Chapter 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' hell 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. Nobody 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 assertion 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.

"Have a little something soft?"

"I wouldn't take a glass of water over your dirty bar," Higgins is said to have roared, "if I died of thirst!"

The man will not compromise.

* * * * *

To all these men, as well as to the lumber-jacks, the Pilot gives his help and carries his message: to all the loggers and lumber-jacks and road-monkeys and cookees and punk-hunters and wood-butchers and swamp-men and teamsters and bull-cooks and the what-nots of the woods, and the gamblers and saloon-keepers and panderers and bartenders (and a host of filthy little runners and pullers-in and small thieves) of the towns. He has no abode near by, no church; he preaches in bunk-houses, and sleeps above saloons and in the little back rooms of hotels and in stables and wherever a blanket may be had in the woods. He ministers to nobody else: just to men like these. To women, too: not to many, perhaps, but still to those whom the pale men of the towns find necessary to their gain. To women like Nellie, in swiftly failing health, who could not escape (she said) because she had lost the knack of dressing in any other way. She beckoned him, aboard train, well aware of his profession; and when Higgins had listened to her ordinary little story, her threadbare, pathetic little plea to be helped, he carried her off to some saving Refuge for such as she. To women like little Liz, too, whose consumptive hand Higgins held while she lay dying alone in her tousled bed in the shuttered Fifth Red House.

"Am I dyin', Pilot?" she asked.

"Yes, my girl," he answered.

"Dyin'--_now?_"

Higgins said again that she was dying; and little Liz was dreadfully frightened then--and began to sob for her mother with all her heart.

I conceive with what tenderness the big, kind, clean Higgins comforted her--how that his big hand was soft and warm enough to serve in that extremity. It is not known to me, of course; but I fancy that little Liz of the Fifth Red House died more easily--more hopefully--because of the proximity of the Pilot's clear, uplifted soul.