"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before their faces, John, when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell asked tentatively, but also by way of further firing the soul of the fighter.
"I believe I could," replied John ardently.
"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.
And John went to it.
But there was another man who had been shocked by John's theatrical venture, and that was the pastor of the First Church, who had his virtues, much as other men. His face was round and like his figure, full of fatness. He was a merry soul and loved a joke. He had a heart as tender as his sense of humor was keen.
But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his convictions. His pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft. He steered her straight. To Heaven with Scylla! To Gehenna with Charybdis! Indeed, if there was one man in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all the rest of the world too, it was this same Charles Thompson Campbell, pastor of the aforesaid grand old First Church. Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were black. His voice had the ultimate roar in it. When he stood up, locks flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his pulpit with that fat doubled fist, the palm of which had been moulded in youth upon the handle of a plow, every nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with the force of his utterance. But Doctor Campbell's convictions, like most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.
Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned. One was the modern novel. Another was the stage! Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted largely, had shed some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature; but he never quoted Shakespeare. One could almost doubt if he had read him, and when Shakespeare came to town, he never went to see him.
On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor Campbell read in the papers that the youngest of his deacons had the night before made his debut as Ursus in Quo Vadis, he was not only pained but moved to self-reproach. Grief enveloped him. It thrust the sharp cleft of a frown into his smooth brow. It thrust his chin down upon his bosom and caused him to heave a tumultuous sigh. He bowed his head beside his study table and then and there put up an earnest petition for the soul of John Hampstead. It was a sincere and natural prayer, because Doctor Campbell was a sincere man and believed in the efficacy of prayer.
Besides, he loved John Hampstead. The young man's impending fate stirred the minister deeply and caused him to reproach himself. In this mood, he dug out all his sermons on the stage, nine years of annual sermons on the influence of the drama, and read them sketchily and with disappointment. Paugh! Piffle! How weak and ineffective they seemed. He delved into his concordance for a text and found one. Then he drove his pen deep into his inkwell and began to write.
The following Sunday night Doctor Campbell's red, excited features were seen dimly through dun, sulphurous clouds of brimstone and fire; but to the preacher's dismay, John Hampstead was not present for fumigation. The reverend gentleman, in his unthinking goodness, had quite overlooked the fact that the play in which John was performing concluded on Sunday night instead of Saturday night; and so while his pastor was hurling his fiery diatribes at that conspicuously assailable institution, the stage, Deacon Hampstead was blissfully bearing Marien Dounay about in his arms.