r act concerning or included
in the work. He had, in some unexplainable way that is common to brazen
assurance or unmitigated ignorance, fastened himself upon the weak old
man as a sort of confidential agent, or what-not, worked upon his fears,
his superstitions, and his foolish half-faith in a system of religion
that has never yet made other than male and female prostitutes,
adventurers, or lunatics, until the old man, standing alone and almost
friendless, had learned to cling to him, and almost rely upon his
consummate bravado to extricate him from the meshes of the web his own
vileness and a vile woman had woven about him; so that in one sense he
stood in the relation of principal to me, and I found it impossible to
shake him off, or relieve myself to any great extent of his impudent
presence and foolish suggestions.

I knew that he was utterly without principle, and was only making a show
of this extraordinary energy in order to appear to more than earn
whatever he got from Lyon, and continue in the latter's mind the feeling
that he was utterly indispensable to him. I also knew him to be as mean
an adventurer as Mrs. Winslow was an adventuress; that he was the
villain who had first unloosed this vast flood of vileness and lechery
upon society, and who, as the shameless Christian minister of Detroit,
had put the fire-brand from hell in this woman's hand, to ever after
continue her moral incendiarism wherever she might go, until thrust from
life and infamous memory, and it annoyed me that this sort of a man
should dictate to me.

I could have disposed of him at one stroke, and I am satisfied that had
I on only one occasion addressed him as the Rev. Mr. Bland, and casually
inquired concerning his old Detroit friends, including Mother Blake, he
would have slunk away without a word or a protest of any kind whatever;
and had I gone farther, and showed him what he himself did not know,
that this woman, whom he was so anxious to have brought down with some
startling development, was none other than the one whom he had led into
a life of sin from the pleasant Nettleton farm-house by the winding
river, and that he was now playing guardian to a man that would have
probably been free from the curse that was hanging over him, had it not
been for Harcout's earlier and more rascally villainy, he would have
disappeared altogether, but I realized that this would not do. It would
have had the effect of putting Lyon at the mercy of a