy to me, some time later, “that chap upstairs is the hardest nut I ever tried to crack. There’ve been times when I felt tempted to crack him with a sledge-hammer, if you want the truth. You know, he always seemed to like me to read to him, but I’ve never been able to discover whether or not he liked what I read. He never asked me a single question, he never seemed interested enough to make a comment. But I think that I’ve made a dent in him at last.”

“A dent! In Flint? With what adamantine pick, oh hardiest of miners!”

“With a book. Guess!”

“I couldn’t. I give up.”

“The Bible!” said Laurence.

The Bible! Had I chosen to read it to him, he would have resented it, been impervious, suspicious, hostile. I looked at the boy’s laughing face, and wondered, and wondered.

“And how,” said I, curious, “did you happen to pitch on the Bible?”

“Why, I got to studying about this chap. I wanted something that’d reach him. I was puzzled. And then I remembered hearing my father say that the Bible is the most interesting book in the world because it’s the most personal. There’s something in it for everybody. So I thought there’d be something in it for John Flint, and I tried it on him, without telling him what I was giving him. I just plunged right in, head over heels. Lord, Padre, it is a wonderful old book, isn’t it? Why, I got so lost in it myself that I forgot all about John Flint, until I happened to glance up and see that he was up to the eyes in it, just like I was! He likes the fights and he gloats over the spoils. He’s asking for more. I think of turning Paul loose on him.”

“Well, if after the manner of men Paul fought with wild beasts at Ephesus,” I said hopefully. “I dare say he’ll be able to hold his own even with John Flint.”

“I like Paul best of all, myself,” said Laurence. “You see, Padre, my father and I have needed a dose of Paul more than once to stiffen our backbones. So I’m going to turn the fighting old saint loose on John Flint. ’By, Padre; I’ll look in to-morrow I left poor old Elijah up in a cave with no water, and the ravens overdue!”

He went down our garden path whistling, his cap on the back of his head, and I looked after him with the warm and comforting sense that the world is just that much better for such as he.

The boy was now, in his last high school year, planning to study law all the Maynes took to law as a duck to water. Brave, simple-hearted, direct, clear-thinking, scrupulously honorable, this was one of the diamonds used to cut the rough hard surface of Slippy McGee.