When I was first seen prowling along the roads and about the fields stalking butterflies and diurnal moths with the caution of a red Indian on the warpath and the stealth of a tiger in the jungle; when mystified folk met me at night, a lantern suspended from my neck, a haversack across my shoulders, a bottle-belt about my waist, and armed with a butterfly net, the consensus of opinion was that poor Father De Rance was stark staring mad. Appleboro hadn’t heretofore witnessed the proceedings of the Brethren of the Net, and I had to do much patient explaining; even then I am sure I must have left many firmly convinced that I was not, in their own phrase, “all there.”

“Hey, you! Mister! Them worms is pizen! Them’s fever-worms!” was shrieked at me frenziedly by the country-folks, black and white, when I was caught scooping up the hairy caterpillars of the tiger moths. Even when it was understood that I wished caterpillars, cocoons, and chrysalids, for the butterflies and moths they would later make, looks of pitying contempt were cast upon me. That a grown man particularly a minister of the gospel, with not only his own but other people’s souls to save should spend time hunting for worms, with which he couldn’t even bait a hook, awakened amazement.

“What any man in his right mind wants with a thing that ain’t nothin’ but wriggles an’ hair on the outside an’ sqush on the inside, beats me!” was said more than once.

“But all of them are interesting, some are valuable, and many grow into very beautiful moths and butterflies,” I ventured to defend myself.

“S’posin’ they do? You can’t eat ’em or wear ’em or plant ’em, can you?” And really, you understand, I couldn’t!

“An’ you mean to tell me to my face,” said a scandalized farmer, watching me assorting and naming the specimens taken from my field box, “you mean to tell me you’re givin’ every one o’ them bugs a name, same’s a baptized Christian? Adam named every livin’ thing, an’ Adam called them things Caterpillars an’ Butterflies. If it suited him an’ Eve and God A’mighty to have ’em called that an’ nothin’ else, looks to me it had oughter suit anybody that’s got a grain o’real religion. If you go to call ’em anythin’ else it’s sinnin’ agin the Bible. I’ve heard all my life you Cath’lics don’t take as much stock in the Scripters as you’d oughter, but this thing o’callin’ a wurrum Adam named plain Caterpillar a a what’d you say the dum beast’s name was? My sufferin’ Savior! is jest about the wüst dern foolishness yet! I lay it at the Pope’s door, every mite o’ it, an’ you’d better believe he’ll have to answer for sech carryin’s on, some o’ these days!”

So many other things having been laid at the Pope’s door, I held my peace and made no futile attempt to clear the Holy Father of the dark suspicion of having perpetrated their names upon certain of the American lepidoptera.

I had yet other darker madnesses; had I not been seen spreading upon trees with a whitewash brush a mixture of brown sugar, stale beer, and rum?

Asked to explain this lunatic proceeding I could only say that I was sugaring for moths; these airy fairy gentlemen having a very human liking for a “wee drappie o’t.”

“That amiable failin’,” Major Appleby Cartwright decided, “is a credit to them an’ commends them to a respectful hearin’. On its face it would seem to admit them to the ancient an’ honorable brotherhood of convivial man. But, suh, there’s another side to this question, an’ it’s this: a creature that’s got six perfectly good legs, not to mention wings, an’ still can’t carry his liquor without bein’ caught, deserves his fate. It’s not in my line to offer suggestions to an allwise Providence, or I might hint that a scoop-net an’ a killing jar in pickle for some two-legged topers out huntin’ free drinks wouldn’t be such a bad idea at all.”

But as I pursued my buggy way and displayed, save in this one particular, what might truthfully be called ordinary common sense people gradually grew accustomed to it, looking upon me as a mild and harmless lunatic whose inoffensive mania might safely be indulged nay, even humored. In consequence I was from time to time inundated with every common thing that creeps, crawls, and flies. I accepted gifts of bugs and caterpillars that filled my mother with disgust and Clelie with horror; both of them hesitated to come into my study, and I have known Clelie to be afraid to go to bed of a night because the great red-horned “Hickory devil” was downstairs in a box, and she was firmly convinced that this innocent worm harbored a cold-blooded desire to crawl upstairs and bite her. That silly woman will depart this life in the firm faith that all crawling creatures came into the world with the single-hearted hope of biting her, above all other mortals; and that having achieved the end for which they were created, both they and she will immediately curl up and die.

But alas, I had but scant time to devote to this enchanting and engrossing study, which, properly pursued, will fill a man’s days to the brim. I gathered my specimens as I could and classified and mounted them as it pleased God until the advent of John Flint.

Now, I must, with great reluctance, here set down the plain truth that he, too, looked upon me at first with amaze not unmixed with rage and contempt. Most caterpillars, you understand, feed upon food of their own arbitrary choosing; and when they are in captivity one must procure this particular aliment if one hopes to rear them.

Slippy McGee feeding bugs! It was about as hideous and devil-born a contretemps as, say, putting a belted earl to peel potatoes or asking an archbishop to clean cuspidors. The man boiled with offended dignity and outraged pride. One could actually see him swell. He had expected something quite different, and this apparently offensive triviality disgusted and shocked him. I could see myself falling forty thousand fathoms in his esteem, and I think he would have incontinently turned his back upon me save for his promise to Mary Virginia.

It is true that many of the caterpillars are ugly and formidable, poor things, to the uninitiated eye, which fails to recognize under this uncomely disguise the crowned and glorious citizens of the air. I had just then a great Cecropia, an able-bodied green gentleman armed with twelve thorn-like, sizable horns, and wearing, along with other agreeable adornments, three yellow and four red arrangements like growths of dwarf cactus plants on the segments behind his hard round green head.

Mr. Flint, with an ejaculation of horror, backed off on one crutch and clubbed the other.

“My God!” said he, “Kill it! Kill it!” I saved my green friend in the nick of time. The man, with staring eyes, looked from me to the caterpillar; then he leaned over and watched it, in grim silence.

He knotted his forehead, made slits of his eyes, gulped, screwed his mouth into the thin red line of deadly determination, and with every nerve braced, even as a martyr braces himself for the stake or the sword, put out his hand, up which the formidable-looking worm walked leisurely. Death not immediately resulting from this daring act, he controlled his shudders and breathed easier. The worm became less and less terrifying; no longer appearing, say, the size of the boa constrictor. A few moments of this harmless meandering about Mr. Flint’s hand and arm, and of a sudden he wore his true colors of an inoffensive and law-abiding larva, anxious only to attend strictly to his own legitimate business, the Gargantuan feeding of himself into the pupa from which he would presently emerge one of the most magnificent of native moths. Gingerly Mr. Flint picked him up between thumb and fore-finger, and as gingerly dropped him back into the breeding-cage. He squared his shoulders, wiped his brow, and drew a long whistling breath.

“Phe-ew! It took all my nerve to do it!” said he, frankly. “I felt for a minute as if a strong-arm cop’d chased me up an alley and pulled his gun on me. The feeling of a bug’s legs on your bare skin is something fierce at first, ain’t it? But after him none of ’em can scare me any more. I could play tag with pink monkeys with blue tails and green whiskers without sending in the hurry-call.”

The setting boards and blocks, the arrays of pins, needles, tubes, forceps, jars and bottles, magnifying-glasses, microscope, slides, drying-ovens, relaxing-box, cabinets, and above all, the mounted specimens, raised his spirits somewhat. This, at least, looked workman-like; this, at least, promised something better than stoking worms!

If not hopefully, at least willingly enough, he allowed himself to be set to work. And that work had come in what some like to call the psychological moment. At least it came or was sent just when he needed it most.

He soon discovered, as all beginners must, that there is very much more to it than one might think; that here, too, one must pay for exact knowledge with painstaking care and patient study and ceaseless effort. He discovered how fatally easy it is to spoil a good specimen; how fairy-fragile a wee wing is; how painted scales rub, and vanish into thin air; how delicate antennæ break, and forelegs will fiendishly depart hence; and that proper mounting, which results in a perfect insect, is a task which requires practice, a sure eye, and an expert, delicate, and dexterous touch. Also, that one must be ceaselessly on guard lest the baleful little ant and other tiny curses evade one’s vigilance and render void one’s best work. He learned these and other salutary lessons, which tend to tone down an amateur’s conceit of his half-knowledge; and this chastened him. He felt his pride at stake he who could so expertly, with almost demoniac ingenuity, force the costliest and most cunningly constructed burglar-proof lock; he whose not idle boast was that he was handy with his fingers! Slippy McGee baffled, at bay before a butterfly? And in the presence of a mere priest and a girl-child? Never! He’d show us what he could do when he really tried to try!

Presently he wanted to classify; and he wanted to do it alone and unaided it looked easy enough. It irked him, pricked his pride, to have to be always asking somebody else “what is this?” And right then and there those inevitable difficulties that confront every earnest and conscientious seeker at the beginning of his quest, arose, as the fascinating living puzzles presented themselves for his solving.

To classify correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them in their proper places.

Mr. Flint tried it and those wretched creatures wouldn’t stay put. It seemed to him that every time he looked at them they ought to be somewhere else; always there was something a bar, a stripe, a small distinctive spot, a wing of peculiar shape, antennæ, or palpi, or spur, to differentiate them.

“Where the Sam Hill,” he blazed, “do all these footy little devils come from, anyhow? Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next one that’s exactly like it is entirely different the next time you look at it? There’s too much beginning and no end at all to this game!”

For all that, he followed them up. I saw with pure joy that he refused to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs. He had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled. First he turned the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his shoulders and hurled himself into work.

There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillae, that splendid Gulf Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South. She’s a long-wing, but she’s not a Heliconian; she’s a silver-spot, but she’s not an Argynnis. She bears a striking family likeness to her fine relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which differentiate her. Whose word should he take for this, and why? Wherein lay those differences? He began, patiently, with her cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver. And yet, in spite of her long marvelous tongue he was beginning to find out that no tool he had ever seen, and but few that God Himself makes, is so wonderful as a butterfly’s tongue she hadn’t been able to tell him that about herself which he most wished to find out. That called for a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.

But he knew that other men knew. And he had to know. He meant to know. For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for its service. That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell a world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon another planet began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite. And he couldn’t break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!

Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners and crannies, or scraping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and disgust, but with the student’s interest and pleasure.

“Think of me being in the same world with ’em all these years and not knowing a thing about ’em when there’s so much to know, and under my skin stark crazy to learn it, only I didn’t know I even wanted to know what I really want to know more than anything else, until I had to get dumped down here to find it out! I get the funniest sort of a feeling, parson, that all along there’s been a Me tucked away inside my hide that’s been loving these things ever since I was born. Not just to catch and handle ’em, and stretch out their little wings, and remember the names some bughouse high-brow wished on ’em, though all that’s in the feeling, too; it’s something else, if I could make you understand what I mean.”

I laughed. “I think I do understand,” said I. “I have a Me like that tucked away in mine, too, you know.”

He looked at me gravely. “Parson,” said he, earnestly, “there’s times I wish you had a dozen kids, and every one of ’em twins! It’s a shame to think of some poor orphans swindled out of such a daddy as you’d have made!”

“Why,” said I, smiling, “You are one of my twins.”

“Me?” He reflected. “Maybe half of me might be, parson,” he agreed, “but it’s not safe for a skypilot to be caught owning a twin like the other half.”

“I’m pinning my faith to my half,” said I, serenely.

“Now, why?” he asked, with sudden fierceness. “I turn it over and over and over: it looks white on the outside, but I can’t to save me figure out why you’re doing it. Parson, what have you got up your sleeve?”

“Nothing but my arm. What should you think?”

“I don’t know what to think, and that’s the straight of it. What’s your game, anyhow? What in the name of God are you after?”

“Why, I think,” said I, “that in the name of God I’m after that other You that’s been tucked away all these years, and couldn’t get born until a Me inside mine, just like himself, called him to come out and be alive.”

He pondered this in silence. Then:

“I’ll take your word for it,” said he. “Though if anybody’d ever told me I’d be eating out of a parson’s hand, I’d have pushed his face in for him. Yep, I’m Fido! Me!”

“At least you growl enough,” said I, tartly.

He eyed me askance.

“Have I got to lick hands?” he snarled.

I walked away, without a reply; through my shoulder-blades I could feel him glaring after me. He followed, hobbling:

“Parson!”

“Well?”

“If I’m not the sort that licks hands I’m not the sort that bites ’em, neither. I’ll tell you it’s this way: I sort of get to chewing on that infernal log of wood that’s where my good leg used to grow and and splinters get into my temper and I’ve got to snarl or burst wide open! You’d growl like the devil yourself, if you had to try holding down my job for awhile, skypilot or no skypilot!”

“Why I dare say I should,” said I, contritely. “But,” I added, after a pause, “I shouldn’t be any the better for it, should you think?”

“Not so you could notice,” shortly. And after a moment he added, in an altered voice: “Rule 1: Can the Squeal!”

I think he most honestly tried to. It was no easy task, and I have seen the sweat start upon his forehead and his face go pale, when in his eagerness he forgot for a moment the cruel fact that he could no longer move as lightly as of old and the crippled body, betraying him, reminded him all too swiftly of his mistake.

The work saved him. For it is the heaven-sent sort of work, to those ordained for it, that fills one’s hours and leaves one eager for further tasks. It called for all his oldtime ingenuity. His tools, for instance at times their limitations irked him, and he made others more satisfactory to himself; tools adjusted to an insect’s frail body, not to a time-lock. Before that summer ended he could handle even the frailest and tiniest specimen with such nice care that it was delightful to watch him at work. The time was to come when he could mend a torn wing or fix a broken antennas with such exquisite fidelity to detail that even the most expert eye might well be deceived.

I had only looked for a little temporary help, such as any intelligent amateur might be able to furnish. But I was not long unaware that this was more than a mere amateur. To quote himself, he had the goods, and I realized with a mounting heart that I had made a find, if I could only hold on to it. For the first time in years I could exchange specimens. My cabinets began to fill out with such perfect insects, too! We added several rare ones, a circumstance to make any entomologist look upon the world through rosy spectacles. Why, even the scarce shy Cossus Centerensis came to our very doors, apparently to fill a space awaiting him. Perhaps he was a Buddhist insect undergoing reincarnation, and was anxious to acquire merit by self-immolation. Anyhow, we acquired him, and I hope he acquired merit.

We had scores of insects in the drying ovens. We had more and ever more in the breeding cages, in our case simple home-made affairs of a keg or a box with a fine wire-netting over the food plant; or a lamp-chimney slipped over a potted plant with a bit of mosquito-netting tied over the top, for the smaller forms.

These cages were a never-failing source of delight and interest to the children, and at their hands heaven rained caterpillars upon us that season. Even my mother grew interested in the work, though Clelie never ceased to look upon it as a horrid madness peculiar to white people.

“All Buckrahs is funny in dey haids,” Daddy January consoled her when she complained to him about it. “Dey gets all kind o’ fool notions ‘bout all kind o’ fool t’ings. You ain’t got to feel so bad de Jedge is lots wuss’n yo’ boss is. Yo’ boss kin see de bugs he run atter, but my boss talk ‘bout some kind o’ bug he call Germ. I ax um what kind o’ bug is dat; an’ he ‘low you can’t see um wid yo’ eye. I ain’t say so to de Jedge, but I ‘low when you see bug you can’t see wid yo’ eye, you best not seem um ‘tall case he must be some kind o’ spook, an’ Gawd knows I ain’t want to see no spook. Ef de bug ain’t no spook, den he mus’ be eenside yo’ haid, ‘stead o’ outside um, an’ to hab bug on de eenside o’ yo’ haid is de wuss kind o’ bad luck. Anyhow, nobody but Buckrah talk an’ ack like dat, niggers is got mo’ sense.”

We found, presently, a ready and a steady sale for our extra stock. We could supply caterpillars, butterflies and moths, or chrysalids and cocoons; we had some rather scarce ones; and then, our unmounted specimens were so perfect, and our mounted ones so exquisitely done, that we had but little trouble in disposing of them. Under the hand of John Flint these last were really works of art. Not for nothing had he boasted that he was handy with his fingers.

The pretty common forms, framed hovering lifelike over delicately pressed ferns and flowers, found even a readier market, for they were really beautiful. Money had begun to come in not largely, it is true, but still steadily and surely. You must know how to handle your stock, and you must be in touch with your market scientists, students, collectors, and this, of course, takes time. We could supply the larger dealers, too, although they pay less, and we had a modest advertisement in one or two papers published for the profession, which brought us orders. But let no one imagine that it is an easy task to handle these frail bodies, these gossamer wings, so that naturalists and collectors are glad to get them. Once or twice we lost valuable shipments.

Long since in the late spring, to be exact, John Flint had moved out of the Guest Room, needed for other occupants, into a two-roomed outbuilding across the garden. Some former pastor had had it built for an oratory and retreat, but now, covered with vines, it had stood for many years unused, save as a sort of lumber room.

When the troublesome question of where we might properly house him had arisen, my mother hit upon these unused rooms as by direct inspiration. She had them cleaned, repainted, scoured, and turned into a pleasant well-lighted, airy workroom and living-room combined, and a smaller and rather austere bedroom, with an inexpensive but very good head of Christ over the mantel, and an old, old carved crucifix on the wall beside the white iron bed. Laurence took from his own room a Morris chair, whose somewhat frayed cushions my mother neatly re-covered. Mary Virginia contributed a rug, as well as dressing-gown and slippers. Miss Sally Ruth gave him outright a brand-new Bible, and loaned him an old cedar-wood wardrobe which had been her great-grandmother’s, and which still smelt delicately of generations of rose-leaved and lavendered linen.

“All I ask,” said Miss Sally Ruth sharply, “is that you’ll read Paul with your eyes open and your mouth shut, and that you’ll keep your clothes in that wardrobe and your moths out of it. If it was intended for anybody to teach you anything, then Paul will teach you; but it wasn’t intended for a cedar-wood wardrobe to hold moths, and I hope you won’t forget it!”

Major Cartwright sent over a fishing-rod, a large jar of tobacco, and a framed picture of General Lee.

“Because no man, suh, could live under the same roof with even his pictured semblance, and not be the bettah fo’ it,” said the major earnestly. “I know. I’ve got to live with him myself. When I’m fair to middlin’ he’s in the dinin’ room. When I’ve skidded off the straight an’ narrow path I lock him up in the parlor, an’ at such times I sleep out on the po’ch. But when I’m at peace with man an’ God I take him into my bedroom an’ look at him befo’ retirin’. He’s about as easy to live with as the Angel Gabriel, but he’s mighty bracin’, Marse Robert is: mighty bracin’!”

Thus equipped, John Flint settled himself in his own house. It had been a wise move, for he had the sense of proprietorship, privacy, and freedom. He could come and go as he pleased, with no one to question. He could work undisturbed, save for the children who brought him such things as they could find. He put his breeding cages out on the vine-covered piazzas surrounding two-sides of his house, arranged the cabinets and boxes which had been removed from my study to his own, nailed up a few shelves to suit himself, and set up housekeeping.

My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved out of the Parish House, and Clelie abated in her dislike of the one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar under her bed. More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning them. He attended to that himself. The man was a marvel of neatness and order. Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat and orderly no woman of Eve’s daughters can compare with him. John Flint’s rooms would arouse the rabid envy of the cleanest and most scourful she in Holland itself.

Now as the months wore away there had sprung up between him, and Mary Virginia and Laurence, one of those odd comradely friendships which sometime unite the totally unlike with bonds hard to break. His spotless workroom had a fascination for the youngsters. They were always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and then again to see how those they had already brought were getting along.

The lame man was an unrivaled listener a circumstance which endeared him to youthful Laurence, in whom thoughts and the urge to express these thoughts in words rose like sap. This fresh and untainted confidence, poured out so naively, taught John Flint more than any words or prayers of mine could have done. It opened to him a world into which, his eyes had not heretofore been permitted to look; and the result was all the more sure and certain, in that the children had no faintest idea of the effect they were producing. They had no end to gain, no ax to grind; they merely spoke the truth as they knew it, and this unselfish and hopeful truthfulness aroused his interest and curiosity; it even compelled his admiration. He couldn’t dismiss this as “hot air”!

I was more than glad to have him thus taught. It was a salutary lesson, tending to temper his overweening confidence and to humble his contemptuous pride. In his own world he had been supreme, a figure of sinister importance. Brash had been crook or cop who had taught or caught Slippy McGee! But in this new atmosphere, in which he breathed with difficulty, the young had been given him for guides. They led him, where a grownup had failed.

Mary Virginia was particularly fond of him. He had as little to say to her as to Laurence, but he looked at her with interested eyes that never lost a movement; she knew he never missed a word, either; his silence was friendly, and the little girl had a pleasant fashion of taking folk for granted. Hers was one of those large natures which give lavishly, shares itself freely, but does not demand much in return. She gave with an open hand to her quiet listener her books, her music, her amusing and innocent views, her frank comments, her truthfulness, her sweet brave gaiety; and he absorbed it like a sponge. It delighted her to find and bring the proper food-plants for his cages. And she being one of those who sing while they work, you might hear her caroling like a lark, flitting about the old garden with her red setter Kerry at her heels.

Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to smoke, to buy books upon lepidoptera.

He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens were such fools he couldn’t help hating them. Madame said she liked to have him around, for he was more like some unobtrusive jinnee than a mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a “growing hand” he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and it grew like Jonah’s gourd.

Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who shared Father De Rance’s madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained to some why he had been a tramp!

Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clelie’s little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.

Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own cats might an interloping stray dog.

“The fellow’s not very prepossessing,” he told me, of an evening when he had dined with us, “but I’ve been on the bench long enough to be skeptical of any fixed good or bad type I’ve found that the criminal type is any type that goes wrong; so I shouldn’t go so far as to call this chap a bad egg. But I hope you are reasonably sure of him, father?”

“Reasonably,” said I, composedly.

“Laurence tells me Madame and Mary Virginia like the fellow. H’m! Well, I’ve acquired a little faith in the intuition of women some women, understand, and some times. And mark you, I didn’t say judgment. Let us hope that this is one of the times when faith in intuition will be justified.”

Later, when he had had time to examine the work progressing under the flexible fingers of the silent workman, he withdrew with more respect.

“I suppose he’s all right, if you think so, father. But I’d watch out for him, anyway,” he advised.

“That is exactly what I intend to do.”

“Rather he fell into your hands than mine. Better for him,” said the judge, briefly. Then he launched into an intimate talk of Laurence, and in thus talking of the boy’s future, forgot my helper.

That was it, exactly. The man was so unobtrusive without in the least being furtive. Had so little to say; attended so strictly to his own business, and showed himself so utterly and almost inhumanly uninterested in anybody else’s, that he kept in the background. He was there, and people knew it; they were, in a sense, interested in him, but not curious about him.

One morning in early autumn he had been with us then some eight or nine months I went over to his rooms with a New York newspaper in my hand. It had news that set my heart to pounding sickeningly news that at once simplified and yet complicated matters. I hesitated as to whether or not I should tell him, but decided that whatever effect that news might produce, I would deal with him openly, above board, and always with truth. He must act and judge for himself and with his eyes open. On my part there should be no concealment.

The paper stated that the body of a man found floating in the East River had been positively identified by the police as that of Slippy McGee. That the noted crook had gotten back into New York through the cunning dragnet so carefully spread for him was another proof of his daring and dexterity. How he met the dark fate which set him adrift, battered and dreadful, in the East River, was another of those underworld crimes that remain unsolved. Cunning and dangerous, mysterious in his life, baffling all efforts to get at him, he was as evilly mysterious in his death. There was only one thing sure that this dead wretch with the marks of violence upon him was Slippy McGee; and since his breath had ceased, the authorities could breathe easier.

He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the paper. A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his hand, musingly. The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust itself forward.

“Dead, huh?” he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting movement of the head. “Well I might just as well be, as buried alive in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!” Once again the Powers of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.

“What am I doing here, anyhow?” he snarled with his lips drawn back from his teeth. “Piddling with bugs Me! Patching up their dinky little wings and stretching out their dam’ little legs and feelers me being what I am, and they being what they are! Say, I’ve got to quit this, once for all I’ve got to quit it. I’m not a man any more. I’m a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing their interesting little babies. My God! Me!” And he threw his hands above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.

“Hanging on here like a boob no wonder they think I’m dead! If I could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land enough ”

“You couldn’t keep it, if you did land it your sort can’t. You know how it went before the women and the sharks got it. There’d be always that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going until you’d pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there. And there’s the drug-danger, too. If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had the strength to let drugs alone. But the drugs get you, sooner or later, do they not? Have you not told me over and over again that ‘nearly all dips are dopes’? That first the dope gets you and then the law? No. You can’t pull off anything that won’t pull you into hell. We have gone over this thing often enough, haven’t we?”

“No, we haven’t. And I haven’t had a chance to pull off anything except leaves for bugs. Me! I want to get my hand in once more, I tell you! I want to pull off a stunt that’ll make the whole bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair and I can do it, easy as easy. Think I’ve croaked, do they? And they can all snooze on their peg-posts, now I’m a stiff? Well, by cripes, I just want half of a half of a chance, and I’ll show ’em Slippy McGee’s good and plenty alive!”

“Come out into the garden, my son, and feel that you are good and plenty alive. Come out into the free air. Hold on tight, a little while longer!”

I laid my hand upon his shoulder compellingly, and although he glared at me, and ground his teeth, and lifted his lip, he came; unwillingly, swearing under his breath, he came. We tramped up and down the garden paths, up and down, and back again, his wooden peg making a round hole, like a hoofmark, in the earth. He stared down at it, spat savagely upon it, and swore horribly, but not too loudly.

“I want to feel like a live man!” he gritted. “A live man, not a one-legged mucker with a beard like a Dutch bomb-thrower’s, puttering about a skypilot’s backyard on the wrong side of everything!”

“Stick it out a little longer, John Flint; hold fast!”

“Hold fast to what?” he demanded savagely. “To a bug stuck on a needle?”

“Yes. And to me who trusts you. To Madame who likes you. To the dear child who put bug and needle into your hand because she knew it was good work and trusted your hand to do it. And more than all, to that other Me you’re finding your own true self, John Flint! Hold fast, hold fast!”

He stopped and stared at me.

“I’m believing him again!” said he, grievously. “I’ve been sat on while I was hot, and my number’s marked on me, 23. I’m hoodooed, that’s what!”

Tramp, tramp, stump, stump, up and down, the two of us.

“All right, devil-dodger,” said he wearily, after a long sullen silence. “I’ll stick it out a bit longer, to please you. You’ve been white the lot of you. But look here if I beat it some night ... with what I can find, why, I’m warning you: don’t blame me you’re running your risks, and it’ll be up to you to explain!”

“When you want to go, John Flint when you really and truly want to go, why, take anything I have that you may fancy, my son. I give it you beforehand.”

“I don’t want anything given to me beforehand!” he growled. “I want to take what I want to take without anybody’s leave!”

“Very well, then; take what you want to take, without anybody’s leave! I shall be able to do without it, I dare say.”

He turned upon me furiously:

“Oh, yes, I guess you can! You’d do without eating and breathing too, I suppose, if you could manage it! You do without too blamed much right now, trying to beat yourself to being a saint! Of course I’d help myself and leave you to go without you’re enough to make a man ache to shoot some sense into you with a cannon! And for God’s sake, who are you pinching and scraping and going without for? A bunch of hickey factory-shuckers that haven’t got sense enough to talk American, and a lot of mill-hands with beans on ’em like bone buttons! They ain’t worth it. While I’m in the humor, take it from me there ain’t anybody worth anything anyhow!”

“Oh, Mr. Flint! What a shame and a sin!” called another voice. “Oh, Mr. Flint, I’m ashamed of you!” There in the freedom of the Saturday morning sunlight stood Mary Virginia, her red Irish setter Kerry beside her.

“I came over,” said she, “to see how the baby-moths are getting on this morning, and to know if the last hairy gentleman I brought spins into a cocoon or buries himself in the ground. And then I heard Mr. Flint and what he said is unkind, and untrue, and not a bit like him. Why, everybody’s worth everything you can do for them only some are worth more.”

The wild wrath died out of his face. As usual, he softened at sight of her.

“Oh, well, miss, I wasn’t thinking of the like of you and him,” he jerked his head at me, half apologetically, “nor young Mayne, nor the little Madame. You’re different.”

“Why, no, we aren’t, really,” said Mary Virginia, puckering her brows adorably. “We only seem to be different but we are just exactly like everybody else, only we know it, and some people never can seem to find it out and there’s the difference! You see?” That was the befuddled manner in which Mary Virginia very often explained things. If God was good to you, you got a little glimmer of what she meant and was trying to tell you. Mary Virginia often talked as the alchemists used to write cryptically, abstrusely, as if to hide the golden truth from all but the initiate.

“Come and shake hands with Mr. Flint, Kerry,” said she to the setter. “I want you to help make him understand things it’s high time he should know. Nobody can do that better than a good dog can.”

Kerry looked a trifle doubtful, but having been told to do a certain thing, he obeyed, as a good dog does. Gravely he sat up and held out an obedient paw, which the man took mechanically. But meeting the clear hazel eyes, he dropped his hand upon the shining head with the gesture of one who desires to become friends. Accepting this, Kerry reached up a nose and nuzzled. Then he wagged his plumy tail.

“There!” said Mary Virginia, delightedly. “Now, don’t you see how horrid it was to talk the way you talked? Why, Kerry likes you, and Kerry is a sensible dog.”

“Yes, miss,” and he looked at Mary Virginia very much as the dog did, trustingly, but a little bewildered.

“Aren’t you sorry you said that?”

“Y-e-s, seeing you seem to think it was wrong.”

“Well, you’ll know better from now on,” said Mary Virginia, comfortingly. She looked at him searchingly for a minute, and he met her look without flinching. That had been the one hopeful sign, from the first that he never refused to meet your glance, but gave you back one just as steady, if more suspicious.

“Mr. Flint,” said Mary Virginia, “you’ve about made up your mind to stay on here with the Padre, haven’t you? For a good long while, at any rate? You wouldn’t like to leave the Padre, would you?”

He stiffened. One could see the struggle within him.

“Well, miss, I can’t see but that I’ve just got to stay on for awhile. Until he’s tired of me and my ways, anyhow,” he said gloomily.

Mary Virginia dismissed my tiredness with an airy wave of her hand. She smiled.

“Do you know,” said she earnestly, “I’ve had the funniest idea about you, from the very first time I saw you? Well, I have. I’ve somehow got the notion that you and the Padre belong. I think that’s why you came. I think you belong right here, in that darling little house, studying butterflies and mounting them so beautifully they look alive. I think you’re never going to go away anywhere any more, but that you’re going to stay right here as long as you live!”

His face turned an ugly white, and his mouth fell open. He looked at Mary Virginia almost with horror Saul might have looked thus at the Witch of Endor when she summoned the shade of Samuel to tell him that the kingdom had been rent from his hand and his fate was upon him.

Mary Virginia nodded, thoughtfully.

“I feel so sure of it,” said she, confidently, “that I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. I want you to take care of Kerry for me. You know I’m going away to school next week, and he can’t stay at home when I’m not there. My father’s away frequently, and he couldn’t take Kerry about with him, of course. And he couldn’t be left with the servants somehow he doesn’t like the colored people. He always growls at them, and they’re afraid of him. And my mother dislikes dogs intensely she’s afraid of them, except those horrible little toy-things that aren’t dogs any more.” The scorn of the real dog-lover was in her voice. “Kerry’s used to the Parish House. He loves the Padre, he’ll soon love you, and he likes to play with Pitache, so Madame wouldn’t mind his being here. And I’d be more satisfied in my mind if he were with somebody that that needed him and would like him a whole lot somebody like you,” she finished.

Now, Mary Virginia regarded Kerry even as the apple of her eye. The dog was a noble and beautiful specimen of his race, thoroughbred to the bone, a fine field dog, and the pride of the child’s heart. He was what only that most delightful of dogs, a thoroughbred Irish setter, can be. John Flint gasped. Something perplexed, incredulous, painful, dazzled, crept into his face and looked out of his eyes.

“Me?” he gasped. “You mean you’re willing to let me keep your dog for you? Yours?”

“I want to give him to you,” said Mary Virginia bravely enough, though her voice trembled. “I am perfectly sure you’ll love him better than any one else in the world would, except me myself. I don’t know why I know that, but I do know it. If you wanted to go away, later on, why, you could turn him over to the Padre, because of course you wouldn’t want to have a dog following you about everywhere. They’re a lot of bother. But somehow, I think you’ll keep him. I think you’ll love him. He he’s a darling dog.” She was too proud to turn her head aside, but two large tears rolled down her cheeks, like dew upon a rose.

John Flint stood stock-still, looking from her to the dog, and back again. Kerry, sensing that something was wrong with his little mistress, pawed her skirts and whined.

“Now I come to think of it,” said John Flint slowly, “I never had anything anything alive, I mean belong to me before.”

Mary Virginia glanced up at him shrewdly, and smiled through her tears. Her smile makes a funny delicious red V of her lower lip, and is altogether adorable and seductive.

“That’s just exactly why you thought nobody was worth anything,” she said. Then she bent over her dog and kissed him between his beautiful hazel eyes.

“Kerry, dear,” said she, “Kerry, dear Kerry, you don’t belong to me any more. I I’ve got to go away to school and you know you wouldn’t be happy at home without me. You belong to Mr. Flint now, and I’m sure he needs you, and I know he’ll love you almost as much as I do, and he’ll be very, very good to you. So you’re to stay with him, and stand by him and be his dog, like you were mine. You’ll remember, Kerry? Good-by, my dear, dear, darling dog!” She kissed him again, patted him, and thrust his collar into his new owner’s hand.

“Go good-by, everybody!” said she, in a muffled voice, and ran. I think she would have cried childishly in another moment; and she was trying hard to remember that she was growing up!

John Flint stood staring after her, his hand on the dog’s collar, holding him in. His face was still without a vestige of color, and his eyes glittered. Then his other hand crept out to touch the dog’s head.

“It’s wet where she dropped tears on it! Parson ... she’s given me her dog ... that she loves enough to cry over!”

“He’s a very fine dog, and she has had him and loved him from his puppyhood,” I reminded him. And I added, with a wily tongue: “You can always turn him over to me, you know if you decide to take to the road and wish to get rid of a troublesome companion. A dog is bad company for a man who wishes to dodge the police.”

But he only shook his head. His eyes were troubled, and his forehead wrinkled.

“Parson,” said he, hesitatingly, “did you ever feel like you’d been caught by by Something reaching down out of the dark? Something big that you couldn’t see and couldn’t ever hope to get away from, because it’s always on the job? Ain’t it a hell of a feeling?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’ve felt caught by that Something, too. And it is at first a terrifying sensation. Until you learn to be glad.”

“You’re caught and you know under your hat you’re never going to be able to get away any more. It’ll hold you till you die!” said he, a little wildly. “My God! I’m caught! First It bit off a leg on me, so I couldn’t run. Then It wished you and your bugs on me. And now Yes, sir; I’m done for. That kid got my goat this morning. My God, who’d believe it? But it’s true: I’m done for. She gave me her dog and she got my goat!”