Higgins Part 4

"Have a little something soft?"

"I wouldn't take a gla.s.s of water over your dirty bar," Higgins is said to have roared, "if I died of thirst!"

The man will not compromise.

To all these men, as well as to the lumber-jacks, the Pilot gives his help and carries his message: to all the loggers and lumber-jacks and road-monkeys and cookees and punk-hunters and wood-butchers and swamp-men and teamsters and bull-cooks and the what-nots of the woods, and the gamblers and saloon-keepers and panderers and bartenders (and a host of filthy little runners and pullers-in and small thieves) of the towns. He has no abode near by, no church; he preaches in bunk-houses, and sleeps above saloons and in the little back rooms of hotels and in stables and wherever a blanket may be had in the woods. He ministers to n.o.body else: just to men like these. To women, too: not to many, perhaps, but still to those whom the pale men of the towns find necessary to their gain. To women like Nellie, in swiftly failing health, who could not escape (she said) because she had lost the knack of dressing in any other way. She beckoned him, aboard train, well aware of his profession; and when Higgins had listened to her ordinary little story, her threadbare, pathetic little plea to be helped, he carried her off to some saving Refuge for such as she. To women like little Liz, too, whose consumptive hand Higgins held while she lay dying alone in her tousled bed in the shuttered Fifth Red House.

"Am I dyin', Pilot?" she asked.

"Yes, my girl," he answered.

"Dyin'--_now?_"

Higgins said again that she was dying; and little Liz was dreadfully frightened then--and began to sob for her mother with all her heart.

I conceive with what tenderness the big, kind, clean Higgins comforted her--how that his big hand was soft and warm enough to serve in that extremity. It is not known to me, of course; but I fancy that little Liz of the Fifth Red House died more easily--more hopefully--because of the proximity of the Pilot's clear, uplifted soul.

IX

IN SPITE OF LAUGHTER

Higgins was born on August 19, 1865, in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a hotel-keeper. When he was seven years old his father died, and two years later his mother remarried and went pioneering to Shelburne, Dufferin County, Ontario, which was then a wilderness. There was no school; consequently there was no schooling. Higgins went through the experience of conversion when he was eighteen. Presently, thereafter, he determined to be a minister; and they laughed at him. Everybody laughed. Obviously, what he must have was education; but he had no money, and (as they fancied) less capacity. At any rate, the dogged Higgins began to preach; he preached--and right vigorously, too, no doubt--to the stumps on his stepfather's farm; and he kept on preaching until, one day, laughing faces slowly rose from behind the stumps, whereupon he took to his heels. At twenty he started to school with little children in Toronto. It was hard (he was still a laughing-stock); and there were three years of it--and two more in the high school.

Then off went Higgins as a lay preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Annandale, Minnesota. Following this came two years at Hamline University. In 1895 he was appointed to the charge of the little Presbyterian church at Barnum, Minnesota, a town of four hundred, where, subsequently, he married Eva L. Lucas, of Rockford, Minnesota.

It was here (says he) that the call came.

X

THE VOICE OF THE LORD

It was on the way between camps, of a Sunday afternoon in midwinter, when the Pilot related the experience which led to the singular ministerial activities in which he is engaged. He was wrapped in a thick Mackinaw coat, with a cloth cap pulled down over his ears; and he wore big overshoes, which buckled near to his knees. There was a heavy pack on his pack; it contained a change of socks (for himself), and many pounds of "readin' matter" (for "the boys"). He had preached in the morning at one camp, in the afternoon at another, and was now bound to a third, where (as it turned out) a hearty welcome was waiting. The day--now drawn far toward evening--was bitterly cold. There was no wind.

It was still and white and frosty on the logging-road.

It seems that once from Barnum the Pilot went vacating into the woods to see the log-drive.

"You're a preacher," said the boys. "Give us a sermon."

Higgins preached that evening, and the boys liked it. They liked the sermon; they fancied their own singing of _Rock of Ages_ and _Jesus, Lover of My Soul_. They asked Higgins to come again. Frequently after that--and ever oftener--Higgins walked into the woods when the drive was on, or into the camps in winter, to preach to the boys. They welcomed him; they were always glad to see him--and with great delight they sang _Jesus, Lover of My Soul_ and _Throw Out the Life-Line_. n.o.body else preached to them in those days; a great body of men--almost a mult.i.tude in all those woods: the Church had quite forgotten them.

"Boys," said Higgins, "you've always treated me right, here. Come in to see me when you're in town. The wife 'll be glad to have you."

They took him at his word. Without warning, one day, thirty lumber-jacks crowded into the little parlor. They were hospitably received.

"Pilot," said the spokesman, all now convinced of Higgins's genuineness, "here's something for you from the boys."

A piece of paper (a check for fifty-one dollars) was thrust into the Pilot's hand, and the whole crew decamped on a run, with howls of bashful laughter, like a pack of half-grown school-boys. And so the relations.h.i.+p was first established.

It was in winter, Higgins says, that the call came; and the voice of the Lord, as he says, was clear in direction. Two lumber-jacks came out of the woods to fetch him to the bedside of a sick homesteader who had been at work in the lumber-camps. The homesteader was a sick man (said they), and he had asked for the Pilot. The doctor was first to the man's mean home. There was no help for him, said he, in a log-cabin deep in the woods; if he could be taken to the hospital in Duluth there might be a chance. It was doubtful, of course; but to remain was death.

"All right," said Higgins. "I'll take him to the hospital."

The hospital doctor in Duluth said that the man was dying. The Pilot so informed the homesteader and bade him prepare. But the man smiled.

He had already prepared. "I heard you preach--that night--in camp--on the river," said he. It seems that he had been reared in a Christian home, but had not for twenty years heard the voice of a minister in exhortation until Higgins chanced that way. And afterward--when the lights in the wannigan were out and the crew had gone to sleep--he could not banish the vision of his mother. Life had been sweeter to him since that night. The Pilot's message (said he) had saved him.

"Mr. Higgins," said he, "go back to the camp and tell the boys about Jesus."

Higgins wondered if the Lord had spoken.

"Go back to the camps," the dying man repeated, "and tell the boys about Jesus."

n.o.body else was doing it. Why shouldn't Higgins? The boys had no minister. Why shouldn't Higgins be that minister? Was not this the very work the Lord had brought him to this far place to do? Had not the Lord spoken with the tongue of this dying man? "Go back to the camps and tell the boys about Jesus." The phrase was written on his heart. "Go back to the camp and tell the boys about Jesus." How it appealed to the young preacher--the very form of it! All that night, the homesteader having died, Higgins--not then the beloved Pilot--walked the hospital corridor. When day broke he had made up his mind. Whatever dreams of a city pulpit he had cherished were gone. He would go back to the camps for good and all.

And back he went.

We had now come over the logging-road near to the third camp. The story of the call was finished at sunset.

"Well," said the Pilot, heartily, with half a smile, "here I am, you see."

"On the job," laughed one of the company.

"For good and all," Higgins agreed. "It's funny about life," he added, gravely. "I'm a great big wilful fellow, naturally evil, I suppose; but it seems to me that all my lifelong the Lord has just led me by the hand as if I were nothing but a little child. And I didn't know what was happening to me! Now isn't that funny? Isn't the whole thing funny?"

XI

FIST-PLAY

It used sometimes to be difficult for Higgins to get a hearing in the camps; this was before he had fought and preached his way completely into the trust of the lumber-jacks. There was always a warm welcome for him in the bunk-houses, to be sure, and for the most part a large eagerness for the distraction of his discourses after supper; but here and there in the beginning he encountered an obstreperous fellow (and does to this day) who interrupted for the fun of the thing. It is related that upon one occasion a big Frenchman began to grind his axe of a Sunday evening precisely as Higgins began to preach.

"Some of the boys here," Higgins drawled, "want to hear me preach, and if the boys would just grind their axes some other time I'd be much obliged."