THE STEADFAST HEART
it is not without its significance that when religion asked help in the prosecuting of a project of mercy it did not apply to religion, but to one whose Bible was a combination of Bob Ingersoll and Buechner’s Force and Matter. They proceeded down the hill and across the bridge to Main Street, at the extremity of which, in a rickety, unpainted frame building, were the printing shop and editorial rooms of the Weekly Observer. As they walked, Trueman repeated the story he had heard from Angus Burke’s lips.
“And there you have it,” he ended as they sat down at a table littered with proof sheets, in a room odorous with printers’ ink and glue and the myriad allied and alluring scents of the craft. “It must be true, because only an extraordinary imagination could have invented it.”
“A new test of credibility. If a thing passes imagination it is, therefore, true. If a man who tells you a story has the brains to invent it, it is a lie; if it’s a stretch above his capacity, it’s the truth.”
“Don’t you believe it, Dave?”
“Yes.”
“Then, of course, the boy isn’t guilty of anything.”
“He’s guilty of the worst crime in the list—a sight of bad luck and a heap of misfortune and
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