They were now out in the road again, the team plodding heavily through the red shale.  “It’s a damned soil,” said the doctor for the second time.  He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt that resentful sense of youth and inexperience.  “I don’t know how you’ve been brought up,” said the elder man.  “I don’t want to infuse heretic notions into your innocent mind.”

James straightened himself.  He tried to give the other man a knowing look.  “I have been about a good deal,” he said.  “You need not be afraid of corrupting me.”

Doctor Gordon laughed.  “Well, I shall not try,” he said.  “At least, I shall not mean to corrupt you.  I am a pessimist, but you are so young that you ought not to be influenced by that.  Lord, only think what may be before you.  You don’t know.  I am so far along that I know as far as I am concerned.  I did not know but you had been brought up to think that whatever the Lord made was good, and that in saying that this red, gluey New Jersey soil was darned bad, I was swearing the worst way.  I don’t want to have millstones and that sort of thing about my neck.  I was quite up in the Scriptures at one time.”

“You need not be afraid,” said James with dignity; “I think the soil darned bad myself.”  He hesitated a little over the darned, but once it was out, he felt proud of it.

“Yes, it is,” said Doctor Gordon, “and if the Lord made it, he did not altogether succeed, and I see no earthly way of tracing the New Jersey soil back to original sin and the Garden of Eden.”

“That’s so,” said James.

Doctor Gordon’s face grew sober, his jocular mood for the time had vanished.  He was his true self.  “Did it ever occur to you that disease was the devil?” he asked abruptly.  “That is, that all these infernal microbes that burrow in the human system to its disease and death, were his veritable imps at work?”

James shook his head, and looked curiously at his companion’s face with its gloomy corrugations.

“Well, it has to me,” said the doctor, “and let me ask you one thing.  You have been brought up to believe that the devil’s particular residence was hell, haven’t you?”

James replied in a bewildered fashion that he had.

“Well,” said Doctor Gordon, “if the devil lives here, as he must live, when there’s such failures in the way of soil, and such climates, and such fiendish diseases, and crimes, why, this is hell.”

James stared at him.

Doctor Gordon nodded half-gloomily, half-whimsically.  “It’s so,” he said.  “We call it earth; but it’s hell.”

James said nothing.  The doctor’s gloomy theology was too much for him.  Besides, he was not quite sure that the elder man was not chaffing him.

“Well,” said Doctor Gordon presently, “hell it is, but there are compensations, such as apple-jack, and now and then there’s something doing that amuses one even here.  I am going to take you to something that enlivens hell this afternoon, if somebody doesn’t send a call.  I am trying to get my work done this morning, the worst of it, so as to have an hour this afternoon.”