lot o’ such folks out in a cesspool!  They do religion more harm than the Devil!  They’re about as like what fightin’ Christians ought to be as a spit wad’s like a bullet!  Well, we went in with a whoop; but God wasn’t out for the sissies that night, Wayland:  he was out with a gun for red blood men!  He got us, Wayland!  That’s all!  ’Twasn’t the poor puny preachers, perhaps ‘twas th’ music:  th’ fat one cud sing, but when we came out the doctor was cryin’; poor fellow he killed himself in D. T.’s later; an’ A was all plugged up wi’ cold in m’ head blowin’ m’ nose!  ‘Boys,’ says I, ’here’s where I get off.  Here’s y’r money back.  A’ve put up a pretty good fight for the Devil so far an’ A’ve earned m’ way!  Now, A’m goin’ t’ fight for God an’ earn m’ way!’ They didn’t want to take the money back.  They didn’t believe it.  A finished my job on the railroad, then A slummed it in th’ cities, this was when the bishop tried to turn me school boy at forty, an’ to dig in y’r graveyard o’ theology; that was before m’ brother was bishop and why, A hiked for Indians, Wayland!  A know the Cree tongue, an’ A know the need o’ decency in th’ tepees, an’ A know the trick o’ puttin’ Christianity into th’ end o’ m’ fist on white blackguards!  An’ that’s all.”

“Is that all?” repeated Wayland; and he gave the old frontiersman the same kind of a look, Matthews had given him that day going up the face of the Pass precipice.

“Yes, that’s all there was to it; an’ A could no more tell y’ what happened, Wayland, than y’ could tell a man what happened when y’ jumped in that pool an’ got washed clean!  Better try it, Wayland!”

They sat late listening to the gurgle and trill and tinkle of the water slipping over the stones.  Neither man said anything more, nor mouthed, nor kneeled, nor amened, nor did save as men among men do and say:  but somehow Wayland had never felt so sure of the God, who was Love and whose Love washed men clean, being, as he told himself, ‘on the job.’  It may not have been religion; and it may not have been theology; but I think it was the workable conviction that many a fighting man incorporates into his life.  Perhaps, it was what Christians call Belief, only we have so slimed that good word over with hypocrisy that it’s hard for fighting working men among men, women among women, people on the job, to mine down to the exact business sense of those old religious terms.  ‘Slimed with hypocrisy?’ Yes, good friends, ’slimed with hypocrisy.’  Have you not known men and women, legions of them, who shouted their fire-proof Belief, Belief, Belief, their fire-insurance Belief that was to roof them from rain of fire and act as an umbrella against the results of their own misdeeds; who underscored their Bibles, and prayed long and loud, and proclaimed themselves right, when every day, every act of every day, every leastermost act of very hour, shouted blasphemous denial of what so ever is lovely and pure and unselfish and Christlike; whose influence damned and injured and blighted every life it touched?  You must not blame business men and women for wanting a workable faith, a faith that will deliver the goods on the job.