I sat and stared at him.  Oh, what was it Paul had said we were to pray for, at such a time as this?

“And for me, that speech may be given to me ... that I may open my mouth with confidence...”

But the words wouldn’t come.

“I’ve got to go!  I’ve got to go, and try myself out!” he gritted.

“You—­understand your risks,” I managed to say through stiff lips.  I had always, in my secret heart, been more or less afraid of this.  Always had I feared that the rulers of the world of darkness, swooping down and catching him unaware, might win the long fight in the end.

“Here you are safe.  You are building up an honored name.  You are winning the respect and confidence of all decent people—­and you wish to undo it all.  You wish to take such desperate chances—­now!” I groaned.

“I’ve got to go!” he burst forth, white-lipped.  “You’ve never seen a dip cut off from his dope, have you?  Well, I’m it, when the old town calls me loud enough for me to hear her plain.  I’ve stood her off as long as I could—­and now I’m that crazy for her I could wallow in her dust.  Besides, there’s not such a lot of risks.  I don’t have to leave my card at the station-house to let ’em know I’m calling, do I?  They haven’t been sitting on what they think is my grave to keep me from getting up before Gabriel beats ’em to it, have they?  No, they’re not expecting me.  What I could do to ’em now would make the Big Uns look like a bunch of pikers—­and their beans would have to turn inside out before they fell for it that I’d come back to my happy home and was on the job again.”

“If—­if you hadn’t been so white, I’d have cut and run for it without ever putting you wise.  But I want to play fair.  I’d be a hog if I didn’t play fair, and I’m trying to do it.  I’m going because I can’t stay.  I’ve got enough of my own money, earned honest, saved up, to pay my way.  Let me take it and go.  And if I can come back, why, I’ll come.”

He was stone deaf to entreaties, prayers, reasoning, argument.  The four years of his stay with me, and all their work, and study, and endeavor, and progress, seemed to have slipped from him as if they had never been.  They were swept aside like cobwebs.  He broke away from me in the midst of my pleading, hurried into his bedroom, and began to sort into a grip a few necessities.

“I’ll leave on the three-o’clock,” he flung over his shoulder to me, standing disconsolate in the door.  “I’ll stop at the bank on my way.”  I could do nothing; he had taken the bit between his teeth and was bolting.  I had for the time being lost all power of control over him, and before I might hope to recover it he would be out of my reach.  Perhaps, I reflected wretchedly, the best thing to do under the circumstances, would simply be to give him his head.  I had seen horses conquered like that.  But the road before John Flint was so dark and so crooked—­and at the end of it waited Slippy McGee!