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 for a nap. “Pilk’ told me you were tinkerin’ with the miscreant’s soul.”

Trueman smiled—not an ordinary smile, but the sort one reserves for a highly regarded friend. “I was heading straight for the printing office,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Um…. Prayer, politics, or personalities?”

“About this child downstairs…. He tells a story that is beyond belief—and I believe it.”

“If you hadn’t a talent for believing,” said the tall, old-young man, “you couldn’t keep to your profession.”

Dave Wilkins, editor and proprietor of the Rainbow Weekly Observer, was the village’s one agnostic—a sort of curiosity of which the town was rather proud. It pointed him out unctuously to strangers as a man predestined to hell fire and brimstone, and small boys used to discuss him in whispers and wonder how a man could get along when he knew for certain he was condemned already to the pains and penalties of the hereafter…. Perhaps it was to prove the inconsistency of human nature that he was the most superstitious man in Rainbow. There was no sign, apparently, in which he did not believe, from thirteen at table to the evil luck of walking under a ladder….

Together the pair, representing religion and anti-religion, left the courthouse together, and