When he had done talking and when she had done building her edifice from his words, she shook her head over it. It wasn’t straight. In some ways it pleased her, as, for instance, the liquor business. She had sympathy with that, but the larceny appealed to her not as an act of piracy but theft. T. C. would have been smothered in a judge’s wig, but she would have made an excellent judge for all that. Candon was now clearly before her, the man and his actions; he had been frank as day with her, he was a repentant sinner, and to cap all he had saved her, at all events in intention, from Chinese slavers. His size and his sailor simplicity appealed to her.
All the same, her sense of right refused to be stirred by the blue eyes of Candon, by his size, his simplicity, his patent daring, by the something or other that made her like him even better than Hank or George, by the fact that he had carried her off on his shoulder against her will and in the face of destruction—and absurdity.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” said Tommie. “I don’t want to rub it in, but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have got mixed up with that McGinnis crowd. What made you?”
“You’ve put your finger on it,” said Candon. “I don’t know what made me. Want of steering.”
“Well,” said Tommie, “you wish you hadn’t, don’t you?”
“You bet.”
“Well then, you’re half out of the hole. D’you ever say your prayers?”
“Me! no—” Candon laughed. “Lord, no—I’ve never been given that way.”
“Maybe if you had you wouldn’t have got into this hole—or maybe you would. No telling,” said Tommie. “I’m no praying beetle myself, but I regularly ask the Lord for protection. You want it in the movies. Dope and a broken neck is what I’m afraid of. I don’t mind being killed, but I don’t want to be killed suddenly or fall for cocaine or whisky, the way some do. Well, I guess work is praying sometimes and I shouldn’t wonder but you’ll have some praying to do with your fists, getting the sand off that stuff. And when you’ve sent it back to its owners, you’ll have prayed yourself clear—that’s my ’pinion.”
“I’ve got something else to tell you,” said Candon, “I reckon you don’t know me yet, anyhow you’ve got to have the lot now I’ve begun.”