“Do you get tired?”

“Tired?  Tired as hell!”

“I mean—­tired of life?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “I aint livin’ the best kind of a life, but what I have is better than none.  I don’t know what’s beyond—­if there is any life or none at all; but something in me makes me stick to this one.  Besides, if there is any chance for a better life here, he must be a damned coward that would go out of it and leave it undone.  Good night.”

I saw him retreat to his shack among the tall weeds.  I heard the door close.  I fancied him lie down in a heap in the corner and go to sleep.  He was a better philosopher than I was, and he had called me a coward, but he had not altered my determination.  I began to sweat.  It was like the action of a fever on my body, and I became very nervous; but I was determined to meet the crisis, and go.

A sudden change in affairs was created by an unearthly scream—­the scream of a woman.  I looked around suddenly and discovered that the only two-story shack on “the bottoms” was in a blaze, and the thought occurred to me that I might be of some help and accomplish my purpose at the same time.

In a moment I was beside the burning hut.  It appeared that a lamp had exploded upstairs, and that three small children were hemmed in.  That was the cause of the scream.

A plank that reached to the upstairs window was lying at the wood pile.  I pushed it against the house and climbed like a cat into the burning bedroom.  By this time the neighbours had collected, and I helped the woman and lowered the three children down, one by one, and then deliberately groped for the stairs to get hemmed in, the smoke suffocating me as I did so.  By the time I found the stairs, my hair was singed, my arms were burned, but I was gradually losing consciousness, and before I reached the bottom I fell, suffocated with the smoke.  In that last moment of consciousness, my whole life came up in review.  I had no regrets.  I had played a part and it was over.

When I came out of coma, I was lying on my cot in the hut, the neighbours crowding my little bedroom and standing outside in scores.  One of the newspapers that had most severely criticized my interference in politics, gave me a pass to Colorado and return—­and in the mountains of Colorado, the door of my soul opened again, and I saw the world beautiful—­and opportunities that were golden for helpfulness and service awaiting my touch.  So I returned to my hut with the sense of God more fully developed in me than it had ever been.

They had a system in that city that I was very much ashamed of—­that I thought all men ought to be ashamed of—­the segregation of the “social evil.”  I discovered that the city fined these poor creatures of the streets, and that these fines, amounting to thousands of dollars every year, went straight into the public school fund, so that it could truly be said that the more debauched society was, the more efficiently it could educate its children and its youth.