The minister drew a pipe from his pocket, filled and lighted it, shaking his head at Craighill’s offer of a cigar.
“Thanks; I prefer this. Hope the smoke won’t be painful to you; it’s a brand they affect out in my suburb, but it’s better than what we used to have up in the lumber camps. I still take the comfort of a pipe, but the drink I cut out and the swearing. As I remember, it was you who taught me to cuss in school because my stammering made it sound so funny.”
Wayne had recalled a good many things about Paddock but the mood he had brought from his father’s house did not yield readily to the confessions of this boyhood friend who had reappeared in the livery of the Christian ministry. The new status was difficult for Craighill to accept and, conscious of the antagonism his recital had awakened, Paddock regretted that he had volunteered his story. The Craighill whom he had known was a big, generous, outspoken fellow whom everybody liked; the man before him was morose and obstinately resentful: and the fact that he had caught him in his own office at an unusual hour, about to indulge his notorious appetite for drink, was in itself an unhappy circumstance. The bottle and the glass were, to say the least, an unfortunate background for reunion. Paddock touched Wayne’s knee lightly; he wished to regain the ground he had lost by his frankness, which had so signally failed of response.
“You have certainly deviated considerably,” remarked Wayne without humour. “I believe they call your kind of thing Christian sociology, and it’s all right. I congratulate you on having struck something interesting in this life. It’s more than I’ve been able to do. Your story is romantic and beautiful; mine had better not be told, Jimmy. I’m as bad as they’re made; I’ve hit the bottom hard. When you came in I had just reached an important conclusion, and was going to empty a quart to celebrate the event.”
“Well?” inquired the minister, studying anew the fine head; the eyes with their hard glitter; the lips that twitched slightly; the fingers whose trembling he had noted in the lighting of repeated cigarettes. “Be sure I shall value your confidence, old man,” said the minister encouragingly, smiling his sad little smile.
“I’m glad you’re interested, Jimmy, but we’ve chosen different routes. Mine, I guess, has scenic advantages over yours and the pace is faster. You’re headed for the heavenly kingdom. I’m going to hell.”
CHAPTER IV
THE WAYS OF WAYNE CRAIGHILL
FOUR days passed. Wayne Craighill ceased twirling and knotting the curtain cord and held his right hand against the strong light of the office window to test his nerves. The fingers twitched and trembled, and he turned away impatiently and flung himself into a chair by his desk, hiding his hands and their tell-tale testimony deep in his pockets. Half a dozen times he shook himself petulantly and attacked his work with frenzied eagerness, as though to be rid of it in a single spurt; but after an hour thus futilely spent he threw himself back and glared at a large etching, depicting a storm-driven galleon riding wildly under a frightened moon, that hung against the dark-olive cartridge paper on the wall above his desk. Shadows appeared now and then on the ground-glass outer door, and lingered several times, testifying to their physical embodiment by violently seizing and rattling the knob. Craighill scowled at every assault, and presently when some importunate visitor had both shaken and kicked the door, he yawned and sought the window again, looking moodily down, as from a hill-top, upon the city of his birth, where practically all his life had been spent, the City of the Iron Heart, lying like a wedge at the confluence of the two broad rivers.
Wayne had used himself hard, as the lines in his smooth-shaven face testified; but the vigour of the Scotch-Irish stock survived in him, and even to-day he carried his tall frame erectly. His head covered with brown hair in which there was a reddish glint, was really fine and his blue eyes, not just now at their clearest, had in them the least hint of the dreamer. His suit of brown—a solid colour—became him: he was dressed with an added scrupulousness as though in conformity to an inner contrition and rehabilitation. He was in his thirtieth year but appeared older to-day as his gaze lay upon the drifting, shifting smoke-cloud that hung above the Greater City.
The son of Colonel Roger Craighill was inevitably a conspicuous person in his native city and his dissipated habits had long been the subject of despairing comment by his fellow-citizens, and the text of occasional lightly veiled sermons in press and pulpit. Dick Wingfield had once remarked that is was too bad that there were only ten commandments, as this small number painfully limited Wayne Craighill’s possible infractions. It was Wingfield who named Wayne Craighill the Blotter, in appreciation of Wayne’s amazing capacity for drink; and it was he who said that Wayne’s sins were merely an expression of the law of compensation and were thrown into the scale to offset Colonel Craighill’s nobility and virtue. Whatever truth may lie in this, it is indisputable that the elder Craighill’s rectitude tended to heighten the colour of his son’s iniquities.