One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The other was a lumberjack--hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man--as they came in together--was already engaged in telling the young one what you might call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement. What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that so elderly a person should enter into such topics with { 174} so much zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'
And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became indeed so elevated by it--especially after the boy had got up once or twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his delight--that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off easily enough. Any { 175} debater could have. But it was clear that the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack--or in a way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the statement that 'A man by ---- could only stick to the ---- faith that he had, and Daddy was a ---- fool to think his that ---- arguments made any difference'--wore the old free-thinker out in { 176} the end. He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared, not a better old man.