Slippy McGee | Page 9

purpose. But in the meantime the mother dies, and here you and I have been used to save alive a poor useless devil of a one-legged tramp, probably without his consent and against his will, because it had to be and we couldn't do anything else! Now, why? I can't help but wonder!"
We looked down again, the two of us, at the face on the pillow. And I wondered also, with even greater cause than the doctor; for I had opened the oilskin package the Poles found, and it had given me occasion for fear, reflection, and prayer. I was startled and alarmed beyond words, for it contained tools of a curious and unusual type,--not such tools as workmen carry abroad in the light of day.
There was no one to whom I might confide that unpleasant discovery. I simply could not terrify my mother, nor could I in common decency burden the already overburdened doctor. Nor is our sheriff one to turn to readily; he is not a man whose intelligence or heart one may admire, respect, or depend upon. My guest had come to me with empty pockets and a burglar's kit; a hint of that, and the sheriff had camped on the Parish House front porch with a Winchester across his knees and handcuffs jingling in his pockets. No, I couldn't consult the law.
I had yet a deeper and a better reason for waiting, which I find it rather hard to set down in cold words. It is this: that as I grow older I have grown more and more convinced that not fortuitously, not by chance, never without real and inner purposes, are we allowed to come vitally into each other's lives. I have walked up the steep sides of Calvary to find out that when another wayfarer pauses for a space beside us, it is because one has something to give, the other something to receive.
So, upon reflection, I took that oilskin package weighted down with the seven deadly sins over to the church, and hid it under the statue of St. Stanislaus, whom my Poles love, and before whom they come to kneel and pray for particular favors. I tilted the saint back upon his wooden stand, and thrust that package up to where his hands fold over the sheaf of lilies he carries. St. Stanislaus is a beautiful and most holy youth. No one would ever suspect him of hiding under his brown habit a burglar's kit!
When I had done this, and stopped to say three Hail Marys for guidance, I went back to the little room called my study, where my books and papers and my butterfly cabinets and collecting outfits were kept, and set myself seriously to studying my files of newspapers, beginning at a date a week preceding my man's appearance. Then:
Slippy McGee Makes Good His Name Once More. Slips One Over On The Police. Noted Burglar Escapes.
said the glaring headlines in the New York papers. The dispatches were dated from Atlanta, and when I turned to the Atlanta papers I found them, too, headlining the escape of "Slippy McGee."
I learned that "the slickest crook in America" finding himself somewhat hampered in his native haunts, the seething underworld of New York, because the police suspected him of certain daring and mysterious burglaries although they had no positive proof against him, had chosen to shift his base of operations South for awhile. But the Southern authorities had been urgently warned to look out for him; in consequence they had been so close upon his heels that he had been surrounded while "on a job." Half an hour later, and he would have gotten away with his plunder; but, although they were actually upon him, by what seemed a miracle of daring and of luck he slipped through their fingers, escaped under their very noses, leaving no clue to his whereabouts. He was supposed to be still in hiding in Atlanta, though as he had no known confederates and always worked alone and unaided, the police were at a loss for information. The man had simply vanished, after his wont, as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. The papers gave rather full accounts of some of his past exploits, from which one gathered that Slippy McGee was a very noted personage in his chosen field. I sat for a long time staring at those papers, and my thoughts were uneasy ones. What should I do?
I presently decided that I could and must question my guest. So far he had volunteered no information beyond the curt statement that his name was John Flint and he was a hobo because he liked the trade. He had been stealing a ride and he had slipped--and when he woke up we had him and he