Higgins, a Man's Christian

VIII

TOUCHING PITCH

Not long ago Bemidji was what the Pilot calls “the worst town on the map.” It was indescribably lawless and vicious. An adequate description would be unprintable. The government–the police and magistrates–was wholly in the hands of the saloon-keeping element. It was a thoroughly noisome settlement. The town authorities laughed at the Pilot; the state authorities gently listened to him and conveniently forgot him, for political reasons. But he was determined to cleanse the place of its established and flaunting wickednesses. He organized a W. C. T. U.; and then–“Boys,” said he to the keepers of places, “I’m going to clean you out. I want to be fair to you–and so I tell you. Don’t you ever come sneaking up to me and say I didn’t give you warning!” They laughed at him when he stripped off his coat and got to work. In the bar-rooms the toast was, “T’ Higgins–and t’ hell with Higgins!” and down went the red liquor. But when the fight was over, when the shutters were up for good–so had he compelled the respect of these men–they came to the preacher, saying: “Higgins, you gave us a show; you fought us fair–and we want to shake hands.”

“That’s all right, boys,” said Higgins.

“Will you shake hands?”

“Sure, I’ll shake hands, boys!”

Jack Worth–that notorious gambler and saloon-keeper of Bemidji–quietly approached Higgins.

“Frank,” said he, “you win; but I’ve no hard feelings.”

“That’s all right, Jack,” said Higgins.

The Pilot remembered that he had sat close to the death-bed of the young motherless son of this same Jack Worth in the room above the saloon. They had been good friends–the big Pilot and the boy. And Jack Worth had loved the boy in a way that only Higgins knew. “Papa,” said the boy, at this time, death being then very near, “I want you to promise me something.” Jack Worth listened. “I want you to promise me, papa,” the boy went on, “that you’ll never drink another drop in all your life.” Jack Worth promised, and kept his promise; and Jack Worth and the preacher had preserved a queer friendship since that night.

“Jack,” said the Pilot, now, “what you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“Aren’t you going to quit this dirty business.”

“I ran a square game in my house, and you know it,” the gambler replied.

“That’s all right, Jack,” Higgins said; “but look here, old man, isn’t little Johnnie ever going to pull you out of this?”

“Maybe, Frank,” was the reply. “I don’t know.”

The gamblers, the bartenders, the little pickpockets are as surely the Pilot’s parishioners as anybody else, and they like and respect him. Nobody is excluded from his ministry. I recall that Higgins was late one night writing in his little room. There came a knock on the door-a loud, angry demand–a forewarning of trouble, to one who knows about knocks (as the Pilot says). Higgins opened, of course, and discovered a big bartender, new to the town–a bigger man than he, and a man with a fighting reputation. The object of the quarrelsome visit was perfectly plain: the preacher braced himself for combat.

“You Higgins?”

“Higgins is my name.”

“Did you ever say that if it came to a row between the gamblers of this town and the lumber-jacks that you’d fight with the lumber-jacks?”

Higgins looked the man over.

“Well,” snarled the visitor, “how about it?”

“Well, my friend,” replied the Pilot, laying off his coat, “I guess you’re my man!” and advanced with guard up.

“I’m no gambler,” the visitor hastily explained. “I’m a bartender.”

“Don’t matter,” said Higgins. “You’re my man just the same. I meant bartenders, too.”

“Well,” said the bartender, “I just come up to ask you a question.”

Higgins attended.

“Are men made by conditions,” the bartender propounded, “or do conditions make men?”

There ensued the hottest kind of an argument. It turned out that the man was a Socialist–a propagandist who had come to Deer River to sow the seed (he said). I have forgotten what the Pilot’s contention was; but, at any rate, it dodged the general issue and concerned itself with the specific question of whether or not conditions at Deer River made saloon-keepers and gamblers and worse and bartenders–the affirmative of which he held to be an abominable opinion. They carried the argument to the bar-room, where, one on each side of the dripping bar, they disputed until daylight, Higgins at times loudly taunting his opponent with the assertion that a bartender could do nothing but shame Socialism in the community. It ended in this amicable agreement: that the bartender was privileged to attempt the persuasion of Higgins to Socialism, and that Higgins was permitted to practise upon the bartender without let or hindrance with a view to his conversion.

“Have a drink?” said the bartender.

“Wh–what!” exclaimed the Pilot.

“Have a little something soft?”

“I wouldn’t take a glass of water over your dirty bar,” Higgins is said to have roared, “if I died of thirst!”

The man will not compromise.

To all these men, as well as to the lumber-jacks, the Pilot gives his help and carries his message: to all the loggers and lumber-jacks and road-monkeys and cookees and punk-hunters and wood-butchers and swamp-men and teamsters and bull-cooks and the what-nots of the woods, and the gamblers and saloon-keepers and panderers and bartenders (and a host of filthy little runners and pullers-in and small thieves) of the towns. He has no abode near by, no church; he preaches in bunk-houses, and sleeps above saloons and in the little back rooms of hotels and in stables and wherever a blanket may be had in the woods. He ministers to nobody else: just to men like these. To women, too: not to many, perhaps, but still to those whom the pale men of the towns find necessary to their gain. To women like Nellie, in swiftly failing health, who could not escape (she said) because she had lost the knack of dressing in any other way. She beckoned him, aboard train, well aware of his profession; and when Higgins had listened to her ordinary little story, her threadbare, pathetic little plea to be helped, he carried her off to some saving Refuge for such as she. To women like little Liz, too, whose consumptive hand Higgins held while she lay dying alone in her tousled bed in the shuttered Fifth Red House.

“Am I dyin’, Pilot?” she asked.

“Yes, my girl,” he answered.

“Dyin’–now?”

Higgins said again that she was dying; and little Liz was dreadfully frightened then–and began to sob for her mother with all her heart.

I conceive with what tenderness the big, kind, clean Higgins comforted her–how that his big hand was soft and warm enough to serve in that extremity. It is not known to me, of course; but I fancy that little Liz of the Fifth Red House died more easily–more hopefully–because of the proximity of the Pilot’s clear, uplifted soul.

IX

IN SPITE OF LAUGHTER

Higgins was born on August 19, 1865, in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a hotel-keeper. When he was seven years old his father died, and two years later his mother remarried and went pioneering to Shelburne, Dufferin County, Ontario, which was then a wilderness. There was no school; consequently there was no schooling. Higgins went through the experience of conversion when he was eighteen. Presently, thereafter, he determined to be a minister; and they laughed at him. Everybody laughed. Obviously, what he must have was education; but he had no money, and (as they fancied) less capacity. At any rate, the dogged Higgins began to preach; he preached–and right vigorously, too, no doubt–to the stumps on his stepfather’s farm; and he kept on preaching until, one day, laughing faces slowly rose from behind the stumps, whereupon he took to his heels. At twenty he started to school with little children in Toronto. It was hard (he was still a laughing-stock); and there were three years of it–and two more in the high school. Then off went Higgins as a lay preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Annandale, Minnesota. Following this came two years at Hamline University. In 1895 he was appointed to the charge of the little Presbyterian church at Barnum, Minnesota, a town of four hundred, where, subsequently, he married Eva L. Lucas, of Rockford, Minnesota.

It was here (says he) that the call came.

X

THE VOICE OF THE LORD

It was on the way between camps, of a Sunday afternoon in midwinter, when the Pilot related the experience which led to the singular ministerial activities in which he is engaged. He was wrapped in a thick Mackinaw coat, with a cloth cap pulled down over his ears; and he wore big overshoes, which buckled near to his knees. There was a heavy pack on his pack; it contained a change of socks (for himself), and many pounds of “readin’ matter” (for “the boys”). He had preached in the morning at one camp, in the afternoon at another, and was now bound to a third, where (as it turned out) a hearty welcome was waiting. The day–now drawn far toward evening–was bitterly cold. There was no wind. It was still and white and frosty on the logging-road.

It seems that once from Barnum the Pilot went vacating into the woods to see the log-drive.

“You’re a preacher,” said the boys. “Give us a sermon.”

Higgins preached that evening, and the boys liked it. They liked the sermon; they fancied their own singing of Rock of Ages and Jesus, Lover of My Soul. They asked Higgins to come again. Frequently after that–and ever oftener–Higgins walked into the woods when the drive was on, or into the camps in winter, to preach to the boys. They welcomed him; they were always glad to see him–and with great delight they sang Jesus, Lover of My Soul and Throw Out the Life-Line. Nobody else preached to them in those days; a great body of men–almost a multitude in all those woods: the Church had quite forgotten them.

“Boys,” said Higgins, “you’ve always treated me right, here. Come in to see me when you’re in town. The wife ’ll be glad to have you.”

They took him at his word. Without warning, one day, thirty lumber-jacks crowded into the little parlor. They were hospitably received.

“Pilot,” said the spokesman, all now convinced of Higgins’s genuineness, “here’s something for you from the boys.”

A piece of paper (a check for fifty-one dollars) was thrust into the Pilot’s hand, and the whole crew decamped on a run, with howls of bashful laughter, like a pack of half-grown school-boys. And so the relationship was first established.

It was in winter, Higgins says, that the call came; and the voice of the Lord, as he says, was clear in direction. Two lumber-jacks came out of the woods to fetch him to the bedside of a sick homesteader who had been at work in the lumber-camps. The homesteader was a sick man (said they), and he had asked for the Pilot. The doctor was first to the man’s mean home. There was no help for him, said he, in a log-cabin deep in the woods; if he could be taken to the hospital in Duluth there might be a chance. It was doubtful, of course; but to remain was death.

“All right,” said Higgins. “I’ll take him to the hospital.”

The hospital doctor in Duluth said that the man was dying. The Pilot so informed the homesteader and bade him prepare. But the man smiled. He had already prepared. “I heard you preach–that night–in camp–on the river,” said he. It seems that he had been reared in a Christian home, but had not for twenty years heard the voice of a minister in exhortation until Higgins chanced that way. And afterward–when the lights in the wannigan were out and the crew had gone to sleep–he could not banish the vision of his mother. Life had been sweeter to him since that night. The Pilot’s message (said he) had saved him.

“Mr. Higgins,” said he, “go back to the camp and tell the boys about Jesus.”

Higgins wondered if the Lord had spoken.

“Go back to the camps,” the dying man repeated, “and tell the boys about Jesus.”

Nobody else was doing it. Why shouldn’t Higgins? The boys had no minister. Why shouldn’t Higgins be that minister? Was not this the very work the Lord had brought him to this far place to do? Had not the Lord spoken with the tongue of this dying man? “Go back to the camps and tell the boys about Jesus.” The phrase was written on his heart. “Go back to the camp and tell the boys about Jesus.” How it appealed to the young preacher–the very form of it! All that night, the homesteader having died, Higgins–not then the beloved Pilot–walked the hospital corridor. When day broke he had made up his mind. Whatever dreams of a city pulpit he had cherished were gone. He would go back to the camps for good and all.

And back he went.

We had now come over the logging-road near to the third camp. The story of the call was finished at sunset.

“Well,” said the Pilot, heartily, with half a smile, “here I am, you see.”

“On the job,” laughed one of the company.

“For good and all,” Higgins agreed. “It’s funny about life,” he added, gravely. “I’m a great big wilful fellow, naturally evil, I suppose; but it seems to me that all my lifelong the Lord has just led me by the hand as if I were nothing but a little child. And I didn’t know what was happening to me! Now isn’t that funny? Isn’t the whole thing funny?”

XI

FIST-PLAY

It used sometimes to be difficult for Higgins to get a hearing in the camps; this was before he had fought and preached his way completely into the trust of the lumber-jacks. There was always a warm welcome for him in the bunk-houses, to be sure, and for the most part a large eagerness for the distraction of his discourses after supper; but here and there in the beginning he encountered an obstreperous fellow (and does to this day) who interrupted for the fun of the thing. It is related that upon one occasion a big Frenchman began to grind his axe of a Sunday evening precisely as Higgins began to preach.

“Some of the boys here,” Higgins drawled, “want to hear me preach, and if the boys would just grind their axes some other time I’d be much obliged.”

The grinding continued.

“I say,” Higgins proceeded, his voice rising a little, “that a good many of the boys have asked me to preach a little sermon to them; but I can’t preach while one of the boys grinds his axe.”

No impression was made.

“Now, boys,” Higgins went on, “most of you want to hear me preach, and I’m going to preach, all right; but I cant preach if anybody grinds an axe.”

The Frenchman whistled a tune.

“Friend, back there!” Higgins called out, “can’t you oblige the boys by grinding that axe another time?”

There was some tittering in the bunk-house–and the grinding went on–and the tune came saucily up from the door where the Frenchman stood. Higgins walked slowly back; having come near, he paused–then put his hand on the Frenchman’s shoulder in a way not easily misunderstood.

“Friend,” he began, softly, “if you–”

The Frenchman struck at him.

“Keep back, boys!” an old Irishman yelled, catching up a peavy-pole. “Give the Pilot a show! Keep out o’ this or I’ll brain ye!”

The Sky Pilot caught the Frenchman about the waist–flung him against a door–caught him again on the rebound–put him head foremost in a barrel of water–and absent-mindedly held him there until the old Irishman asked, softly, “Say, Pilot, ye ain’t goin’ t’ drown him, are ye?” It was all over in a flash: Higgins is wisely no man for half-way measures in an emergency; in a moment the Frenchman lay cast, dripping and gasping, on the floor, and the bunk-house was in a tumult of jeering. Then Higgins proceeded with the sermon; and–strangely–he is of an earnestness and frankly mild and loving disposition so impressive that this passionate incident had doubtless no destructive effect upon the solemn service following. It is easy to fancy him passing unruffled to the upturned cask which served him for a pulpit, readjusting the blanket which was his altar-cloth, raising his dog-eared little hymn-book to the smoky light of the lantern overhead, and beginning, feelingly: “Boys, let’s sing Number Fifty-six: ‘Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly.’ You know the tune, boys; everybody sing–‘While the nearer waters roll and the tempest still is high.’ All ready, now!” A fight in a church would be a seriously disturbing commotion; but a fight in a bunk-house–well, that is commonplace. There is more interest in singing Jesus, Lover of My Soul, than in dwelling upon the affair afterward. And the boys sang heartily, I am sure, as they always do, the Frenchman quite forgotten.

Next day Higgins was roused by the selfsame man; and he jumped out of his bunk in a hurry (says he), like a man called to fire or battle.

“Well,” he thought, as he sighed, “if I am ever to preach in these camps again, I suppose, this man must be satisfactorily thrashed; but”–more cheerfully–“he needs a good thrashing, anyhow.”

“Pilot,” said the Frenchman, “I’m sorry about last night.”

Higgins shook hands with him.

XII

MAKING THE GRADE

Fully to describe Higgins’s altercations with lumber-jacks and tin-horn gamblers and the like in pursuit of clean opportunity for other men would be to pain him. It is a phase of ministry he would conceal. Perhaps he fears that unknowing folk might mistake him for a quarrelsome fellow. He is nothing of the sort, however; he is a wise and efficient minister of the gospel–but fights well, upon good occasion, notwithstanding his forty-odd years. In the Minnesota woods fighting is as necessary as praying–just as tender a profession of Christ. Higgins regrets that he knows little enough of boxing; he shamefacedly feels that his preparation for the ministry has in this respect been inadequate. Once, when they examined him before the Presbytery for ordination, a new-made seminary graduate from the East, rising, quizzed thus: “Will the candidate not tell us who was Cæsar of Rome when Paul preached?” It stumped Higgins; but–he told us on the road from Six to Four–“I was confused, you see. The only Cæsar I could think of was Julius, and I knew that that wasn’t right. If he’d only said Emperor of Rome, I could have told him, of course! Anyhow, it didn’t matter much.” Boxing, according to the experience of Higgins, was an imperative preparation for preaching in his field; a little haziness concerning an Emperor of Rome really didn’t matter so very much. At any rate, the boys wouldn’t care.

Higgins’s ministry, however, knows a gentler service than that which a strong arm can accomplish in a bar-room. When Alex McKenzie lay dying in the hospital at Bemidji–a screen around his cot in the ward–the Pilot sat with him, as he sits with all dying lumber-jacks. It was the Pilot who told him that the end was near.

“Nearing the landing, Pilot?”

“Almost there, Alex.”

“I’ve a heavy load, Pilot–a heavy load!”

McKenzie was a four-horse teamster, used to hauling logs from the woods to the landing at the lake–forty thousand pounds of new-cut timber to be humored over the logging-roads.

“Pilot,” he asked, presently, “do you think I can make the grade?”

“With help, Alex.”

McKenzie said nothing for a moment. Then he looked up. “You mean,” said he, “that I need another team of leaders?”

“The Great Leader, Alex.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” said McKenzie: “you mean that I need the help of Jesus Christ.”

No need to tell what Higgins said then–what he repeated about repentance and faith and the infinite love of God and the power of Christ for salvation. Alex McKenzie had heard it all before–long before, being Scottish born, and a Highlander–and had not utterly forgotten, prodigal though he was. It was all recalled to him, now, by a man whose life and love and uplifted heart were well known to him–his minister.

“Pray for me,” said he, like a child.

McKenzie died that night. He had said never a word in the long interval; but just before his last breath was drawn–while the Pilot still held his hand and the Sister of Charity numbered her beads near by–he whispered in the Pilot’s ear:

“Tell the boys I made the grade!”

Pat, the old road-monkey–now come to the end of a long career of furious living–being about to die, sent for Higgins. He was desperately anxious concerning the soul that was about to depart from his ill-kept and degraded body; and he was in pain, and turning very weak.

Higgins waited.

“Pilot,” Pat whispered, with a knowing little wink, “I want you to fix it for me.”

“To fix it, Pat?”

“Sure, you know what I mean, Pilot,” Pat replied. “I want you to fix it for me.”

“Pat,” said Higgins, “I can’t fix it for you.”

“Then,” said the dying man, in amazement, “what the hell did you come here for?”

“To show you,” Higgins answered, gently, “how you can fix it.”

“Me fix it?”

Higgins explained, then, the scheme of redemption, according to his creed–the atonement and salvation by faith. The man listened–and nodded comprehendingly–and listened, still with amazement–all the time nodding his understanding. “Uh-huh!” he muttered, when the preacher had done, as one who says, I see! He said no other word before he died. Just, “Uh-huh!”–to express enlightenment. And when, later, it came time for him to die, he still held tight to Higgins’s finger, muttering, now and again, “Uh-huh! Uh-huh!”–like a man to whom has come some great astounding revelation.

XIII

STRAIGHT FROM THE SHOULDER

In the bunk-house, after supper, Higgins preaches. It is a solemn service: no minister of them all so punctilious as Higgins in respect to reverent conduct. The preacher is in earnest and single of purpose. The congregation is compelled to reverence. “Boys,” says he, in cunning appeal, “this bunk-house is our church–the only church we’ve got.” No need to say more! And a queer church: a low, long hut, stifling and ill-smelling and unclean and infested, a row of double-decker bunks on either side, a great glowing stove in the middle, socks and Mackinaws steaming on the racks, boots put out to dry, and all dim-lit with lanterns. Half-clad, hairy men, and boys with young beards, lounge everywhere–stretched out on the benches, peering from the shadows of the bunks, squatted on the fire-wood, cross-legged on the floor near the preacher. Higgins rolls out a cask for a pulpit and covers it with a blanket. Then he takes off his coat and mops his brow.

Presently, hymn-book or Testament in hand, he is sitting on the pulpit.

“Not much light here,” says he, “so I won’t read to-night; but I’ll say the First Psalm. Are you all ready?”

Everybody is ready.

“All right. ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,’ boys, ‘nor standeth in the way of sinners.’”

The door opens and a man awkwardly enters.

“Got any room back there for Bill, boys?” the preacher calls.

There seems to be room.

“I want to see you after service, Bill. You’ll find a seat back there with the boys. ‘For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous; but the way of the ungodly,’ gentlemen, ‘shall perish.’”

There is a prayer, restrained, in the way of the preacher’s church–a petition terrible with earnestness. One wonders how a feeling God could turn a deaf ear to the beseeching eloquence of it! And the boys sing–lustily, too–led by the stentorian preacher. An amazing incongruity: these seared, blasphemous barbarians bawling, What a Friend I Have in Jesus!