On one occasion I was kindly invited to stay at a logging camp back of Oyster Bay. After supper I preached to the “boys,” and was listened to with respect and attention. When it came time to rest, they put me up in the top bunk in the bunk-house. And glad I was before morning that I was up aloft, for later on some of the boys came in the worse of liquor, passed around their bottles and had a most hilarious time. I don’t know how it commenced, but very soon a fight ensued; and, oh, how they did batter each other, while I lay in my blankets praying that God would, in some way, stop the quarrel. I did not get much rest that night, I assure you.
Next morning some of the poor fellows came and humbly apologized, and years afterwards one of them met me and asked if I recalled that night and its scene of turmoil and revelry.
“Indian Pray One Eye Open and One Eye Shut.”
On one of my trips, very early in my missionary experience, we came to an Indian camp where a number of men and women were drinking whiskey in one of the large houses. The house having been pointed out to me, I rushed in without ceremony.
The man who had been serving the liquor to his friends around the fire, having heard my footsteps, was just in the act of putting a bottle away in a box. I rushed towards him, and seizing the bottle from him, I poured the contents upon the fire. The vile stuff blazed up with a blue blaze as if it had been coal oil.
I told the people I was not angry with them, and invited them to the service. The little bell was now ringing, and there gathered into a large house about thirty or forty persons, who sat around the fire, some on boxes and some on beds and mats.
We had sung in the native language, and were now singing in English, “There is a happy land, far, far away,” when in came a man crazed with the drink, all painted up, with only a blanket on, waving a scalping-knife in his hand and shouting at the top of his voice, “I’ll fix the white man! I don’t care for the white man!”
He jumped on a bed behind where Cushan, my assistant, and I were just in the act of kneeling down to prayer. Cushan, the interpreter, prayed, and I prayed, for the first time publicly in the Indian language, for God to have mercy upon the poor people, and especially upon the poor man who had the knife and was so angry. I had not prayed very long before he stepped down as stealthily and quietly as possible and walked out of the house.
After the service was over Cushan said to me, “Mr. Crosby, that man very angry. You not know Indian. He want to kill us. All the time when I pray I shut my eyes when I pray, but this time I shut one eye and open the other. I watch and pray.”
The episode was over, and the missionary smiled at the native shrewdness of his helper.