THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW WAY

WHEN next Haddon and his wife met at the breakfast table Haddon was more than ordinarily out of sorts, his wife rather more than ordinarily grave and silent. At length he flung back from the table.

“Well, don’t it beat the devil,” said he, “how ungrateful some people are! Here our hill-billy turns up missing this morning. Where do you suppose he is?”

“I fancy he’ll find his way back. Perhaps we’ll hear from him soon.” She spoke quietly, not evincing any of her own uneasiness over Joslin’s disappearance.

“You seem to have a very good notion of him and his ways! I’ll say he didn’t have much politeness about him—just to pull his freight without a word of thanks. He may have left town for all I know.”

“He’s a strange man in some ways!”

“Well, if he’s gone, he’s thrown over the best chance he ever had in his life. He didn’t have a cent when we picked him up. I think he was a nut, that’s what I think he was, talking about starting a college when he didn’t have the price of a pair of shoes to his name. Why, our Company’d build him a half-dozen colleges if he’d come along with us. I just wanted a little more talk with him, and here he’s gone, no one knows where.”

“I gave him the name of a little school out in the town where I was born—don’t you know—Brandon College?”

“Well, Brandon, Ohio, don’t happen to be on the map of New York or the Cumberland Land and Mineral Company.” He was scowling, his red face puffy, unlovable.

“Good-by,” he concluded abruptly. “I’ve got to get downtown to a meeting—and I’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. This Kentucky friend of yours has put me in strictly Dutch.”

Without further salutation he turned to the hall door. She rose, sighing, and passed out of the room.

At just about the moment that the foregoing conversation was taking place in Haddon’s home, another interview was advancing, in the smoking room of a west-bound passenger train heading from the city. Of the speakers one was a grizzled old passenger conductor who had spent his life on the line, who stood now regarding a tall raw-boned young man, whom he had been obliged to accost for a second time, so much absorbed did he seem in a certain book over which he was poring.

“Tick-ets, please!”

“Good mornin’,” said the young man, looking up. “I didn’t buy any ticket, sir, because I didn’t have no money. They let me through the gate in the crowd.”

“Well,” said the conductor, “you’ve no business here without one. Where do you want to go?”

“I’m a-goin’ to Brandon, Ohio,” replied the young man, his fingers now between the pages of his closed book. “I’ve got thirty-five cents to my name.”

“Brandon, Ohio—on thirty-five cents! What do you think we are?”

“I didn’t expect ye to carry me all the way to Brandon fer that much,” replied David Joslin. “I only wanted to git out into the aidge of town if I could, so I could find work. Please put me down whar thar’s a brickyard, an’ I kin work my way. I’m a-goin’ out thar to study to be a preacher, ye see.”

The gray old railway conductor looked at him steadily for a time. There was something so frank in the gray eyes that all he could do was to shake his head. “I’ll see you when I’ve finished making my train,” he growled, frowning; but he purposely delayed until after the train was more than two hundred miles west of the city!

“Well, young man,” said he then, “I guess you’d better get off about here. My run ends here. This is quite a manufacturing town, and you can get work in a brickyard, or most any place, I should think. Lord knows, labor’s scarce enough so that anyone can find work who really wants to work.”

“I thank ye very much, sir,” said David Joslin, simply. “Ye’ve been right kind to me. I believe the Lord will bless ye.”

The conductor, abashed, made no reply whatever, but stood looking after him as he slowly strode up the station platform, his gaze this way and that.

The kindly advice of the railroad man proved useful Before mid-afternoon Joslin had once more engaged in day labor in one of the brickyards of this place, a city devoted to manufacturing interests. He was delighted to find that here his wages would be as much as a dollar and a half a day. The foreman showed him a row of little buildings where, among foreigners of all sorts, it might be possible to get quarters and food sufficient to keep soul and body together. Here, then, in a little room half lighted by flaring gas light, within the sound of profanity and continuous card-playing, David Joslin sat down for his first evening alone in the great world of the Outside.

He began his daily practice of copying the letters of the alphabet, using a piece of brown paper which he had found, and the stub of a broken pencil. Having completed a certain amount of this exercise, he turned to the pages of his book, laboriously to read, as best he could, the words of old John Calvin, written long ago, about Eve, and the Garden, and the Serpent and the first great Sin.

He read until he slept even as he sat. But as he slept he dreamed and started moaning. He felt on him all the weight of the original Sin.