“Men,” continued the doctor, “I'm starting out on a new track. I want to straighten out the past all I can. I can't keep this money. I'd feel like a thief.”
But such an ethical code was beyond the men, and one and all protested to each other, in tones that were quite audible over the hall and with anathemas of more or less terrible import, that the money was not theirs and that they would not touch it. The doctor listened for a minute or more and then, with the manner of one closing a discussion, he said, “All right. If you won't help me I'll have to find some way, myself, of straightening this up. This is all I have to say. I'm no preacher and I'm not any better than the rest of you, but I'd like to be a great deal better man than I am, and, with God's help, I'm going to try. That's my religion.”
And with these words he sat down, leaving the people still staring at him and waiting for something in the way of closing exercises to what must have been the most extraordinary religious service in all their experience. Softly, Margaret began to play the old hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee!” The men, accepting it as a signal, rose to their feet and began to sing, and with these great words of aspiration ringing through their hearts they passed out into the night.
Among the many who lingered to speak to the doctor were “Mexico,” “Peachy,” and, of course, his faithful follower, Tommy Tate. “Mexico” drew him off to one corner.
“Say, pard,” he began, “you've done me up many a time before, but blanked if yeh haven't hit me this time the worst yet! When you was talkin' about them two little chaps—” here “Mexico's” hard face began to work and his voice to quiver—“you put the knife right in here. I had a brother once,” he continued in a husky voice. “I wish to God someone had choked the blank nonsense out of me, for I done him a wrong an' I wasn't man enough to own up. An' that's what started me in all this hell business I've been chasin' ever since.”
The doctor took him by the arm and walked him out of the room. “Take Miss Robertson home,” he said to Tommy as he passed.
An hour later he appeared, pale and as nearly exhausted as his iron nerve and muscle would allow him to be. “I say, Margaret, this thing is wonderful! There's no explaining it by any physical or mental law that I know.” Then, after a pause, he added, with an odd thrill of tenderness in his voice, “I believe we shall hear good things of 'Mexico' yet.”
And so they did, but that is another tale.