A soft shuffle of feet on the sawdust floor, and the gray figures in the room melted like mist from a breath, as if the rushing in of the outside air had blown them all into rings of smoke and carried them away. Mysterious doors opened and closed as if they had not been, and the room was quiet and deserted, the proprietor and his assistant reading the sporting pages with their feet on a table when the cop swung along and looked in:
“Business pretty poor t’night, Jake,” he said with a significant look around.
“Yas, Cap’n, pretty poor. Beats all how a man’s goin’ to live ef this here prohibition keeps up. Have a glass o’ sody, Cap’n? Sorry I ain’t got nothin’ better to offer ya.”
Out in the night gray figures melted into black shadows, and a low voice murmured: “Behind the hazel—”
And out at sea a revenue cutter paced the coast, and a little black boat with a silent crew and no lights, dropped down after a long wait behind the horizon and stole away, hovered back to watch, and stole away again just before the dawning.
CHAPTER XIII
Joyce did not get up as early as she had planned. She had been utterly worn out with the experiences of the last two days and human flesh will have its revenge. The sun stole into her little casement windows, and laid warm fingers on her brown hair, but she did not feel them. She was sleeping deeply. It was the grocery boy with the little yellow Ford from the store across the way that finally reached her consciousness. He was possessed of a clear, sharp whistle, and a jazzy tenor voice and when he was not using one he was using the other while he unloaded boxes from the freight station.
Joyce roused at last, rubbed her eyes and looked around, for a moment forgetting where she was. The little house was full of sweet air and brilliant sunshine, and in the maples overhead two robins were singing with all their might. The world sounded cheerful and busy and she felt rested and more ready for life than when she had crept between her newspapers the night before.
As her eyes wandered over her own painted walls suddenly she saw the two five dollar bills pinned there, waving a little in the morning breeze. Where could they have come from? Had some one, a former occupant, pinned them there for safe-keeping while at work? And must she waste her valuable time going out to hunt for the owner? Then she spied the ragged edge of one bill, and a crooked tear half way across, and noticed that the other was crisp and new. These must be the bills she had paid the men for their work! That tear was unmistakable. She had been afraid it would tear all the way across before she got rid of it. The other two bills she had used had been crisp and new. She remembered that the man who drove the truck got a crisp, new one. It was the two older men who had left this money for her. The kindly spirit of the rough workmen drew sudden tears to her eyes. To think that such a beautiful act should be done by rough workingmen who were utter strangers to her. Gentlemen at heart they were. Ah, more than that, God’s men. Surely her Heavenly Father, knowing her need, had let them be his ministers. She knelt suddenly beside the wooden box and prayed a blessing on the men, and a thanksgiving to the Father who had thus given His help, and arose feeling strengthened. Somehow the nearness of God her Father, Christ her Companion had become real to her in a new sense. Some might have said this little bit of money came from the kindness of humanity, and proved nothing about an overruling God. Joyce knew better. She had the inner witness in her soul that God was with her, the spiritual sense that comes to those, and those only, who believe, and who yield their lives to leading because of that belief, which becomes Faith, the Faith of our fathers. Because Faith is the gift of God in answer to our deliberate act of belief. Joyce had no question but that her Father’s hand was in every happening of her life and had one suggested that all these things would have happened anyway, whether she believed, or prayed or not, she would have merely smiled as at one who is talking about something he does not understand. So simply had she been taught in the Faith while she was yet a little child, and so deeply and truly had the Faith grown within her year by year.