"Hi will, ma'am. Hi'll do that. If you'll pardon me now, Hi'll step right out and sign the pledge. I know just where to go, if you'll pardon me."
Hatton did know just where to go. He crossed the park to the east side and came to the brightly lighted Salvation Army barracks. A meeting was in progress, and a fiery tongued young woman was exhorting all the sinners of the world to come to glory. Hatton was fascinated by the groans and loud Amens that came from that chorus of human wreckage. Pushing nearer to the front, he came under the penetrating eye of the Salvation captain. She hailed him as a "brother," and there was something so unswervingly pure in her direct gaze that it had the effect of magnetising Hatton.
"Brother," said the Salvation captain, "are you saved?"
"No, ma'am," said the unhappy Hatton, "but begging your pardon, if it haren't hout of horder, Hi'd like to be taking the pledge, ma'am."
"Nothing is out of order where a human soul is at stake," said the woman, smiling in an exalted way. "Lift up your hand, my brother."
Hatton lifted his shaking hand, and, word for word, he repeated the pledge after the Salvation captain. Nor was there one in that room who found aught to laugh at in the words of Hatton.
"Hi promise, with God's 'elp," said Hatton, "to habstain from the use of halcoholic liquors as a beverage, from chewing tobaccer or speaking profane and himpure languidge."
Having thus spoken, Hatton felt a glow of relief and a sense of transfiguration. He experienced, in fact, that hysterical exhilaration that "converts" feel, as if suddenly he were reborn, and had come out of the mud into the clean air. At such moments martyrs, heroes and saints are made. Hatton, the automaton-like valet of the duplex studio, with his "yuman 'ankerings" was afire with a true spiritual fervour. We leave him then marching forth from the barracks with the Salvation Army, his head thrown up, and singing loudly of glory.
On the third day after the disappearance of Sunny, Professor Timothy Barrowes arrived in New York City with the dinornis skeleton of the quaternary period, dug up from the clay of the Red Deer cliffs of Canada. This precious find was duly transported to the Museum of Natural History, where it was set up by the skilled hands of college workmen, who were zealots even as the little man who nagged and adjured them as he had the excavators on the Red Deer River. So absorbed, in fact, was Professor Barrowes by his fascinating employment, that he left his beloved fossil only when the pressing necessity of further funds from his friend and financial agent (Jerry had raised the money to finance the dinornis) necessitated his calling upon Jerry Hammond, who had made no response to his latter telegrams and letters.