“Oh, she met one of her new recruits,—as hard a boy, so one of the policemen on this beat tells me, as there is in the row,—and pressed him into service to escort her back to civilization; and strange to say, the fellow did it without placing any tricks.”
The doctor turned on the small lady a curious glance.
“I think you may be able to do something, even for Dirk Colson,” he said.
“Do you know him?”
He laughed over the eagerness of the question.
“Never heard of him before. I was only thinking of our friend's description of his awfulness. Ah, whom have we here?”
For the door had opened abruptly, and a pair of great blue eyes, set in a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger. She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and silently as she had come.
“That is Dirk's sister,” Sallie Calkins said, coming forward, her homely face aglow with shame. “She isn't a bad girl, ma'am, she doesn't mean to be, but she has a dreadful time. Her mother is sickly, and has to go out washing, times when she isn't able to sit up; and there'll be days when she can't hold up her head; and the father is bad, ma'am, and drinks, and swears, and sells things for drink till there ain't nothing left to sell; and Mart hasn't anything to mend her clothes with, and she doesn't know how, anyway; and she hasn't even got a comb to comb her hair with, her father he took it to sell; and everything there is horrid, and Dirk, he's awful.”
It was strange, she could not herself account for it; but with every added word of misery that set poor Dirk Colson lower and lower in the scale of humanity, there seemed to come into this woman's heart, and shine in her face, an assurance that he was to be a “chosen vessel unto God.”
The doctor was watching her again, curious, apparently, to see how this pitiful appeal for forbearance in judging of poor Mart affected her, and something in his face made her say, speaking low, “an inheritance among them which are sanctified.”