The motor slackened perceptibly. “There’s not the least danger of that.”
“Of course not—with your hands on the wheel. Go ahead—don’t slow down. You haven’t shown me yet quite what the car can do, have you?”
“Well—not quite. Pretty near, though. I knew you were a good sport. Lots of older men get nervous when we hit—what we were hitting. Not even R. P. B. drives in quite that notch—and he’s no coward. He says it’s all right, if you don’t happen to throw a tire. I never expect to throw one—not at that pace. Never have. Maybe I better not take any chances with the minister in, though.”
“Take any that you’d take for yourself,” commanded Black. Tom, diminishing his pace of necessity for a one-way bridge, glanced quickly round at his companion, to see what Black’s face might reveal that his cool speech did not. He saw no trace of fear in the clean-cut profile outlined against the almost daylight of the vivid night; instead he saw a man seemingly at ease under conditions which usually, Tom reflected, rather strung most fellows up, old or young.
Suddenly Tom spoke his mind: “You are a good sport,” he said, in his ardent young way. “They mostly aren’t, though, in your business, are they?—honestly now? You would go to war, though, wouldn’t you?”
Then he saw a change of expression indeed. Black’s lips tightened, his chin seemed to protrude more than usual—and, as we have stated before, it was a frankly aggressive chin at any time. Black’s head came round, and his eyes seemed to look straight through Tom’s into his cynical young thoughts.
“Tom,” he said—waited a bit, and then went on, slowly and with peculiar emphasis—“there’s just one thing I can never take peaceably from any man—and I don’t think I have to take it. I have the honour to belong to a profession which includes thousands of the finest men in the world—just as your friend Doctor Burns’ profession includes thousands of fine men. You—and others—never think of hitting at the profession of medicine and surgery just because you may happen to know a man here and there who isn’t a particularly worthy member of it. There are quacks and charlatans in medicine—but the profession isn’t judged by them. Is it quite fair to judge the ministry by some man you have known who didn’t seem to measure up?”
“Why—no, of course not,” admitted Tom. “It’s just that—I suppose—well—I don’t think there are so many of ’em who—who——”
“Want to drive seventy miles an hour—at midnight?”
Tom laughed boyishly. “I don’t expect that, of course. But I don’t like long prayers, to tell the truth; and most of the sermons find fault with folks because they don’t happen to come up to the preacher’s mark, and I get fed up on ’em.”