When, for instance, in the early days at the chapel, John missed the Pedersen children from the Sunday school, and found their mother in tears at home because the children had no shoes, and that they had no shoes because Olaf gambled away his weekly wage in "Beaney" Webster's pool room where race-track bets were made, and poker and other gambling games were played, all in defiance of law,--and when he found the police supine and prosecutors indifferent,--the practical minded young divine sent Deacon Mullin--who, to his frequent discomfiture resembled a "tin can" sport more than a church official--into Beaney's to bet upon a horse. When the Deacon's horse won, and Beaney all unsuspecting paid the winnings over in a sealed envelope, the next Sunday night John took the envelope into the pulpit and shook it till it jingled as he told the story which next morning the newspapers printed widely, while the minister himself was swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Beaney.
That was the beginning, but to John's surprise it was not the end. Beaney did not plead guilty meekly. He fought and desperately, for this meddlesome amateur clergyman had lifted the cover on a sneaking underground system of petty gambling, of illicit liquor selling, and of graver violations of the moral laws, which ramified widely. Attacked in one part, all its members rallied to a defence of the whole that was impudent, determined and astonishingly powerful.
Hampstead was unknown, his church small and wretched and despised. His sole weapon was the newspapers who would not endorse him, but who would print what he said and what he did. What he said was not so much, but what John Hampstead did was presently considerable, for a few public-spirited citizens put money in his hand for detectives and special prosecutors, and he spent more hours that year in police courts than he did in his church.
In the end he won. The lawless element, sore and chastened, acknowledged their defeat, while the forces of good and evil alike recognized thus early the entry into the community of a man whose character and personality were henceforth to be reckoned with.
But while these battlings earned John publicity and high regard, they also won him hate and trouble. The work cost him tremendous expenditure of energy and sleepless nights. It made enemies of men whose friendship he desired. It brought him threats innumerable. A stick of dynamite was found beneath his study window. Yet John's devotion made him careless of personal danger. He trembled for Rose and Dick and Tayna; he trembled for the man who had crept through the shadow of the palms to plant that stick and time that fuse, which mercifully went out; but somehow he did not tremble for himself.