"You refuse!" cried Ned Trent, rising impatiently.

The reverend Archibald Crane looked at his catechiser with a trace
of alarm.

"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I must," he apologized.

The stranger advanced until he touched the desk on the other side
of which the Reverend Archibald was sitting, where he stood for
some moments looking down on his opponent with an almost amused
expression of contempt.

"You are an interesting little beast," he drawled, "and I've seen a
lot of your kind in my time. Here you preach every Sunday, to
whomever will listen to you, certain cut-and-dried doctrines you
don't believe practically in the least. Here for the first time
you have had a chance to apply them literally, and you hide behind
a lot of words. And while you're about it you may as well hear
what I have to say about your kind. I've had a pretty wide
experience in the North, and I know what I'm talking about. Your
work here among the Indians is rot, and every sensible man knows
it. You coop them up in your log-built houses, you force on them
clothes to which they are unaccustomed until they die of
consumption. Under your little tin-steepled imitation of
civilization, for which they are not fitted, they learn to beg, to
steal, to lie. I have travelled far, but I have yet to discover
what your kind are allowed on earth for. You are narrow-minded,
bigoted, intolerant, and without a scrap of real humanity to
ornament your mock religion. When you find you can't meddle with