Jim clinched his fists hard and shut his teeth with a grip as he sat silent for a moment. Then drawing a deep breath, as if he were lifting a weight from his life, he said calmly:
“Mrs. Shirley died some time ago. Only one child survived her—a little girl six years old. The letter says—”The letter fluttered in Jim’s trembling hands. “It says, ‘My little Leigh is just six. She has been taught to love her uncle Jim.... Through the help of a friend here’—she doesn’t give the name—‘I have made you her guardian. I want her to go to your home. Her father will not take any responsibility, nor try to keep her. I know you will not fail me.’”
Jim folded the letter abruptly. “It is a dead woman’s last wish. How can I make a home for a little girl? What shall I do?”
He looked at the two men for answer. The doctor lifted his hand to Pryor Gaines, but the preacher waited awhile before replying. Then he said thoughtfully:
“It is easy for us two to vote a duty on you, Shirley. I answer only because you ask, not because I would advise. From my angle of vision, this looks like your call to service. Your lonely fireside is waiting for a little child’s presence—the child already taught to love you. I would say send for her at once.”
“But how can I send?” Jim questioned. “How can 153 I do a parent’s part by her? I can help a neighbor in need. I can’t bring up his children. I’m not fit for that kind of work. I’ve hung on here for more than a dozen years to be ready to help when the time came, and now the thing seems impossible.”
“‘As thy day, so shall thy strength be.’ If you have prepared yourself to do anything, you can do it,” Pryor Gaines assured him.
“Well, how can I send?” Jim asked again. “There’s nobody there to bring her, and nobody here to go after her. It’s an awfully long way from here to Ohio. A little six-year-old girl can’t come alone. I couldn’t go back myself. I may be a coward, but the Almighty made me as I am. I can’t go back to Cloverdale and see only a grave—I can stay here and remember, and maybe do a kind of a man’s part, but I can’t go back.” He bowed his head and sat very still.
“You are right, Shirley,” Pryor Gaines spoke softly still. “Unless you were close to the life in its last days, don’t hang any graves like dead weights of ineffectual sorrow about your neck. Look back to the best memories. Look up to the eternal joy no grave can withhold.”
There was a sympathetic chord in Pryor Gaines’ voice that spoke home to the heart, and so long as he lived in the Grass River valley, he gave the last service for everyone who left it for the larger life beyond it.