Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/67

 up a big meeting for him. Prexy Quarles and Juanita! Aber nit! Never get them two together! And Prexy had called on him—

Suppose it got into the newspapers! How he'd saved a tough kid, just as good as Judson Roberts could do. Juanita—find skirts like her any place, but where could they find a guy that could start in and save souls right off the bat?

Chuck all these fool thoughts, now that Jim was asleep, and figure out his spiel. What was that about sweating in the vineyard? Something like that, anyway. In the Bible. . . . However much they might rub it in—and no gink'd ever had a worse time, with that sneaking Eddie poking him on one side and Jim lambasting him on the other—whatever happened, he had to show those yahoos he could do just as good—

Hell! This wasn't buying the baby any shoes; this wasn't getting his spiel done. But—

What was the doggone thing to be about?

Let's see now. Gee, there was a bully thought! Tell 'em about how a strong husky guy, the huskier he was the more he could afford to admit that the power of the Holy Ghost had just laid him out cold—

No. Hell! That was what Old Jud had said. Must have something new—kinda new, anyway.

He shouldn't say "hell." Cut it out. Stay converted, no matter how hard it was. He wasn't afraid of— Him and Old Jud, they were husky enough to—

No, sir! It wasn't Old Jud; it was his mother. What'd she think if she ever saw him with Juanita? Juanita! That sloppy brat! No modesty!

Had to get down to brass tacks. Now!

Elmer grasped the edge of his work-table. The top cracked. His strength pleased him. He pulled up his dingy red sweater, smoothed his huge biceps, and again tackled his apostolic labors:

Let's see now: The fellows at the Y. would expect him to say—

He had it! Nobody ever amounted to a darn except as the—what was it?—as the inscrutable designs of Providence intended him to be.

Elmer was very busy making vast and unformed scrawls in a ten-cent note-book hitherto devoted to German. He darted