"
And it has always been like that since he came to Grand Avenue ten years
ago. It has always turned out that Tobias takes off his white shirt and
puts on his sailor's black sweater and fastens on his old wooden leg and
follows the one on the window sill.
* * * * *
Avast and belay! The night is still young and a sailor man's abroad. The
sergeant going off duty at the Chicago Avenue station passes and winks and
calls: "Hello, Tobias. Pretty rough tonight."
"Fa'n ta mig!" roars Tobias. "Hold tight." And he steers for Clark Street.
And now the one on the window sill is gone and the storm grows quiet. And
poor Tobias Wooden-Leg, the venerable and pious, who has won the grace of
God through a terrific fight, finds himself again lost and strayed.
Of what good were the prayers and the night after night readings in the
old sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago? Of what good the promises
and tears of repentance, when this thing that seemed to rise out of
forgotten seas could come and jump up on his window sill and bewitch him
as if he were a heedless boy? When it could sit laughing at him until in
its laugh he heard the sounds of old winds roaring and old seas standing
on their heads, and he put on his black sweater--the moth-eaten badge of
his sinfulness--and he put on his wooden leg and lifted out the handful of
money from under the corner of the carpet?
What good were the prayers if they couldn't keep him pious? Yes, that was
it.
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