here. Sit down again and let's dig a little
deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English
way of describing things; don't you?"

Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I
shall pass over them lightly. Each day, though he did not tell me in
detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to
find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no
success. He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy
zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat.
But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly
to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he
threw up his hands.

"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the
grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days
have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind. It's simply
wretched--miserable!"

"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded
him.

"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both
of them put together," he asserted soberly. "It involves the entire
fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization. The
Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or
it isn't--one of the two. If it falls in its mission it is a hollow
mockery; a thing beneath contempt. I go to my fellow Christians with a
simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get? I
am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the
thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that
society must be protected, and all that!"

"The mills of the gods," I suggested.

"Nothing of the sort! It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of
things. Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah! Assuming
that you really did the thing for which you were punished--and I don't
believe you did--is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves
absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we
profess? But I mustn't be unfair. Perhaps the fault is partly mine,
after all. Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."

"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.

"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least. Just the same, the wretched
fact remains. You might be the biggest villain unhung--if only you
hadn't passed through the courts a