h the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his
coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is
entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of
the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty.
It is the same in the moral field."

"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.

"No; you have paid only a part of it--the law's part. Society still
has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the
final jot and tittle."

Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in
Springville--we may call the small city Springville because that isn't
its real name--I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious
hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never
have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then--what I
learned later--that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was
growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on
time sales.

Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do
what I had done so many times before--take the first train and vanish.
But a small incident delayed the vanishing--for the moment, at least.
On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time
in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a
young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling
and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and
I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the
disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants--to pass by,
like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.

Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided
heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself,
and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the
gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened,
that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as
I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue
uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.

"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way
on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"

We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt. There
was a cut over one eye where he had butted into one of the
climbing-steps on the p