After a moment he pushed open the door without ceremony, and
entered. He bent his brows, studying the Reverend Archibald Crane,
while the latter, looking up startled, turned pink.
He was a pink little man, anyway, the Reverend Archibald Crane, and
why, in the inscrutability of its wisdom, the Church had sent him
out to influence strong, grim men, the Church in its inscrutable
wisdom only knows. He wore at the moment a cambric English
boating-hat to protect his bald head from the draught, a full
clerical costume as far as the trousers, which were of lavender,
and a pair of beaded moccasins faced with red. His weak little
face was pink, and two tufts of side-whiskers were nearly so. A
heavy gold-headed cane stood at his hand. When he heard the door
open he exclaimed, before raising his head, "My, these first flies
of the season do bother me so!" and then looked startled.
"Good-evening," greeted Ned Trent, stopping squarely in the centre
of the room.
The clergyman spread his arms along the desk's edge in
embarrassment.
"Good-evening," he returned, reluctantly. "Is there anything I can
do for you?" The visitor puzzled him, but was dressed as a
_voyageur_. The Reverend Archibald immediately resolved to treat
him as such.
"I wish to introduce myself as Ned Trent," went on the Free Trader
with composure, "and I have broken in on your privacy this evening
only because I need your ministrations cruelly."
"I am rejoiced that in your difficulties you turn to the
consolations of the Church," replied the other in the cordial tones
of the man who is always ready. "Pray be seated. He whose soul
thirsteth need offer no apology to the keeper of the spiritual
fountains."
"Quite so," replied the stranger dryly, seating himself as
suggested, "only in this case my wants are temporal rather than
spiritual. They, however, seem to me fully within the province of
the Church.^
"The Church attempts within limits to aid those who are materially
in want," assured Crane, with official dignity. "Our resources are
small, but to the truly deserving we are always ready to give in
the spirit of true giving."
"I am rejoiced to hear it," returned the young man, grimly; "you
will then have no difficulty in getting me so small a matter as a
rifle and about forty or fifty rounds of ammunition."
A pause of astonishment ensued.
"Why, really," ejaculated Crane, "I fail to see how that falls
within my jurisdiction in the slightest. You should see our
Trader, Mr. McDonald, in regard to all such things. Your request
addressed to me becomes extraordinary."
"Not so much so when you know who I am. I told you my name is Ned
Trent, but I neglected to inform you further that I am a captured
Free Trader, condemned to _la Longue Traverse_, and that I have in
vain tried to procure elsewhere the means of escape."
Then the clergyman understood. The full significance of the
intruder's presence flashed over his little pink face in a trouble
of uneasiness. The probable consequences of such a bit of charity
as his visitor proposed almost turned him sick with excitement.
"You expect to have them of me!" he cried, getting his voice at
last.
"Certainly," assured his interlocutor, crossing his legs
comfortably. "Don't you see the logic of events forces me to think
so? What other course is open to you? I am in this country
entirely within my legal rights as a citizen of the Canadian
Commonwealth. Unjustly, I am seized by a stronger power and
condemned unjustly to death. Surely you admit the injustice?"
"Well, of course you know--the customs of the country--it is hardly
an abstract question--" stammered Crane, still without grasp on the
logic of his argument "But as an abstract question the injustice is
plain," resumed the Free Trader, imperturbably. "And against plain
injustice it strikes me there is but one course open to an
acknowledged institution of abstract--and concrete--morality. The
Church must set itself against immorality, and you, as the Church's
representative, must get me a rifle."
"You forget one thing," rejoined Crane.
"What is that?"
"Such an aid would be a direct act of rebellion against authority
on my part, which would be severely punished. Of course," he
asserted, with conscious righteousness, "I should not consider that
for a moment as far ay my own personal safety is concerned. But my
cause would suffer. You forget, sir, that we are doing here a
great and good work. We have in our weekly congregational singing
over forty regular attendants from the aborigines; next year I hope
to build a church at Whale River, thus reaching the benighted
inhabitants of that distant region. All of this is a vital matter
in the service of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. You suggest
that I endanger all this in order to right a single instance of
injustice. Of course we are told to love one another, but--" he
paused.
"You have to compromise," finished the stranger for him.
"Exactly." said the Reverend Crane. "Thank you; it is exactly
that. In order to accomplish what little good the Lord vouchsafes
to our poor efforts, we are obliged to overlook many things.
Otherwise we should not be allowed to stay here at all."
"That is most interesting," agreed Ned Trent, with a rather biting
calm. "But is it not a little calculating? My slight familiarity
with religious history and literature has always led me to believe
that you are taught to embrace the right at any cost
whatsoever--that, if you give yourself unreservedly to justice, the
Lord will sustain you through all trials. I think at a pinch I
could even quote a text to that effect."
"My dear fellow," objected the Reverend Archibald in gentle
protest, "you evidently do not understand the situation at all. I
feel I should be most untrue to my trust if I were to endanger in
any way the life-long labor of my predecessor. You must be able to
see that for yourself. It would destroy utterly my usefulness
here. They'd send me away. I couldn't go on with the work, I have
to think what is for the best."
"There is some justice in what you say," admitted the stranger, "if
you persist in looking on this thing as a business proposition.
But it seems to my confessedly untrained mind that you missed the
point. 'Trust in the Lord,' saith the prophet. In fact, certain
rivals in your own field hold the doctrine you expound, and you
consider them wrong. 'To do evil that good may come' I seem to
recognize as a tenet of the Church of the Jesuits."
"I protest. I really do protest," objected the clergyman,
scandalized.
"All right," agreed Ned Trent, with good-natured contempt. "That
is not the point. Do you refuse?"
"Can't you see?" begged the other. "I'm sure you are reasonable
enough to take the case on its broader side."
"You refuse?" insisted Ned Trent.
"It is not always easy to walk straightly before the Lord, and my
way is not always clear before me, but----"
"You refuse!" cried Ned Trent, rising impatiently.
The reverend Archibald Crane looked at his catechiser with a trace
of alarm.
"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I must," he apologized.
The stranger advanced until he touched the desk on the other side
of which the Reverend Archibald was sitting, where he stood for
some moments looking down on his opponent with an almost amused
expression of contempt.
"You are an interesting little beast," he drawled, "and I've seen a
lot of your kind in my time. Here you preach every Sunday, to
whomever will listen to you, certain cut-and-dried doctrines you
don't believe practically in the least. Here for the first time
you have had a chance to apply them literally, and you hide behind
a lot of words. And while you're about it you may as well hear
what I have to say about your kind. I've had a pretty wide
experience in the North, and I know what I'm talking about. Your
work here among the Indians is rot, and every sensible man knows
it. You coop them up in your log-built houses, you force on them
clothes to which they are unaccustomed until they die of
consumption. Under your little tin-steepled imitation of
civilization, for which they are not fitted, they learn to beg, to
steal, to lie. I have travelled far, but I have yet to discover
what your kind are allowed on earth for. You are narrow-minded,
bigoted, intolerant, and without a scrap of real humanity to
ornament your mock religion. When you find you can't meddle with
other people's affairs enough at home you get sent where you can
get right in the business--and earn salvation for doing it. I
don't know just why I should say this to you, but it sort of does
me good to tell it. Once I heard one of your kind tell a sorrowing
mother that her little child had gone to hell because it had died
before he--the smug hypocrite--had sprinkled its little body with a
handful of water. There's humanity for you! It may interest you
to know that I thrashed that man then and there. You are all
alike; I know the breed. When there is found a real man among
you--and there are such--he is so different in everything,
including his religion, as to be really of another race. I came
here without the slightest expectation of getting what I asked for.
As I said before, I know your breed, and I know just how well your
two-thousand-year-old doctrines apply to practical cases. There is
another way, but I hated to use it. You'd take it quick enough, I
dare say. Here is where I should receive aid. I may have to get
it where I should not. You a man of God! Why, you poor little
insect, I can't even get angry at you!"
He stood for a moment looking at the confused and troubled
clergyman. Then he went out.