Higgins shook hands with him.
XII
MAKING THE GRADE
Fully to describe Higgins’s altercations with lumber-jacks and tin-horn gamblers and the like in pursuit of clean opportunity for other men would be to pain him. It is a phase of ministry he would conceal. Perhaps he fears that unknowing folk might mistake him for a quarrelsome fellow. He is nothing of the sort, however; he is a wise and efficient minister of the gospel–but fights well, upon good occasion, notwithstanding his forty-odd years. In the Minnesota woods fighting is as necessary as praying–just as tender a profession of Christ. Higgins regrets that he knows little enough of boxing; he shamefacedly feels that his preparation for the ministry has in this respect been inadequate. Once, when they examined him before the Presbytery for ordination, a new-made seminary graduate from the East, rising, quizzed thus: “Will the candidate not tell us who was Cæsar of Rome when Paul preached?” It stumped Higgins; but–he told us on the road from Six to Four–“I was confused, you see. The only Cæsar I could think of was Julius, and I knew that that wasn’t right. If he’d only said Emperor of Rome, I could have told him, of course! Anyhow, it didn’t matter much.” Boxing, according to the experience of Higgins, was an imperative preparation for preaching in his field; a little haziness concerning an Emperor of Rome really didn’t matter so very much. At any rate, the boys wouldn’t care.
Higgins’s ministry, however, knows a gentler service than that which a strong arm can accomplish in a bar-room. When Alex McKenzie lay dying in the hospital at Bemidji–a screen around his cot in the ward–the Pilot sat with him, as he sits with all dying lumber-jacks. It was the Pilot who told him that the end was near.
“Nearing the landing, Pilot?”
“Almost there, Alex.”
“I’ve a heavy load, Pilot–a heavy load!”
McKenzie was a four-horse teamster, used to hauling logs from the woods to the landing at the lake–forty thousand pounds of new-cut timber to be humored over the logging-roads.
“Pilot,” he asked, presently, “do you think I can make the grade?”