“If it leaks out that we still walk out together,” said Jimmy Dodson, “I am done for socially, and I shall lose my three hundred a year.”
On the other hand William Jordan’s constant fear was lest his friend in a moment of unguarded impetuosity should pass through the shop and penetrate over the threshold of the little room.
“Jimmy,” he said, with that directness of speech which was his recent possession, “I would urge upon you never to pass beyond the threshold of the little room in which I and my father dwell, until that hour should come wherein you are told to enter.”
“I promise, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, assenting readily, “and I ask you not to breathe it to a living soul that we still walk out together. Really I don’t know why we do. I seem to be taking my life in my hand, yet I feel as though I haven’t the power to help myself. The fact is I can’t do without you, Luney.”
However, the time was at hand when these evening excursions were much curtailed. In the course of his daily wanderings abroad, the young man in his new and high courage, found himself on one occasion in a dreadful slum in the eastern part of the great city. Once before in the early days of his childhood when, holding the hand of his father, he was wont to go forth to seek knowledge, he had found himself in this dismal place. And such was the terror it aroused in him that his dreams were haunted for many nights. But this day he traversed these regions, which he had never thought to dare to enter again, calmly, fearlessly and alone.
And in the middle of the most noisome part of the slum, he observed a stalwart man in a shabby black coat, and a very old hat, and trousers frayed at the end, and ugly and misshapen shoes with their strings hanging loose, talking to two ragged and filthy urchins whose bare legs were plastered with mud, who were revelling in the gutter.
The young man stood a little apart watching these three until the boys went away, and then he approached the man and said as he took off his hat: “I beg your pardon, sir, but I would like to help you in your labours. I would like to instruct those children in reading and writing, and in other simple arts in which they seem to be deficient.”
The man was frankly pleased by this address.
“Come to-night to the mission at half-past eight,” he said brusquely, “and we will find work for your hands. See, there is the mission.” He pointed across the street to a grimy building of mean exterior, with a lamp over the door.
Accompanied by James Dodson, who left him at the door, the young man came to the mission at half-past eight that evening. Thenceforward every night of the week, he came there at the same hour and in the same company. At the end of a month, the stalwart man, who was somewhat grim of aspect, and rather rough of manner, and who was spoken of as “The Boss,” said: “I don’t know whether you are aware of it, Jordan, but already you have made a difference to us. We other fellows will be getting jealous. You have something that has been given to none of us.”