thing
stirred in my consciousness; something I always had to remember in
connection with St. Stanislaus....

Across my mind as across a screen flashed a series of pictures--a
mangled tramp carried into the Parish House, my mother watching with a
concerned and shocked face, and the hall mud-stained by the trampling
feet of the clumsy bearers; the shaggy Poles, caps off, turning over
to me as to high authority the heavy oilskin package they had found; I
opening that package later and standing amazed and startled before its
contents; and that same package, hidden under my cassock, carried over
to the church and placed for security and secrecy in the keeping of
the little saint. Well, that had been quite right; there had been
nothing else to do; one had to be secret and careful when one had in
one's keeping the tools of that notorious burglar, Slippy McGee.

Small wonder that I did not connect those pictures with the fate of
Mary Virginia Eustis! No, I did not immediately grasp their tremendous
bearing upon the petitions I was repeating. And all the while, with a
dull insistence, an enraging persistence, they flickered before the
eyes of my memory--the Poles, the screaming cursing tramp;
Westmoreland pondering aloud as to why he had been permitted to save
so apparently worthless a life; and the little saint hiding from the
eyes of men all traces of lost Slippy McGee. Nor, more curiously yet,
did I connect them with the Butterfly Man. The Butterfly Man was
somebody else altogether, another and a different person, a man of
whom even one's secretest thoughts were admiring and respectful. He
was so far removed from the very shadow of such things as these, that
it did one's conscience a sort of violence to think of him in
connection with them. I tried to dismiss the memories from my mind. I
wished to concentrate wholly upon the problem of Mary Virginia.

And then that mysterious, hidden self-under-self that lives in us far,
far beneath thought and instinct and conscience and heredity and even
consciousness itself, rose to the surface with a message:

_Slippy McGee had been the greatest cracksman in all America...._
"Honest to God, skypilot, I can open any box made, easy as easy!" ...
_And even as his tools were hidden in St. Stanislaus, Slippy McGee
himself was hidden in John Flint_.

Recoiling, I clung to the altar railing. What dreadful thing was I
contemplating, what fearful temptation was assailing me, here under
the l