“Finished my job yesterday,” said Morton, “and am here just long enough to pick up my things. Shall go to-morrow morning.”
“And start in for another stiff year’s work,” said the preacher. “Well, Mort, you’ve made a summer of it. I hope things’ll ease up for you sometime, and they will, they will.”
The young man lifted his head with an impatient movement. “I wish people wouldn’t pity me for having to work,” he said. “I don’t care how hard I work. It’s the easiest thing there is.”
Some fine wrinkles had gathered in the preacher’s forehead. “Yes,” he said, with his eyes still on Morton’s face. “It’s a good deal easier than wanting work and not getting it, for instance. Plenty of folks could tell you that.”
There was a touch of contempt mingled now with the impatience in Morton’s voice. “I never was a bit afraid but I could get all the work I wanted,” he said. “Give me my head and hands, and I’ll take care of that.”
“And not be so proud of yourself for doing it maybe, when you get to my age,” said the preacher. Then dropping into his bit of a drawl, he added: “But there are things that ain’t so easy to come by, eh, Mort? It’s a fact, man. But ‘Faint-heart never won fair lady,’ nor anything else worth having.”
A flush rose in Morton’s face and he sent a quick look at the preacher. The shrewd gray eyes were looking at him kindly.
“And Stout-heart doesn’t win them either, sometimes,” he said bitterly.
“Oh, it’s chance, it’s chance, the way things happen!”
The preacher laid his hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. “No, Mort,” he said with a peculiar gentleness in his voice, “Stout-heart doesn’t win them always. We fail of them sometimes with all our trying. God knows how I’ve wanted some things I’ve missed. But there’s one thing we needn’t miss,—the Lord himself stands to that,—courage to meet what comes, strength to go without, if we must, and not be broken by it.”