"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before their faces, John, when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell asked tentatively, but also by way of further firing the soul of the fighter.
"I believe I could," replied John ardently.
"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.
But there was another man who had been shocked by John's theatrical venture, and that was the pastor of the First Church, who had his virtues, much as other men. His face was round and like his figure, full of fatness. He was a merry soul and loved a joke. He had a heart as tender as his sense of humor was keen.
But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his convictions. His pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft. He steered her straight. To Heaven with Scylla! To Gehenna with Charybdis! Indeed, if there was one man in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all the rest of the world too, it was this same Charles Thompson Campbell, pastor of the aforesaid grand old First Church. Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were black. His voice had the ultimate roar in it. When he stood up, locks flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his pulpit with that fat doubled fist, the palm of which had been moulded in youth upon the handle of a plow, every nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with the force of his utterance. But Doctor Campbell's convictions, like most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.
Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned. One was the modern novel. Another was the stage! Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted largely, had shed some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature; but he never quoted Shakespeare. One could almost doubt if he had read him, and when Shakespeare came to town, he never went to see him.
On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor Campbell read in the papers that the youngest of his deacons had the night before made his debut as Ursus in _Quo Vadis_, he was not only pained but moved to self-reproach. Grief enveloped him. It thrust the sharp cleft of a frown into his smooth brow. It thrust his chin down upon his bosom and caused him to heave a tumultuous sigh. He bowed his head beside his study table and then and there put up an earnest petition for the soul of John Hampstead. It was a sincere and natural prayer, because Doctor Campbell was a sincere man and believed in the efficacy of prayer.