“Yes, it's a good report,” assented the Convener. “We had practically no support a year ago. Our strongest man—”
“Fink?”
“Yes. You know Hank, I see. Well, Hank's enthusiasm and devotion were hardly of what you would call the purest type. But whatever his motive, he stood by the missionary, and, do you know, it is a splendid testimony of the power of the Gospel to see the change in that same shrewd old sinner. Yes, sir, give the Gospel a chance and it will do its work.” The Convener, who hated all cant and canting phrases with a perfect hatred, rarely allowed himself the luxury of an emotional outbreak. But the case of Hank Fink seemed to reach the springs of feeling that he kept hidden in the deep heart of him.
“So Boyle has done well?” said the Superintendent. “I am very glad of it. Very glad of it, for his own sake, for his mother's, and for the sake of another.”
“Yes,” replied the Convener, “Boyle has done a fine bit of work. He lived all summer on his horse's back and in his canoe, followed the prospectors up into the gulches and the miners to their mines, if you can call them mines, left a magazine here, a book there, a New Testament next place. And once he got his grip on a man, he never let him go. Hank told me how he found a man sick in a camp away up in a gulch and how he stayed with him for more than a week, then brought him down on his horse's back to the Forks. Yes, it's a good record. A church built at the north end of the field, another almost completed at the Forks. Really, it was very fine,” continued the Convener, allowing his enthusiasm to rise. “It renews one's faith in the reality of religion to see a man jump into his work like that. They didn't pay him his salary the first half year, but he omitted to mention that in his report.”
The Superintendent sat up straight. “Is he behind yet?”
“No. I mentioned the matter to Fink and explained that if the field failed it was Boyle that would suffer. His language—well,” the Convener laughed reminiscently, “you have seen Hank?”
“Yes. I've seen him, I've heard him, and I've read him. But let us hope that his deeds will atone in a measure for his broken English. But,” continued the Superintendent, “you have had Boyle ordained, have you not?”
“Yes. We got him ordained,” replied the Convener, beginning to chuckle. A delighted, choking chuckle it was. Any missionary who had worked in his Presbytery would recognize the Convener in the dark by that chuckle. It began, if one were quick to observe, with a wrinkling about the corners of the sharp blue eyes, then became audible in a succession of small explosions that seemed to have their origin in the region of the esophagus and to threaten the larynx with disruption, until relief was found in a wide-throated peal that subsided in a second series of small explosions and gradually rumbled off into silence somewhere in the region of the diaphragm, leaving only the wrinkles about the corners of the blue eyes as a kind of warning that the whole process might be repeated upon sufficient provocation. “Yes, we got him ordained,” he repeated when the chuckle had passed. “I was glad of your explanatory note about him. It guided us in our arrangements for examination.”
“What happened?” inquired the Superintendent, leaning forward. He dearly loved a yarn, and he sorely hated to lose any of the more humorous incidents of missionary life, not only for the joy they brought him, but also because they furnished him with ammunition for his Eastern campaigns.