The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering. "I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected, with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty. It is the same in the moral field." "But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted. "No; you have paid only a part of it--the law's part. Society still has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the final jot and tittle." Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in Springville--we may call the small city Springville because that isn't its real name--I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then--what I learned later--that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on time sales. Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before--take the first train and vanish. But a small incident delayed the vanishing--for the moment, at least. On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants--to pass by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side. Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself, and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened, that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street. "Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"