Mike pulled himself together sufficiently to reply:
“I don’t think ye’re quite all them things. Cheer up! cheer up, old fellow!”
Noxon did not speak, but slowly swayed his head from side to side, like one from whom all hope had departed. Mike drew a chair beside him, and as tenderly as a mother lifted the white hand from where it lay on the handkerchief, and held it in his own warm grasp.
“Noxy, me bye, Mike Murphy is yer frind through thick and thin—don’t ye forget that—and I’m going to see ye through this if I have to break a thrace in trying.”
“You!” repeated the despairing one, looking up in Mike’s honest blue eyes. “No one can save a wretch like me. I’m not worth saving!”
“Ye forget there’s One to whom the same is aisy, me bye. Ye feel down in the mouth jest now, as Jonah did respicting the whale, but bimeby this fog will clear away and the sun will shine forth again. I’ve been in some purty bad scrapes mesilf and He niver desarted me. Why, it ain’t two hours, since He raiched out His hand, grabbed me by the neck and saved me from drowning. I tell ye, Noxy, that He won’t fail ye.”
“But you never did what I have done.”
The Irish youth bent his head as if recalling his past life.
“I can’t say that I did, but I’m the meanest scamp that iver lived—barring yersilf,” he added, with the old twinkle in his eyes. “Come, now, be a man and we’ll have ye out of this scrape as quick as I jumped awhile ago whin I awoke to the fact that me trousers was afire.”
Noxon actually smiled at the recollection.