"I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw. He will agree that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an example should be made of Nicholas and of his father."
"And yet you nursed the old man and were kind to him, I believe, after the offense."
"I—I thought you had killed him. But even you must see that we cannot have a man received here as Nicholas was—the most favoured child of the mission—who helps to perpetuate the degrading blasphemies of his unhappy race. It's nothing to you; you even encourage—"
"'Pon my soul—" But Brother Paul struck in with an impassioned earnestness:
"We spend a life-time making Christians of these people; and such as you come here, and in a week undo the work of years."
"I—I?"
"It's only eighteen months since I myself came, but already I've seen—" The torrent poured out with never a pause. "Last summer some white prospectors bribed our best native teacher to leave us and become a guide. He's a drunken wreck now somewhere up on the Yukon Flats. You take our boys for pilots, you entice our girls away with trinkets—"
"Great Caesar! I don't."
But vain was protest. For Brother Paul the visitor was not a particular individual. He stood there for the type of the vicious white adventurer.
The sunken eyes of the lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but—The Enemy! against whom night and day he waged incessant warfare.