“You’ve got no call to speak disrespectful of Mr. Farrar, Joe. I’ve been goin’ to hear him myself. Take it from me, he’s the straight goods.”
“Right you are, Bill!” exclaimed another one of the company, and a half dozen voices echoed approval. Then a man, seated with a group at a table, rose unsteadily to his feet and lifted a half-drained glass in the air.
“I drink,” he shouted, “to health of rev’ren’ ’piscopal preasher. Frien’ o’ labor. Who joins me?”
Every glass was raised, and all of the men seated rose to take part in the tribute.
“Come, Steve!” shouted one; “take a nip to the preacher.”
But Lamar shook his head defiantly.
“Not I,” he said. “You fellows can drink your empty heads off to him if you want to. But I say that any one who pretends to be a friend to the laboring man just to get a chance to steer him into a capitalistic church is a damned hypocrite!”
The lone man in the corner brought his glass down on the table with a crash.
“Take that back, Steve!” he shouted. “You’ve got no right to say that, an’ it’s a lie. He’s no hypocrite. I know. Why, boys, what you think that preacher done when my Tommy was sick an’ died with the black fever last spring, an’ you, Steve Lamar, and every mother’s son of you here, was too damn scared o’ your lives to come within a mile o’ the house. He held my boy’s hand whilst he was a-dyin’; that’s what he done, an’ he come there an’ read the funeral business when my own brother was afraid to come into the yard; an’ the missus would crawl a hundred miles on her hands and knees to-night to do the least kindness to the preacher with a heart in him. Oh, to hell with your knockin’!”
For a moment following this impassioned speech there was utter silence in the room; then came a roar of applause, and in the midst of it some one shouted: “Drink! To the preacher with a heart in ’im! Drink!”