With alarmed evangelistic zeal, Jim Lefferts struggled to keep Elmer true to the faith, after his exposure to religion in defending Eddie at Cato.
He was, on the whole, rather more zealous and fatiguing than Eddie.
Nights, when Elmer longed to go to sleep, Jim argued; mornings, when Elmer should have been preparing his history, Jim read aloud from Ingersoll and Thomas Paine.
"How you going to explain a thing like this—how you going to explain it?" begged Jim. "It says here in Deuteronomy that God chased these Yids around in the desert for forty years and their shoes didn't even wear out. That's what it says, right in the Bible. You believe a thing like that? And do you believe that Samson lost all his strength just because his gal cut off his hair? Do you, eh? Think hair had anything to do with his strength?"
Jim raced up and down the stuffy room, kicking at chairs, his normally bland eyes feverish, his forefinger shaken in wrath, while Elmer sat humped on the edge of the bed, his forehead in his hands, rather enjoying having his soul fought for.
To prove that he was still a sound and freethinking stalwart, Elmer went out with Jim one evening and at considerable effort they carried off a small outhouse and placed it on the steps of the Administration Building.
Elmer almost forgot to worry after the affair of Eddie and Dr. Lefferts.
Jim's father was a medical practitioner in an adjoining village. He was a plump, bearded, bookish, merry man, very proud of his atheism. It was he who had trained Jim in the faith and in his choice of liquor; he had sent Jim to this denominational college partly because it was cheap and partly because it tickled his humor to watch his son stir up the fretful complacency of the saints. He dropped in and found Elmer and Jim agitatedly awaiting the arrival of Eddie.
"Eddie said," wailed Elmer, "he said he was coming up to see me, and he'll haul out some more of these proofs that I'm going straight to hell. Gosh, Doctor, I don't know what's got into me. You better examine me. I must have anemics or
