“Sure!  I see it.  But money’s easy enough to come at by a fellow like you when he needs it.  You haven’t come across all square with me yet!” It was not mere inquisitiveness; it was the insistence of a plain man who wanted a definite peg on which to hitch the first warp of association.  “You’ve got to handle money of mine,” he went on.  “I’m in a tight place and I have got to have the right men tied up with me.  I wouldn’t have to ask one of those boys yonder why he wanted to lug ice.  But you ain’t no ordinary slouch, mister.  You don’t do things—­not many of ’em—­unless you’ve got a good reason for same.”  It was the instinct of ingenuousness.  “Keep it all to yourself if you want to.  But in that case you’ll have to excuse me!”

Farr did not hesitate.  He smiled.

“You’re a down-on-the-ground fellow who may be able to understand the thing better than I do myself,” he declared.  Again he put his hand on the bent shoulder.

“You didn’t break loose from a good job and start this ice business here simply to make more money, did you?”

“Well, I’ve got a family to support and I wanted to make some money, of course, but I thought it was about time to have less relics, germs, curiosities, microbes, and general knickknacks left in ice-boxes after the ice had melted.  So I went out of the frozen museum business, mister.”  His voice softened suddenly.  “We lost a little girl a year ago last summer.  Typhoid!”

“I lost a little girl—­a friend,” said Farr, patting the shoulder.  “It’s this way with me—­What is your name?”

“Freeland Nowell.”

“Mr. Nowell, I have poked more or less fun in my life at men who claimed to have missions.  Perhaps that was because those men drew my attention by advertising their missions loudly—­and, therefore, I concluded that all men with licenses to cure this and fix that and regulate the other were fooling themselves or else were bluffs.  But all of a sudden I have waked up to something.  I believe that any human being who isn’t doing a little something on the side to help somebody else in this life is mighty miserable.  I believe that the average sort of folks are doing it—­keeping it quiet, in most cases, perhaps.  I thought I had a mission and I stood up in your city government and advertised it and made considerable of an ass of myself.”

“Well, it was all right one way you look at it,” said Nowell, with the caution of the honest citizen.  “But, of course, you got the stigmy put onto you of being a crank and a disturber and you don’t get nowhere!  It ain’t gab and holler that does it!  If talk sets folks to thinking—­that’s all right, so far as it goes.  But a lot of these chaps set their mouths to going and let their hands lay crossed in their laps and then wonder why the world doesn’t get better because they have asked it to be good.”

It was sagacity from the humble observer.