"But, well, say, Dean Trosper thought you and the committee might like to talk over a semi-permanent arrangement—"
"Nope, nope, nope."
Returned to Babylon, Elmer went at once to the office of the dean.
One look at his expression was enough.
The dean concluded two minutes of the most fluent description with:
"—the faculty committee met this morning, and you are fired from Mizpah. Of course you remain an ordained Baptist minister. I could get your home association to cancel your credentials, but it would grieve them to know what sort of a lying monster they sponsored. Also, I don't want Mizpah mixed up in such a scandal. But if I ever hear of you in any Baptist pulpit, I'll expose you. Now I don't suppose you're bright enough to become a saloon-keeper, but you ought to make a pretty good bartender. I'll leave your punishment to your midnight thoughts."
Elmer whined, "You hadn't ought—you ought not to talk to me like that! Doesn't it say in the Bible you ought to forgive seventy times seven—"
"This is eighty times seven. Get out!"
So the Reverend Mr. Gantry surprisingly ceased to be, for practical purposes, a Reverend at all.
He thought of fleeing to his mother, but he was ashamed; of fleeing to Lulu, but he did not dare.
He heard that Eddie Fislinger had been yanked to Schoenheim to marry Lulu and Floyd Naylor . . . a lonely grim affair by lamplight.
"They might have ast me, anyway," grumbled Elmer, as he packed.
He went back to Monarch and the friendliness of Ad Locust. He confessed that he had been a minister, and was forgiven. By Friday that week Elmer had become a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company.
