Slippy McGee | Page 9

"But there are times, my friend, when I
wonder! Now, this morning I had to tell a working man his wife's got to
die. There's no help and no hope--she's got to die, and she a mother of
young children. So I have to try desperately," said the doctor, rubbing
his nose, "to cling tooth and claw to the hope that there is Something
behind the scenes that knows the forward-end of things--sin and sorrow
and disease and suffering and death things--and uses them always for
some beneficent purpose. But in the meantime the mother dies, and
here you and I have been used to save alive a poor useless devil of a
one-legged tramp, probably without his consent and against his will,
because it had to be and we couldn't do anything else! Now, why? I
can't help but wonder!"
We looked down again, the two of us, at the face on the pillow. And I
wondered also, with even greater cause than the doctor; for I had
opened the oilskin package the Poles found, and it had given me
occasion for fear, reflection, and prayer. I was startled and alarmed
beyond words, for it contained tools of a curious and unusual type,--not
such tools as workmen carry abroad in the light of day.
There was no one to whom I might confide that unpleasant discovery. I
simply could not terrify my mother, nor could I in common decency
burden the already overburdened doctor. Nor is our sheriff one to turn
to readily; he is not a man whose intelligence or heart one may admire,

respect, or depend upon. My guest had come to me with empty pockets
and a burglar's kit; a hint of that, and the sheriff had camped on the
Parish House front porch with a Winchester across his knees and
handcuffs jingling in his pockets. No, I couldn't consult the law.
I had yet a deeper and a better reason for waiting, which I find it rather
hard to set down in cold words. It is this: that as I grow older I have
grown more and more convinced that not fortuitously, not by chance,
never without real and inner purposes, are we allowed to come vitally
into each other's lives. I have walked up the steep sides of Calvary to
find out that when another wayfarer pauses for a space beside us, it is
because one has something to give, the other something to receive.
So, upon reflection, I took that oilskin package weighted down with the
seven deadly sins over to the church, and hid it under the statue of St.
Stanislaus, whom my Poles love, and before whom they come to kneel
and pray for particular favors. I tilted the saint back upon his wooden
stand, and thrust that package up to where his hands fold over the sheaf
of lilies he carries. St. Stanislaus is a beautiful and most holy youth. No
one would ever suspect him of hiding under his brown habit a burglar's
kit!
When I had done this, and stopped to say three Hail Marys for guidance,
I went back to the little room called my study, where my books and
papers and my butterfly cabinets and collecting outfits were kept, and
set myself seriously to studying my files of newspapers, beginning at a
date a week preceding my man's appearance. Then:
Slippy McGee Makes Good His Name Once More. Slips One Over On
The Police. Noted Burglar Escapes.
said the glaring headlines in the New York papers. The dispatches were
dated from Atlanta, and when I turned to the Atlanta papers I found
them, too, headlining the escape of "Slippy McGee."
I learned that "the slickest crook in America" finding himself somewhat
hampered in his native haunts, the seething underworld of New York,
because the police suspected him of certain daring and mysterious

burglaries although they had no positive proof against him, had chosen
to shift his base of operations South for awhile. But the Southern
authorities had been urgently warned to look out for him; in
consequence they had been so close upon his heels that he had been
surrounded while "on a job." Half an hour later, and he would have
gotten away with his plunder; but, although they were actually upon
him, by what seemed a miracle of daring and of luck he slipped through
their fingers, escaped under their very noses, leaving no clue to his
whereabouts. He was supposed to be still in hiding in Atlanta, though
as he had no known confederates and always worked alone and unaided,
the police were at a loss for information. The man had simply vanished,
after his wont, as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. The
papers gave rather full accounts of some of his