“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_!”
“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?”
“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.”