Dave gazed at the swaying crowd. Several men were running to join it. Then he looked down from his great height at the slim, athletic figure of his friend.
"Do you want any help?" he inquired casually.
Parson Tom shook his head.
"No," he said, with a smile of perfect confidence. "They're children, all simple children. Big and awkward and unruly, if you like, but all children. I can manage them."
"I believe you can," said Dave. "Well, so long. Don't be too hard on them. Remember they're children."
Tom Chepstow laughed back at him as he hurried away.
"All right. But unruly children need physical correction as well as moral. And if it is necessary I shan't spare them."
He went off at a run, and Dave went on to the depot. He knew his friend down to his very core. There was no man in the village who was the parson's equal in the noble art of self-defense. And it was part of his creed to meet the rougher members of his flock on their own ground. He knew that this militant churchman would stop that fight, and, if necessary, bodily chastise the offenders. It was this wholesome manliness that had so endeared the "fighting parson" to his people. They loved him for his capacity, and consequently respected him far more than they would have done the holiest preacher that ever breathed. He was a man they understood.
The spiritual care of a small lumbering village is not lightly to be entered upon. A man must be peculiarly fitted for it. In such a place, where human nature is always at its crudest; where muscle, and not intellect, must always be the dominant note; where life is lived without a thought for the future, and the present concern is only the individual fitness to execute a maximum of labor, and so give expression to a savage vanity in the triumph of brute force, the man who would set out to guide his fellows must possess qualities all too rare in the general run of clergy. His theology must be of the simplest, broadest order. He must live the life of his flock, and teach almost wholly by example. His preaching must be lit with a local setting, and his brush must lay on the color of his people's every-day life.
Besides this, he must possess a tremendous moral and physical courage, particularly the latter, for to the lumber-jack nothing else so appeals. He must feel that he is in the presence of a man who is always his equal, if not his superior, in those things he understands. Tom Chepstow was all this. He was a lumberman himself at heart. He knew every detail of the craft. He had lived that life all his manhood's days.