Mrs. Davis was sitting by the fireless stove, on which she had placed her small lamp, and she was trying by its feeble light to do some mending. Her face had that indifference to its own hopelessness which forbids all hope for it. She looked up as they entered.
"Oh, it's the preacher," she said, with a flickering smile about her fretful lips; and she rose, brushing some lifeless strands of hair behind her ears, and pulling down her sleeves, which were rolled above her thin elbows.
"Molly has had an accident, Mrs. Davis," John explained, putting the child gently down, and steadying her on her uncertain little feet, until her eyes were fairly opened. "So I came home with her to say how it happened."
"She spilt the beer, I reckon," said Mrs. Davis, glancing at the empty jug John had put on the table. "Well, 't ain't no great loss. He's asleep, and won't know nothing about it. He'll have forgot he sent her by mornin'." She jerked her head towards one side of the room, where her husband was lying upon the floor. "Go get the preacher a chair, Molly. Not that one; it's got a leg broke. Oh, you needn't speak low," she added, as John thanked the child softly; "he won't hear nothing before to-morrow."
The lumberman lay in the sodden sleep with which he ended a spree. He had rolled up his coat for a pillow, and had thrown one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ever-hastening plunge downward.
But the preacher did not consider fate when he turned and looked at the drunken man. A stern look crept over the face which had smiled at Molly but a moment before.
"This is the third time," he said, "that this has happened since Tom came and told me he would try to keep sober. I had hoped the Spirit of God had touched him."
"I know," the woman answered, turning the coat she was mending, and moving the lamp a little to get a better light; "and it's awful hard on me, so it is; that's where all our money goes. I can't get shoes for the children's feet, let alone a decent rag to put on my back to wear of a Sabbath, and come to church. It's hard on me, now, I tell you, Mr. Ward."
"It is harder on him," John replied. "Think of his immortal soul. Oh, Mrs. Davis, do you point out to him the future he is preparing for himself?"
"Yes," she said, "I'm tellin' him he'll go to hell all the time; but it don't do no good. Tom's afraid of hell, though; it's the only thing as ever did keep him straight. After one o' them sermons of yours, I've known him swear off as long as two months. I ain't been to church this long time, till last Sabbath; and I was hopin' I'd hear one of that kind, all about hell, Mr. Ward, so I could tell Tom, but you didn't preach that way. Not but what it was good, though," she added, with an evident wish to be polite.