第84章

I wanted to get away from the past. For nearly four years I had been carrying round a heart with hell in it. I had begun to forget a little, but that day it all came back. This week I met my brother. I found him dying, almost dead, up in the Big Horn Valley. That morning my heart carried hell in it. To-day it is like what I think heaven must be." As he spoke these words a light broke over his face, and again he stood silent, striving to regain control of his voice.

"Blanked if he don't hold the cards!" said "Mexico" in a thick voice to "Peachy" Budd.

"Full flush," answered "Peachy."

"Mexico" was in the grasp of the elemental emotions of his untutored nature. His swarthy face was twisted like the face of a man in torture. His black eyes were gleaming like two fires from under his shaggy eyebrows.

"How it came about," continued the doctor, in a quiet, even tone, "I am not going to tell. But this I am going to say, I know it was God's great mercy, His great kindness it was that took the hate out of my heart. I forgave my brother that day--and--God forgave me.

That's all there is to it. It's the biggest thing that has ever come to me. I have got my brother back just as when we were little chaps at the Old Mill." A sudden choke caught the speaker's voice.

The firm lips quivered and the strong hands writhed themselves in a mighty effort to master the emotions surging through his soul.

Tommy Tate was openly sniffling and wiping his eyes. "Peachy" Budd was swearing audibly his emotions, but, most of all, "Mexico's" swarthy face betrayed the intensity of his feelings. He had grasped the back of the seat before him and was leaning toward the speaker as if held under an hypnotic spell.

Again the doctor, getting his voice steady, went on. "I have just a word more to say. I would like to give credit for this that happened to me to the One we have been reading about this afternoon, and I do so with all my heart. I came near being coward enough and mean enough to go away without owning this up before you. How He did it, I do not pretend to know. I'm not a preacher.

But He did it, and that's what chiefly concerns me. And what He did for me I guess He can do for any of you. And now I've got to square up some things. 'Mexico'--" At the sound of his name "Mexico" started violently and, involuntarily, his hand went, with a quick motion, toward his hip--"I've taken a lot from you. I'd like to pay it back." The voice was humble, earnest, kind.

"Mexico," taken by surprise, shifted his tobacco to the other side of his mouth, stood up and drawled out, "Haow? Me? Pay me back?

Blanked if you do! It was a squar' deal, wa'n't it?"

"Yes, I played fair, 'Mexico,' but--"

"Then go to hell!" "Mexico's" tone was not at all unfriendly, but his vocabulary was limited, and he was evidently deeply stirred.

"We're squar' an'--an' blanked if I don't believe ye're white! Put it thar!" With a single stride "Mexico" was over the seat that separated him from the platform and reached out his hand. The doctor took it in a hard grip.

"Look here, men," he said, when "Mexico" had resumed his seat, "I've got to do something with this money. I've got at least five thousand that don't belong to me."

"'Tain't ours," called a voice.

"Men," continued the doctor, "I'm starting out on a new track. I want to straighten out the past all I can. I can't keep this money. I'd feel like a thief."

But such an ethical code was beyond the men, and one and all protested to each other, in tones that were quite audible over the hall and with anathemas of more or less terrible import, that the money was not theirs and that they would not touch it. The doctor listened for a minute or more and then, with the manner of one closing a discussion, he said, "All right. If you won't help me I'll have to find some way, myself, of straightening this up. This is all I have to say. I'm no preacher and I'm not any better than the rest of you, but I'd like to be a great deal better man than I am, and, with God's help, I'm going to try. That's my religion."

And with these words he sat down, leaving the people still staring at him and waiting for something in the way of closing exercises to what must have been the most extraordinary religious service in all their experience. Softly, Margaret began to play the old hymn, "Nearer, My God, to Thee!" The men, accepting it as a signal, rose to their feet and began to sing, and with these great words of aspiration ringing through their hearts they passed out into the night.

Among the many who lingered to speak to the doctor were "Mexico,"

"Peachy," and, of course, his faithful follower, Tommy Tate.

"Mexico" drew him off to one corner.

"Say, pard," he began, "you've done me up many a time before, but blanked if yeh haven't hit me this time the worst yet! When you was talkin' about them two little chaps--" here "Mexico's" hard face began to work and his voice to quiver--"you put the knife right in here. I had a brother once," he continued in a husky voice. "I wish to God someone had choked the blank nonsense out of me, for I done him a wrong an' I wasn't man enough to own up. An' that's what started me in all this hell business I've been chasin' ever since."

The doctor took him by the arm and walked him out of the room.

"Take Miss Robertson home," he said to Tommy as he passed.

An hour later he appeared, pale and as nearly exhausted as his iron nerve and muscle would allow him to be. "I say, Margaret, this thing is wonderful! There's no explaining it by any physical or mental law that I know." Then, after a pause, he added, with an odd thrill of tenderness in his voice, "I believe we shall hear good things of 'Mexico' yet."

And so they did, but that is another tale.