CHAPTER VI. — “SATAN, HE HAS 'EM ALL THE WEEK.”
“That Black Dirk is a case,” said Policeman Duffer, turning hastily away from an unusually stupid man, who could not be made to understand where a certain street was. “He is the worst of the lot, I believe. Jerry Tompkins is slyer, and Dick Bolton is quicker than lightning at mischief; Nimble Dick they call him; he's a sort of ringleader; what he does the rest are apt to; but, to my thinking, Dirk is ahead of them all for evil. The rest are kind of jolly; fun seems to be about half that they are after; but Dirk, he's sullen; you never know how to take him, nor when he may burst out on you. He's dangerous. I am always looking out for something awful that he will do.”
Poor Dirk! Yet he was the boy to whom Mrs. Roberts' desires had gone out the most anxiously. It was over his image that she had lingered that morning in her closet. Policeman Duffer would have been greatly astonished had he known there was that in his words which gave her courage. “Perhaps,” she said to herself, with quickening breath, “oh, perhaps the poor boy is the most in danger of them all, and the Saviour, knowing it, sees ways in which I may reach him, and so presses his poor, sullen face on my memory.”
“What does he do for a living?” she hastened to ask.
“Well, to the best of my knowledge, he loafs for a living. That's all I've ever known him guilty of doing. He's got a drunken father,—one of the meanest kind of drunkards. If he would go and stay drunk all the time and leave them alone they might manage; but he has spells of getting half over it, and coming home and tearing around like all possessed. Then they have times! I've been in there when it took all my strength to manage him. If he would get killed in one of his rows I'd have some hope of the rest of 'em; but he won't. That kind of folks never do get killed; it's the decent ones. A fellow was carried by here just with a broken leg,—a nice, decent boy; works hard to help his sister. He's the sort now that gets his leg broken and gets laid up for the rest of the winter. How do you account for that? He lives pretty near Black Dirk's. Of course, he's got a drunken father; they all have in that row; but if I was going in for benevolence I'd twice as soon do something for young Calkins as for any of your set; they're a bad lot. They aren't worth lifting a finger for. Now, that's a fact.”
“And yet,” said Mrs. Roberts, her voice tremulous with a feeling that just then surged over her, “how can I help remembering that if the Lord Jesus had said that of us, and stayed up there in his glory, we should have been utterly without help or hope to-day?”
Very much astonished was Policeman Duffer. Ladies on all sorts of errands had consulted him. He had been presented with many tracts in his day; but rarely had a clear-voiced, earnest-eyed woman quietly confronted him with that name, as if it contained an unanswerable argument. However, he was not embarrassed; it took a great deal to embarrass him.
“I don't take much stock in him,” he said, with a lofty toss of his head, and a careless tone, as though the question were one easy to dispose of. “I don't believe in him myself.”
“Do you know him?”
Earnest eyes, raised to his face, fixed steadily on his face, while the questioner waited quietly for an answer.