Pippin did not go to bed. He had had little sleep for several nights; this last night he had had none. Excitement and emotion had run riot through him for twenty-four hours, and for the first time in his life he had turned from his food. These things, added to the lightning stroke of Mary's revelation and the strangeness of her manner in making it, brought about a condition which Pippin failed to recognize or to understand. His head seemed to whirl; his knees felt "like they was water in 'em"; black specks danced before his eyes. He was dead tired, and did not know it. Puzzled and bewildered, his simple mind fallen apart, as it were, into incongruous fragments; asking over and over again how and why, and again why and how. Deaf for once to the kindly voices of the creatures of his own brain, which had cheered and companioned him through these past months, he ranged the fields like a hunted animal; finally, long after nightfall, he sought his poor room and dropped exhausted on his bed. Here, as he sat with drooping head and hanging arms, sleep fell upon him like a mantle of lead, yet he struggled against it. He was all wrong inside, he now confided to "Ma" whom he seemed to feel once more beside him. "I'm all wrong!" he repeated. "It's like sin, or somethin', was gnawin' at me. I will—" Pippin struggled to his feet and made his little birch-tree bow, but very wearily, as if the tree had been beaten by tempests, "I will praise the Lord a spell before now I lay me down to sleep."
Why, even his voice was going back on him. At the strange, husky sound, his heart grew cold within him.
"My God!" he muttered. "What's this? Has Satan got a-holt of me?"
Clearing his throat violently, he summoned all his strength, and the great voice broke out like a silver trumpet:
"Throw out the life line across the dark wave,
There is a brother whom someone should save;
Somebody's brother! Oh, who, then, will dare
To throw out the life line, his peril to share?"
Thump! thump came the unmistakable sound of an angry boot on the wall.
"Shut up!" cried an exasperated voice. "Shut up, you darned gospel shark!"
Pippin stopped dead; his eyes blazed; molten flames coursed through his veins. He darted out of his own door and grasped the handle of the next one. It was locked, but that meant nothing to Pippin the Kid. One dexterous turn of Mrs. Baxter's hairpin (a dandy tool for light work, sure!) and the door flew open.
Mr. Joseph Johnson was a stonemason, and worked hard all day. He needed his sleep, and was not of mystic or dramatic temperament; it was, therefore, perhaps hardly strange that he was annoyed by vehement-tuneful demands for a life line at nine o'clock o' night. At all events, he was just bending forward to deliver another thump on the wall when, as has been said, the door flew open, and to him entered a lightly clad bronze statue, its arm outstretched, its eyes darting flames.
"Say!" cried the statue; "who are you that can't hear the Lord praised a spell? Who are you to stop a man in the middle of his song? Darn your hide! If you can't sing yourself, be thankful other folks can; you hear me? Have you said your prayers to-night? You never! Down you go!"