The Rev. Elias Tupper's voice thereafter was sufficiently loud to reach the ears of a number of the members of his congregation who were grouped about nearby.
"That boy," he announced, folding his short arms across his chest and sighing deeply, "is a painful example of original sin."
Since his return to the room up to this time Uncle Ambrose had made no remark, but now clearing his throat he eyed the last speaker for so long in silence that a little clacking noise was heard close by him and an old, old woman with an ear trumpet held to her ear leaned so far out of her wheeled chair that only her daughter's restraining hand kept her from falling.
"Original sin, Brother Elias?" The tall man drawled his question thoughtfully. "I wonder now why you speak of this boy's weaknesses as original sin? I've done lived in Pennyrile a right smart number of years and I ain't been witness to a single original sin. Seems like every fault a human crittur commits is just a plain copy of some fault that has gone before him. And I reckon it's more'n likely there's a good many original sinners among us men here to-night that has been original along pretty much the same lines as this here boy."
There was an unspoken yet moving appeal in the sympathetic tones of the well-known voice, softening some of the women listeners and a few of the men, but the Hon. Calvin Jones had still to be heard from.
There are men in this world to whom even the simplest exchange of words is a chance for oratory. So the Honorable Calvin, frowning and with one finger thrust in his coat, by his dramatic silence held his audience for a moment spellbound.
"May I inquire," he thundered, "if this lad whom Mr. Ambrose Thompson has just rescued and—er—defended, is any relation of his?"
In the interrogation itself there was no offence, but to every grown-up person who heard, the insinuation was plain enough.
To the tips of his big ears Uncle Ambrose flushed. "No, sir, he's not my son," he answered the man, who was a stranger to him before this evening, "and maybe I'm glad and maybe I'm sorry. For I won't say since my daughter and Em'ly's died that I ain't thought most any kind of a child's better than no child at all." He hesitated and then went on in pretty much his same old fashion of talking to himself: "Come to think of it now, mebbe in a way this boy is a son of mine, for I kind er think that every young man that plays the fool is the son of every man that's played the fool before him."
And then with a friendly smile he turned again toward the widow.