"
"Lemuel; and I'm no good fellow."
"That's the truth," his wife added thinly. "Here is the only one in
this house." She touched her abundant self.
"Then I can put up?"
"No," Lemuel Doret told him. "This is a house of God's."
Bella laughed in a rising hysterical key.
"Listen to him," she gasped; "listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you
might have forgotten him," she proclaimed; "he's been in the pen for
ten and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen
years ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out
on a 'coke' deal. If this here's a house of God's I'd like to know what
he called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went
on, not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run
a hop joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other
breath. That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even
for the police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter
in his district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first
he cut neither."
She stopped from sheer lack of breath.
Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the
glory of God. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the
Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and
brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of
redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who
acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight.
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