Higgins, a Man's Christian

The Big Scotchman presently wanted whiskey.

“No,” said the Pilot; “you stay right here.”

The Big Scotchman got up to dress.

“Nothing to wear,” said the Pilot.

Then the fight was on again. It was a long fight–merely a physical thing in the beginning, but a fight of another kind before the day was done. And the Pilot won. When the Big Scotchman got up from his knees he took the Pilot’s hand and said that, by God’s help, he would live better than he had lived. Moreover, he was as good as his word. Presently White Pine knew him no more; but news of his continuance in virtue not long ago came down to the Pilot from the north. It was what the Pilot calls a real reformation and conversion. It seems that there is a difference.

We had gone the rounds of the saloons in Deer River, and had returned late at night to the hotel. The Pilot was very busy–he is always busy, from early morning until the last sot drops unconscious to the bar-room floor, when, often, the real day’s work begins; he is one of the hardest workers in any field of endeavor. And he was now heart-sick because of what he had seen that night; but he was not idle–he was still shaking hands with his parishioners in the bar-room, still advising, still inspiring, still scolding and beseeching, still holding private conversations in the corners, for all the world like a popular and energetic politician on primary day.

A curious individual approached me.

“Friend of the Pilot’s?” said he.

I nodded.

“He’s a good man.”

I observed that the stranger was timid and slow–a singular fellow, with a lean face and nervous hands and clear but most unsteady eyes. He was like an old hulk repainted.

“He done me a lot of good,” he added, in a slow, soft drawl, hardly above a whisper, at the same time slowly smoothing his chin.

It was a pleasant thing to hear.

“They used to call me Brandy Bill,” he continued. He pointed to a group of drunkards lying on the floor. “I used to be like that,” said he, looking up like a child who perceives that he is interesting. After a pause, he went on: “But once when the snakes broke out on me I made up my mind to quit. And then I went to the Pilot and he stayed with me for a while, and told me I had to hang on. I thought I could do it if the boys would leave me alone. So the Pilot told me what to do. ‘Whenever you come into town,’ says he, ‘you go on to your sister’s and borrow her little girl.’ Her little girl was just four years old then. ‘And,’ says the Pilot, ‘don’t you never come down street without her.’ Well, I done what the Pilot said. I never come down street without that little girl hanging on to my hand; and when she was with me not one of the boys ever asked me to take a drink. Yes,” he drawled, glancing at the drunkards again, “I used to be like that. Pretty near time,” he added, like a man displaying an experienced knowledge, “to put them fellows in the snake-room.”

Such a ministry as the Pilot’s springs from a heart of kindness–from a pure and understanding love of all mankind. “Boys,” said he, once, in the superintendent’s office, after the sermon in the bunk-house, “I’ll never forget a porterhouse steak I saw once. It was in Duluth. I’d been too busy to have my breakfast, and I was hungry. I’m a big man, you know, and when I get hungry I’m hungry. Anyhow, I wasn’t thinking about that when I saw the steak. It didn’t occur to me that I was hungry until I happened to glance into a restaurant window as I walked along. And there I saw the steak. You know how they fix those windows up: a chunk of ice and some lettuce and a steak or two and some chops. Well, boys, all at once I got so hungry that I ached. I could hardly wait to get in there.

“But I stopped.

“‘Look here, Higgins,’ thought I, ‘what if you didn’t have a cent in your pocket?’

“Well, that was a puzzler. ‘What if you were a dead-broke lumber-jack, and hungry like this?’

“Boys, it frightened me. I understood just what those poor fellows suffer. And I couldn’t go in the restaurant until I had got square with them.

“‘Look here, Higgins,’ I thought, ‘the best thing you can do is to go and find a hungry lumber-jack somewhere and feed him.’

“And I did, too; and I tell you, boys, I enjoyed my dinner.”

It is a ministry that wins good friends, and often in unexpected places: friends like the lumber-jack (once an enemy) who would clear a way for the Pilot in town, shouting, “I’m road-monkeying for the Pilot!” and friends like the Blacksmith.

Higgins came one night to a new camp where an irascible boss was in complete command.

“You won’t mind, will you,” said he, “if I hold a little service for the boys in the bunk-house to-night?”

The boss ordered him to clear out.

“All I want to do,” Higgins protested, mildly, “is just to hold a little service for the boys.”

Again the boss ordered him to clear out: but Higgins had come prepared with the authority of the proprietor of the camp.

“I’ve a pass in my pocket,” he suggested.

“Don’t matter,” said the boss; “you couldn’t preach in this camp if you had a pass from God Almighty!”

To thrash or not to thrash? that was the Pilot’s problem; and he determined not to thrash, for he knew very well that if he thrashed the boss the lumber-jacks would lose respect for the boss and jump the camp. The Blacksmith, however, had heard–and had heard much more than is here written. Next morning he involved himself in a quarrel with the boss; and having thrashed him soundly, and having thrown him into a snowbank, he departed, but returned, and, addressing himself to that portion of the foreman which protruded from the snow, kicked it heartily, saying: “There’s one for the Pilot. And there’s another–and another. I’ll learn you to talk to the Pilot like a drunken lumber-jack. There’s another for him. Take that–and that–for the Pilot.”

Subsequently Higgins preached in those camps.

XVI

THE WAGES OF SACRIFICE

One asks, Why does Higgins do these things? The answer is simple: Because he loves his neighbor as himself–because he actually does, without self-seeking or any pious pretence. One asks, What does he get out of it? I do not know what Higgins gets. If you were to ask him, he would say, innocently, that once, when he preached at Camp Seven of the Green River Works, the boys fell in love with the singing. Jesus, Lover of My Soul, was the hymn that engaged them. They sang it again and again; and when they got up in the morning, they said: “Say, Pilot, let’s sing her once more!” They sang it once more–in the bunk-house at dawn–and the boss opened the door and was much too amazed to interrupt. They sang it again. “All out!” cried the boss; and the boys went slowly off to labor in the woods, singing, Let me to Thy bosom fly! and, Oh, receive my soul at last!– diverging here and there, axes and saws over shoulder, some to the deeper forest, some making out upon the frozen lake, some pursuing the white roads–all passing into the snow and green and great trees and silence of the undefiled forest which the Pilot loves–all singing as they went, Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on Thee– until the voices were like sweet and soft-coming echoes from the wilderness.

Poor Higgins put his face to the bunk-house door and wept.

“I tell you, boys,” he told us, on the road from Six to Four, “it was pay for what I’ve tried to do for the boys.”

Later–when the Sky Pilot sat with his stockinged feet extended to a red fire in the superintendent’s log-cabin of that bitterly cold night–he betrayed himself to the uttermost. “Do you know, boys,” said he, addressing us, the talk having been of the wide world and travel therein, “I believe you fellows would spend a dollar for a dinner and never think twice about it!”

We laughed.

“If I spent more than twenty-five cents,” said he, accusingly, “I’d have indigestion.”

Again we laughed.

“And if I spent fifty cents for a hotel bed,” said he, with a grin, “I’d have the nightmare.”

That is exactly what Higgins gets out of it.

Higgins gets more than that out of it: he gets a clean eye and sound sleep and a living interest in life. He gets even more: he gets the trust and affection of almost–almost–every lumber-jack in the Minnesota woods. He wanders over two hundred square miles of forest, and hardly a man of the woods but would fight for his Christian reputation at a word. For example, he had pulled Whitey Mooney out of the filth and nervous strain of the snake-room, and reestablished him, had paid his board, had got him a job in a near-by town, had paid his fare, had taken him to his place; but Whitey Mooney had presently thrown up his job (being a lazy fellow), and had fallen into the depths again, had asked Higgins for a quarter of a dollar for a drink or two, and had been denied. Immediately he took to the woods; and in the camp he came to be complained that Higgins had “turned him down.”

“You’re a liar,” they told him. “The Pilot never turned a lumber-jack down. Wait till he comes.”

Higgins came.

“Pilot,” said a solemn jack, rising, when the sermon was over, as he had been delegated, “do you know Mooney?”

“Whitey Mooney?”

“Yes. Do you know Whitey Mooney?”

“You bet I do, boys!”

“Did–you–turn–him–down?”