Higgins Part 3

There was no shooting.

Further to ill.u.s.trate the ease with which the lumber-jack may be robbed, I must relate that last midwinter, in the office of a Deer River hotel, the Pilot was greeted with hilarious affection by a boy of twenty or thereabouts who had a moment before staggered out from the bar-room.

The youngster was having an immensely good time, it seemed; he was full of laughter and wit and song--not yet quite full of liquor. It was snowing outside, I recall, and a bitter wind was blowing from the north; but it was warm and light in the office--bright, and cosy, and companionable: very different, indeed, from the low, stifling, crowded, ill-lit bunk-houses of the camps, nor was his elation like the weariness of those places. There were six men lying drunk on the office floor-in grotesque att.i.tudes, very drunk, stretched out and snoring where they had fallen.

"Boy," demanded the Pilot, "where's your money?"

The young lumber-jack said that it was in the safe-keeping of the bartender.

"How much you got left?"

"Oh, I got lots yet," was the happy reply.

Presently the boy went away, and presently he reeled back again, and put a hand on the Pilot's shoulder.

"Near all in?" asked the Pilot.

"I came here yesterday morning with a hundred and twenty-three dollars," said the boy, very drunkenly, "and I give it to the bartender to keep for me, and I'm told I got two-thirty left."

He was quite content; but Higgins knew that the money of which they were robbing him was needed at his home, a day's journey to the east of Deer River.

There is no pleasure thereabout (they say) but the spree, and the end of the spree is the snake-room for by far the most of the merry-makers--r a penniless condition for all--pneumonia for many--and for the survivors a beggared, reeling return to the hard work of the woods.

Higgins is used to picking over the bodies of drunken men in the snake-room heaps--of entering sadly, but never reluctantly (he said), in search of men who have been sorely wounded in brawls, or are taken with pneumonia, or in whom there remains hope of regeneration. He carries them off on his back to lodgings--or he wheels them away in a barrow--and he washes them and puts them to bed and (sometimes angrily) restrains them until their normal minds return. It has never occurred to him, probably, that this is an amazing exhibition of primitive Christian feeling and practice. He may have thought of it, however, as a glorious opportunity for service, for which he should devoutly and humbly give thanks to Almighty G.o.d.

VIII

TOUCHING PITCH

Not long ago Bemidji was what the Pilot calls "the worst town on the map." It was indescribably lawless and vicious. An adequate description would be unprintable. The government--the police and magistrates--was wholly in the hands of the saloon-keeping element. It was a thoroughly noisome settlement. The town authorities laughed at the Pilot; the state authorities gently listened to him and conveniently forgot him, for political reasons. But he was determined to cleanse the place of its established and flaunting wickednesses. He organized a W. C. T. U.; and then--"Boys," said he to the keepers of places, "I'm going to clean you out. I want to be fair to you--and so I tell you. Don't you ever come sneaking up to me and say I didn't give you warning!" They laughed at him when he stripped off his coat and got to work. In the bar-rooms the toast was, "T' Higgins--and t' h.e.l.l with Higgins!" and down went the red liquor. But when the fight was over, when the shutters were up for good--so had he compelled the respect of these men--they came to the preacher, saying: "Higgins, you gave us a show; you fought us fair--and we want to shake hands."

"That's all right, boys," said Higgins.

"Will you shake hands?"

"Sure, I'll shake hands, boys!"

Jack Worth--that notorious gambler and saloon-keeper of Bemidji--quietly approached Higgins.

"Frank," said he, "you win; but I've no hard feelings."

"That's all right, Jack," said Higgins.

The Pilot remembered that he had sat close to the death-bed of the young motherless son of this same Jack Worth in the room above the saloon.

They had been good friends--the big Pilot and the boy. And Jack Worth had loved the boy in a way that only Higgins knew. "Papa," said the boy, at this time, death being then very near, "I want you to promise me something." Jack Worth listened. "I want you to promise me, papa,"

the boy went on, "that you'll never drink another drop in all your life." Jack Worth promised, and kept his promise; and Jack Worth and the preacher had preserved a queer friendship since that night.

"Jack," said the Pilot, now, "what you going to do?"

"I don't know, Frank."

"Aren't you going to quit this dirty business."

"I ran a square game in my house, and you know it," the gambler replied.

"That's all right, Jack," Higgins said; "but look here, old man, isn't little Johnnie _ever_ going to pull you out of this?"

"Maybe, Frank," was the reply. "I don't know."

The gamblers, the bartenders, the little pickpockets are as surely the Pilot's parishioners as anybody else, and they like and respect him.

n.o.body is excluded from his ministry. I recall that Higgins was late one night writing in his little room. There came a knock on the door-a loud, angry demand--a forewarning of trouble, to one who knows about knocks (as the Pilot says). Higgins opened, of course, and discovered a big bartender, new to the town--a bigger man than he, and a man with a fighting reputation. The object of the quarrelsome visit was perfectly plain: the preacher braced himself for combat.

"You Higgins?"

"Higgins is my name."

"Did you ever say that if it came to a row between the gamblers of this town and the lumber-jacks that you'd fight with the lumber-jacks?"

Higgins looked the man over.

"Well," snarled the visitor, "how about it?"

"Well, my friend," replied the Pilot, laying off his coat, "_I guess you're my man!_" and advanced with guard up.

"I'm no gambler," the visitor hastily explained. "I'm a bartender."

"Don't matter," said Higgins. "You're my man just the same. I meant bartenders, too."

"Well," said the bartender, "I just come up to ask you a question."

Higgins attended.

"Are men made by conditions," the bartender propounded, "or do conditions make men?"

There ensued the hottest kind of an argument. It turned out that the man was a Socialist--a propagandist who had come to Deer River to sow the seed (he said). I have forgotten what the Pilot's contention was; but, at any rate, it dodged the general issue and concerned itself with the specific question of whether or not conditions at Deer River made saloon-keepers and gamblers and worse and bartenders--the affirmative of which he held to be an abominable opinion. They carried the argument to the bar-room, where, one on each side of the dripping bar, they disputed until daylight, Higgins at times loudly taunting his opponent with the a.s.sertion that a bartender could do nothing but shame Socialism in the community. It ended in this amicable agreement: that the bartender was privileged to attempt the persuasion of Higgins to Socialism, and that Higgins was permitted to practise upon the bartender without let or hindrance with a view to his conversion.

"Have a drink?" said the bartender.

"Wh--what!" exclaimed the Pilot.