“Well,” said Mike, “I’ve got me hundred dollars, and you’ll git yer pay in the nixt wurruld.”

“I don’t want no pay,” responded Jim.  “An’ what do ye know about the next world, anyway?”

“The praste says there is one,” said Mike.

“The priest be hanged!  What does he know about it?”

“That’s his business,” said Mike.  “It’s not for the like o’ me to answer for the praste.”

“Well, I wish he was here, in Number Nine, an’ we’d see what we could git out of ‘im.  I’ve got to the eend o’ my rope.”

The truth was that Jim was becoming religious.  When his own strong right hand failed in any enterprise, he always came to a point where the possibilities of a superior wisdom and power dawned upon him.  He had never offered a prayer in his life, but the wish for some medium or instrument of intercession was strong within him.  At last an idea struck him, and he turned to Mike and told him to go down to his old cabin, and stay there while he sent the boy back to him.

When Harry came up, with an anxious face, Jim took him between his knees.

“Little feller,” said he, “I need comfortin’.  It’s a comfort to have ye here in my arms, an’ I don’t never want to have you go ’way from me.  Your pa is awful sick, and perhaps he ain’t never goin’ to be no better.  The rain and the ride, I’m afeared, was too many fur him; but I’ve did the best I could, and I meant well to both on ye, an’ now I can’t do no more, and there ain’t no doctor here, an’ there ain’t no minister.  Ye’ve allers been a pretty good boy, hain’t ye?  And don’t ye s’pose ye can go out here a little ways behind a tree and pray?  I’ll hold on to the dog; an’ it seems to me, if I was the Lord, I sh’d pay ’tention to what a little feller like you was sayin’.  There ain’t nobody here but you to do it now, ye know.  I can nuss your pa and fix his vittles, and set up with ’im nights, but I can’t pray.  I wasn’t brung up to it.  Now, if ye’ll do this, I won’t ax ye to do nothin’ else.”

The boy was serious.  He looked off with his great black eyes into the woods.  He had said his prayers many times when he did not know that he wanted anything.  Here was a great emergency, the most terrible that he had ever encountered.  He, a child, was the only one who could pray for the life of his father; and the thought of the responsibility, though it was only dimly entertained, or imperfectly grasped, overwhelmed him.  His eyes, that had been strained so long, filled with tears, and, bursting into a fit of uncontrollable weeping, he threw his arms around Jim’s neck, where he sobbed away his sudden and almost hysterical passion.  Then he gently disengaged himself and went away.

Jim took off his cap, and holding fast his uneasy and inquiring dog, bowed his head as if he were in a church.  Soon, among the songs of birds that were turning the morning into music, and the flash of waves that ran shoreward before the breeze, and the whisper of the wind among the evergreens, there came to his ear the voice of a child, pleading for his father’s life.  The tears dropped from his eyes and rolled down upon his beard.  There was an element of romantic superstition in the man, of which his request was the offspring, and to which the sound of the child’s voice appealed with irresistible power.