“Would you better accept it?” I wondered.

“I can’t afford not to,” said he resolutely.  “The time’s come for me to get out in the open, and I might just as well face the music, and Do it Now.  Risks?  I hardly think so.  I never hunted in couples, remember—­I always went by my lonesome and got away with it.  Besides, who’s remembering Slippy?  Nobody.  He’s drowned and dead and done with.  But, however, and nevertheless, and because, I shall go.”

Again we looked at each other; and his look was untroubled.

“The pipe-dreams I’ve had about slipping back into little old New York!  But if anybody had told me I’d go back like I’m going, with the sort of folks waiting for me that will be waiting now, I’d have passed it up.  Well, you never can tell, can you?  And in a way it’s funny—­now isn’t it?”

“No, you never can tell,” said I, soberly.  “But I do not think it at all funny.  Quite the contrary.”  Suppose, oh, suppose, that after all these years, when a well-earned success was in his grasp, it should happen—­I turned pale.  He read my fear in my face and his smile might have been borrowed from my mother’s mouth.

“Don’t you get cold feet, parson,” he counseled kindly.  “Be a sport!  Besides, it’s all in the Game, you know.”

“Is it?”

“Sure!”

“And worth while, John?”

He laughed.  “Believe me!  It’s the worthwhilest thing under the sun to sit in the Game, with a sport’s interest in the hands dealt out, taking yours as it comes to you, bluffing all you can when you’ve got to, playing your cards for all they’re worth when it’s your turn.  No reneging.  No squealing when you lose.  No boasting how you did it when you win.  There’s nothing in the whole universe so intensely and immensely worth while as being you and alive, with yourself the whole kitty and the sky your limit!  It’s one great old Game, and I’m for thanking the Big Dealer that I’da whack at playing it.”  And his eyes snapped and his lean brown face flushed.

“And you are really willing to—­to stake yourself now, my son?”

“Lord, parson, you ought to know!  And you a dead ringer for the real thing in a classy sport yourself!”

“My dear son—!”

My dear son waved his fine hand, and chuckled in his red beard.

“Would you back down if this was your call?  Why, you’re the sort that would tackle the biggest noise in the ring, even if you knew you’d be dragged out on your pantry in the first half of the first round, if you thought you’d got holy orders to do it!  If you saw me getting jellyfish of the spine now, you’d curl up and die—­wouldn’t you, honest Injun?” His eyes crinkled and he grinned so infectiously that my fears subsided.  I had an almost superstitious certainty that nothing really evil could happen to a man who could grin like that.  Fate and fortune are perfectly powerless before the human being who can meet them with the sword of a smile.