Norman Duncan - Higgins, a Man's Christian

Twenty thousand of the thirty thousand lumber-jacks and river-pigs of the Minnesota woods are hilariously in pursuit of their own ruin for lack of something better to do in town. They are not nice, enlightened men, of course; the debauch is the traditional diversion–the theme of all the brave tales to which the youngsters of the bunk-houses listen in the lantern-light and dwell upon after dark. The lumber-jacks proceed thus–being fellows of big strength in every physical way–to the uttermost of filth and savagery and fellowship with every abomination. It is done with shouting and laughter and that large good-humor which is bedfellow with the bloodiest brawling, and it has for a bit, no doubt, its amiable aspect; but the merry shouters are presently become like Jimmie the Beast, that low, notorious brute, who, emerging drunk and hungry from a Deer River saloon, robbed a bulldog of his bone and gnawed it himself–or like Damned Soul Jenkins, who goes moaning into the forest, after the spree in town, conceiving himself condemned to roast forever in hell, without hope, nor even the ease which his mother’s prayers might win from a compassionate God.

They can’t help themselves, it seems. Not all of them, of course; but most.

A big, clean, rosy-cheeked man in a Mackinaw coat and rubber boots–hardly distinguishable from the lumber-jack crew except for his quick step and high glance and fine resolute way–went swiftly through a Deer River saloon toward the snake-room in search of a lad from Toronto who had in the camps besought to be preserved from the vicissitudes of the town.

“There goes the Pilot,” said a lumber-jack at the bar. “Hello, Pilot!”

“’Lo, Tom!”

“Ain’t ye goin’ t’ preach no more at Camp Six?”

“Sure, Tom!”

“Well–when the hell?”

“Week from Thursday, Tom,” the vanishing man called back; “tell the boys I’m coming.”

“Know the Pilot?” the lumber-jack asked.

I nodded.

“Higgins’s job,” said he, earnestly, “is keepin’ us boys out o’ hell; an’ he’s the only man on the job.”

Of this I had been informed.

“I want t’ tell ye, friend,” the lumber-jack added, with honest reverence, “that he’s a damned good Christian, if ever there was one. Ain’t that right, Billy?”

“Higgins,” the bartender agreed, “is a square man.”

The lumber-jack reverted to the previous interest. All at once he forgot about the Pilot.

“Hey, Billy!” he cried, severely, “where’d ye put that bottle?”

Higgins was then in the snake-room of the place–a foul compartment into which the stupefied and delirious are thrown when they are penniless–searching the pockets of the drunken boy from Toronto for some leavings of his wages. “Not a cent!” said he, bitterly. “They haven’t left him a cent! They’ve got every penny of three months’ wages! Don’t blame the boy,” he pursued, in pain and infinite sympathy, easing the lad’s head on the floor; “it isn’t all his fault. He came out of the camps without telling me–and some cursed tin-horn gambler met him, I suppose–and he’s only a boy–and they didn’t give him a show–and, oh, the pity of it! he’s been here only two days!”

The boy was in a stupor of intoxication, but presently revived a little, and turned very sick.

“That you, Pilot?” he said.

“Yes, Jimmie.”

“A’ right.”

“Feel a bit better now?”

“Uh-huh.”

The boy sighed and collapsed unconscious: Higgins remained in the weltering filth of the room to ease and care for him. “Don’t wait for me, old man,” said he, looking up from the task. “I’ll be busy for a while.”

Frank necessity invented the snake-room of the lumber-town saloon. There are times of gigantic debauchery–the seasons of paying off. A logger then once counted one hundred and fifty men drunk in a single hotel of a town of twelve hundred inhabitants where fourteen other bar-rooms heartily flourished. They overflowed the snake-rooms–they lay snoring on the bar-room floor–they littered the office–they were doubled up on the stair-landings and stretched out in the corridors. Drunken men stumbled over drunken men and fell helpless beside them; and still, in the bar-room (said he)–beyond the men who slept or writhed on the floor and had been kicked out of the way–the lumber-jacks were clamoring three deep for whiskey at the bar. Hence the snake-room: one may not eject drunken men into bitter weather and leave them to freeze. Bartenders and their helpers carry them off to the snake-room when they drop; others stagger in of their own notion and fall upon their reeking fellows. There is no arrangement of the bodies–but a squirming heap of them, from which legs and arms protrude, wherein open-mouthed bearded faces appear in a tangle of contorted limbs. Men moan and laugh and sob and snore; and some cough with early pneumonia, some curse, some sing, some horribly grunt; and some, delirious, pick at spiders in the air, and talk to monkeys, and scream out to be saved from dogs and snakes. Men reel in yelling groups from the bar to watch the spectacle of which they will themselves presently be a part.

This is the simple and veracious narrative of the singular ministerial activities of the Rev. Francis Edmund Higgins, a Presbyterian, who regularly ministers, without a church, acting under the Board of Home Missions, to the lumber-jacks of the remoter Minnesota woods. Singular ministerial activities these are, truly, appealing alike to those who believe in God and to such as may deny Him. They are particularly robust. When we walked from Camp Two to Camp Four of a midwinter day, with the snow crackling underfoot and the last sunset light glowing like heavenly fire beyond the great green pines–

“Boys,” said Higgins, gravely, “there’s just one thing that I regret; and if I had to prepare for the ministry over again, I wouldn’t make the same mistake: I ought to have taken boxing lessons.”

No other minister of the gospel, possibly, could with perfect propriety, in the sight of the unrighteous, who are the most severe critics of propriety in this respect, lean easily over a bar (his right foot having of long habit found the rail), and in terms of soundest common sense reasonably urge upon the man behind the wet mahogany the shame of his situation and the virtue of abandoning it; nor could any other whom I know truculently crowd into the howling, brawling, drunken throng of lumber-jacks, all gone mad of adulterated liquor, and with any confident show of authority command the departure of some weakling who had followed the debauch of his mates far beyond his little strength.

“Come out o’ this!” says Higgins.

“Ah, go chase yerself, Pilot!” is the indulgent response, most amiably delivered, with a loose, kind smile.

“Come on!” says Higgins, in wrath.

“Ah, Pilot,” the youngster pleads, “I’m on’y havin’ a little fun. You go chase yerself, Pilot,” says he, affectionately, with no offence whatsoever, “an’ le’ me alone.”

The Rev. Francis Edmund Higgins, in the midst of an unholy up-roar–the visible manifestation, this environment and behavior, it seems to me, of the noise and smell and very abandonment of hell–is privileged to seize the youngster by the throat and in no unnecessarily gentle way to jerk him into the clean, frosty air of the winter night. In these days of his ministry, nobody–the situation being an ordinary one–would interfere. If, however, it seemed unwise to proceed in this way, Higgins would at least strip the boy of his savings.