n with the work. I have to think what is for the
best."

"There is some justice in what you say," admitted the stranger, "if
you persist in looking on this thing as a business proposition. But
it seems to my confessedly untrained mind that you missed the point.
'Trust in the Lord,' saith the prophet. In fact, certain rivals in
your own field hold the doctrine you expound, and you consider them
wrong. 'To do evil that good may come' I seem to recognize as a tenet
of the Church of the Jesuits."

"I protest. I really do protest," objected the clergyman, scandalized.

"All right," agreed Ned Trent, with good-natured contempt. "That is
not the point. Do you refuse?"

"Can't you see?" begged the other. "I'm sure you are reasonable enough
to take the case on its broader side."

"You refuse?" insisted Ned Trent.

"It is not always easy to walk straightly before the Lord, and my way
is not always clear before me, but--"

"You refuse!" cried Ned Trent, rising impatiently.

The Reverend Archibald Crane looked at his catechiser with a trace of
alarm.

"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I must," he apologized.

The stranger advanced until he touched the desk on the other side of
which the Reverend Archibald was sitting, where he stood for some
moments looking down on his opponent with an almost amused expression
of contempt.

"You are an interesting little beast," he drawled, "and I've seen a
lot of your kind in my time. Here you preach every Sunday, to whomever
will listen to you, certain cut-and-dried doctrines you don't believe
practically in the least. Here for the first time you have had a
chance to apply them literally, and you hide behind a lot of words.
And while you're about it you may as well hear what I have to say
about your kind. I've had a pretty wide experience in the North, and I
know what I'm talking about. Your work here among the Indians is rot,
and every sensible man knows it. You coop them up in your log-built
houses, you force on them clothes to which they are unaccustomed until
they die of consumption. Under your little tin-steepled imitation of
civilization, for which they are not fitted, they learn to beg, to
steal, to lie. I have travelled far, but I have yet to discover what
your kind are allowed on earth for. You are narrow-minded, bigoted,
intolerant, and without a scrap of real humanity to ornament your mock
religion. When you find you can't meddle with other people's affairs
enough at home you get s