“But you won out, my boy,” said his father in a croaking voice, putting his arm round his son.
“Yes, because you made me stick it, just as you have often made me stick it since. May God forget me if I ever forget what you have done for me. Shall we read now?”
He took the big Bible from its place upon the table, and turning the leaves read aloud from the teachings of the world's greatest Master. It was the parable of the talents.
“Rather hard on the failure,” he said as he closed the book.
“No, not the failure,” said his father, “the slacker, the quitter. It is nature's law. There is no place in God's universe for a quitter.”
“You are right, dad,” said Barry. “Good-night.”
He kissed his father, as he had ever done since his earliest infancy. Their prayers were said in private, the son, clergyman though he was, could never bring himself to offer to lead the devotions of him at whose knee he had kneeled every night of his life, as a boy, for his evening prayer.
“Good-night, boy,” said his father, holding him by the hand for a moment or so. “We do not know what is before us, defeat, loss, suffering. That part is not in our hands altogether, but the shame of the quitter never need, and never shall be ours.”
The little man stepped into his bedroom with his shoulders squared and his head erect.
“By Jove! He's no quitter,” said his son to himself, as his eyes followed him. “When he quits he'll be dead. God keep me from shaming him!”
The hour for the church service had not quite arrived, but already a number of wagons, buckboards and buggies had driven up and deposited their loads at the church door. The women had passed into the church, where the Sunday School was already in session; the men waited outside, driven by the heat of the July sun and the hotter July wind into the shade of the church building.
Through the church windows came the droning of voices, with now and then a staccato rapping out of commands heard above the droning.
“That's Hayes,” said a sturdy young chap, brown as an Indian, lolling upon the grass. “He likes to be bossing something.”
“That's so, Ewen,” replied a smaller man, with a fish-like face, his mouth and nose running into a single feature.
“I guess he's doin' his best, Nathan Pilley,” answered another man, stout and stocky, with bushy side whiskers flanking around a rubicund face, out of which stared two prominent blue eyes.