The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside. “I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this, shouting, ‘Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly concern over your snivelling souls!’ Let him tell us that never will our lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in the grave.” A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam’s throat. “Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this, our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at night.” The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech. “Father!” shouted the broken voice, “I have taken a life, a man that moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have killed.” * * * * * The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began going silently away. The lump in Sam’s throat grew larger. Tears stood in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a cold wind blew. The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer talked of so often and so eloquently. “Mike McCarthy is only a brother who has gone the dark road,” he thought and felt a glow of pride in the thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind. John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts. “It is an odd thought,” said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and unnatural like the voice from the jail; “it is an odd thought that but for a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth.” Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing. Telfer went on talking.