"And is he in the Church?" Shock's face was a study. McIntyre laughed long and loud.
"Why, my dear fellow, we're glad to get hold of any kind of half-decent chap that is willing to help in any way. We use him as usher, manager, choir-master, sexton. In short, we put him any place where he will stick."
Shock drew a long breath. The situation was becoming complicated to him.
"About Loon Lake," continued McIntyre, "I can't tell you much. By all odds the most interesting figure there is the old Prospector, as he is called. You have heard about him?"
Shock bowed.
"No one knows him, though he has been there for many years. His daughter, I understand, has just come out from England to him. Then, there's Andy Hepburn, who runs a store, a shrewd, canny little Scot. I have no doubt he will help you. But you'll know more about the place in a week than I could tell you if I talked all night, and that I must not do, for you must be tired."
When he finished Shock sat silent with his eyes upon the map. He was once more conscious of a kind of terror of these unknown places and people. How could he get at them? What place was there for him and his mission in that wild, reckless life of theirs? What had he to bring them. Only a Tale? In the face of that vigorous, strenuous life it seemed at that moment to Shock almost ridiculous in its inadequacy. Against him and his Story were arraigned the great human passions—greed of gold, lust of pleasure in its most sensuous forms, and that wild spirit of independence of all restraint by law of Good or man. He was still looking at the map when Mr. McIntyre said:
"We will take the books, as they say in my country."
"Ay, and in mine," said Shock, coming out of his dream with a start.
Mrs. McIntyre laid the Bible on the table. Her husband opened the Book and read that great Psalm of the wilderness, "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place," and so on to the last cry of frail and fading humanity after the enduring and imperishable, "Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us: yea, the work of our hands establish thou it."