"Keep the change," said he, unabashed. "I wasn't meaning you, anyhow. I've got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson, you don't need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me, I'd bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I'd put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles. Believe me, he'd do it!" he finished, with enthusiasm.
Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.
"Yep, ten orders in to-day's mail and seven in yesterday's; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on. And here's a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We're looking up," said he, complacently.
The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty. I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame's right hand man and Westmoreland's faithful ally. His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient. He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.
"He may have only one leg," said Westmoreland, when Flint had helped him all of one night with a desperately ill millworker, "but he certainly has two hands; he knows how to use his ears and eyes, he's dumb until he ought to speak, and then he speaks to the point. Father, Something knew what It was about when you and I were allowed to drag that tramp out of the teeth of death! Yes, yes, I'm certainly glad and grateful we were allowed to save John Flint."
From that time forth the big man gave his ex-patient a liking which grew with his years. Absent-minded as he was, he could thereafter always remember to find such things as he thought might interest him. Appleboro laughs yet about the day Dr. Westmoreland got some small butterflies for his friend, and having nowhere else to put them, clapped them under his hat, and then forgot all about them; until he lifted his hat to some ladies and the swarm of insects flew out.
Without being asked, and as unostentatiously as he did everything else, Flint had taken his place in church every Sunday.
"Because it'd sort of give you a black eye if I didn't," he explained. "Skypiloting's your lay, father, and I'll see you through with it as far as I can. I couldn't fall down on any man that's been as white to me as you've been."
I must confess that his conception of religion was very, very hazy, and his notions of church services and customs barbarous. For instance, he disliked the statues of the saints exceedingly. They worried him.
"I can't seem to stand a man dolled-up in skirts," he confessed. "Any more than I'd be stuck on a dame with whiskers. It don't somehow look right to me. Put the he-saints in pants instead of those brown kimonas with gold crocheting and a rope sash, and I'd have more respect for 'em."