"What you say about me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made here in Springville as anywhere. Sit down again and let's dig a little deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English way of describing things; don't you?"
Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I shall pass over them lightly. Each day, though he did not tell me in detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no success. He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat. But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he threw up his hands.
"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind. It's simply wretched—miserable!"
"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded him.
"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both of them put together," he asserted soberly. "It involves the entire fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization. The Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or it isn't—one of the two. If it falls in its mission it is a hollow mockery; a thing beneath contempt. I go to my fellow Christians with a simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get? I am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that society must be protected, and all that!"
"The mills of the gods," I suggested.
"Nothing of the sort! It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of things. Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah! Assuming that you really did the thing for which you were punished—and I don't believe you did—is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we profess? But I mustn't be unfair. Perhaps the fault is partly mine, after all. Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."
"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.
"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least. Just the same, the wretched fact remains. You might be the biggest villain unhung—if only you hadn't passed through the courts and the penitentiary. As you thought probably was the case, your story is known all over town; though how it has got such a wide publication in so short a time is more than I can fathom. Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I mentioned your name. The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate mountain standing squarely in the way; and I—I haven't the faith needful for its removal!"
Being under the deepest obligation to this dear young fellow who was bruising himself for me, I said what I could to lighten his burden. But in the midst of it he got up and reached for his hat and overcoat.