"Not one of my staff, you can gamble on that. And not one of the Spokane gang either. It was a green hand--fellow named Seymour working as a brakeman on the railroad and one of the few volunteers who refused to take any pay. And he was square enough to own up to what he'd done, too. Oh, I guess he had good intentions. But, thunderation, good intentions have ruined empires!
"Well, I've got to be getting along. I'm certainly going to put somebody's nice clean bathroom on the bum as soon as I get through telephoning."
Melber straightened himself and lurched off into the second-growth. He moved like a very old man, his blistered hands dangling.
"What he just now said about good intentions puts me in mind of Samson Goodhue," said Charley. "There was one of the best paving contractors Hell ever had." I knew what the expression on his face meant. It meant he was letting down a mental tentacle like a baited hook into the thronged private fish-pool of his early reminiscence. Scenting copy, I encouraged him.
"I'm fixing to tell you," he promised. "This looks to me like a good loafing place."
We reposed side by side on a lichened log with our toes gouging the green moss, and he rolled a cigarette and proceeded:
Like I was just now telling you, his name was Samson Goodhue. So you can see how easy it was to twist that around into Good Samaritan and then to render that down for kitchen use into Good Sam. It was a regular trick name and highly suitable, seeing that he counted that day lost which, as the poet says, its low descending sun didn't find him trying to help somebody out of a jam.
In fact, he really made a profession out of it. You might say he was an expert promoter. He wasn't one of your meek and lowly ones, though.
They say the meek shall inherit the earth but I reckon not until everybody else is through with it.
Not Good Sam. He was just as pushing and determinated and persisting in his work as though he was taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits. And probably it wasn't his fault that about every time he tackled a job of philanthropping the scheme seemed to go wrong. You had to give him credit for that. But after a while it got so that when the word spread that Good Sam was going around doing good, smart people ran for cover. They didn't know but what it might be their turn next, and they figured they'd had enough hard luck already without calling in a specialist.