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Title: The Rising of the Tide
       The Story of Sabinsport

Author: Ida M. Tarbell

Release Date: July 28, 2014 [EBook #46436]

Language: English

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                         THE RISING OF THE TIDE

                        THE STORY OF SABINSPORT


                                   BY
                             IDA M. TARBELL




                                New York
                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                  1919
                          All rights reserved

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            Copyright, 1919
                        By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

            Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1919

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         THE RISING OF THE TIDE

                     HOW THE WAR CAME TO SABINSPORT




                               CHAPTER I


"The town is going to the Devil, and the worst of it is nobody will
admit it. You won't. You sit there and smile at me, as if you didn't
mind having Jake Mulligan and Reub Cowder pry open ballot boxes. You
know those two birds are robbing this village every hour of the day.
Nobody with pep enough to sit up and fight 'em. Rotten selfishness,
that's what ails this town. People getting rich here and spending their
money in the city. Women won't even buy their hats here--starving the
stores. Can't support a decent theater--don't bring a good singer once
a year. Everybody goes to the city, and we have to feed on movies.

"Try to raise an issue, and you get laughed at. Treated like a kid.
Tell me to 'cut it out,' not disturb things. Nice place for a man who'd
like to help a community! I'm going to get out. Can't stand it. Honest,
Dick, I'm losing my self-respect."

"Wrong, Ralph. You're spoiling for a fresh turn with the muck rake. You
can't make a garden with one tool. You must have several. I'm serious.
You're like the men in the mines that will tackle but one job, always
swing a pick. The muck rake did its job in Sabinsport for some time.
You've got to pass on to the next tool."

"I don't get you. You're like all the rest. You're lying down. I'm
ashamed of you, Parson. Get out of here. You'll end in corrupting me."

"No, only persuading you that taking a city calls for more weapons than
one."

Silence fell for a moment. Ralph Gardner was tired. Getting out the
daily issue of the Sabinsport _Argus_ was, as he often said, "Some
job." To be your own editor-in-chief, leader writer, advertising agent
and circulation manager for the only daily in a town of 15,000 or more
means hard work and a lot of it. Ralph loved it, "ate it up," they said
in the shop. It was only when calm settled over Sabinsport and he felt
no violent reaction from his spirited attacks on town iniquities that
he was depressed. This was one of these periods. The year before he had
fought and won for the Progressive Party of the District a smashing
victory. He was eager to follow it up with attacks on the special
grafts of the two men who for years had run the town and vicinity. He
had ousted their candidates from the County and State tickets. He meant
to wrest the town from them, but he couldn't get the support he needed.
The town had lain down on him. He didn't understand it and it fretted
him.

Now here was his best and wisest friend, advising waiting. He hung his
handsome head in sulky silence.

"What a boy!" thought the Reverend Richard Ingraham. They were the best
of friends, this eager, active, confident young editor and this cool,
humorous-eyed, thoughtful young parson. Wide apart in birth, in type of
education, in their contacts with the world, they were close in a love
of decency and justice, in contempt for selfishness and vulgarity. Both
were accidents in Sabinsport, and so looked at the town in a more or
less detached way. This fact, their instinctive trust and liking for
each other, and the clinching force of the great tragedy in which they
had first met had made them friends.

Ralph Gardner was only 28. He had graduated six years before at a
Western university where for the moment the sins of contemporary
business and politics absorbed the interest of the greater part of
faculty and students. There was a fine contempt for all existing
expressions of life, a fine confidence in their power to create social
institutions as well as forms of art which would sweep the world of
what they called the "worn out." Whatever their professions, they went
forth to lay bare the futility and selfishness and greed of the present
world. They had no perspective, no charity, no experience, but they had
zeal, courage, and the supporting vision of a world where no man knew
want, no woman dragged a weary life through factory or mill, no child
was not busy and happy.

Never has there poured into the country a group more convinced of its
own righteousness and the essential selfishness of all who did not see
with their eyes or share their confidence in the possibility of
regeneration through system. Like revolutionists in all ages they felt
in themselves the power to make over the world and like them they
carried their plans carefully diagramed in their pockets.

Gardner was one of the first of the crop of St. Georges in his
university. He had chosen journalism for his profession. He began at
the bottom on an important Progressive journal of a big Western city.
He worked up from cub reporter to a desk in the editor's room. But he
chafed at the variety of things which occupied the editorial attention,
at the tendency to confine reform to an inside page or even drop it
altogether. There were moments when he suspected his crusading spirit
was regarded as a nuisance. And finally in a fit of disgust and zeal he
put his entire inheritance into the Sabinsport _Argus_.

Ralph had a real reason in buying the _Argus_. The town was ruled by
two of the cleverest men in the State, giving him a definite enemy. It
was not so large but what, as he planned it, he could know every man,
woman and child in it. It had the varied collection of problems common
to a prosperous Middle-West town, settled at the end of the eighteenth
century, and later made rich by coal mines and iron mills. Ralph saw in
Sabinsport a perfect model of the dragon he was after, a typical union
of Business and Politics, a typical disunion of labor and capital. It
was to be his laboratory. His demonstration of how to make a perfect
town out of a rotten one should be a model for the world.

In his ambitions and his attacks Richard Ingraham had been his steady
backer, and at the same time his surest brake. It would be too much to
say that he had always kept him from running his head into stone walls,
but the Parson had never failed Ralph even when he made a fool of
himself. He never had shown or felt less interest because often the
young editor ignored his advice. The relation between the two had grown
steadily in confidence and affection. A regular feature of their day
was an hour together in Ralph's office after the paper was on the
press, and he was getting his breath. They were spending this hour
together now, a late afternoon hour of July 28, 1914. It was a pleasant
place to talk on a hot afternoon. The second floor back of the
three-story building which housed the _Argus_ opened by long windows on
to a wide veranda, a touch of the Southern influence in building which
was still to be seen in several places in the town. The Parson had been
quick to see that this veranda properly latticed would make a capital
workroom for Ralph in the summer, and had by insistence overcome the
young editor's indifference to his surroundings, and secured for him a
cool and quiet office and a delightful summer lounging room. Here they
were sitting now, Ralph's feet on the veranda railing, his head
hanging--dejection in every muscle.

"Ralph," said the Rev. Richard, "it's your method of attack not your
cause, I doubt. I don't believe you can win by going at this thing in
your usual way. You must find a new approach. Mulligan and Cowder are
no fools, and if you open on them from your old line, they'll be ready
for you."

"There's only one way to do this thing," Ralph shouted hotly. "Show 'em
up. Shame the town for tolerating them, fight them to a finish. If I
could get the proofs that they opened those ballot boxes, do you
suppose I'd be quiet? Not on your life."

"You won't get the proof."

"You mean you won't help me to get it?"

"I do."

The Rev. Richard could be very final and very disarming. Ralph knew he
could not count on him for help in tracing the gossip. He did not
suspect what was true, that his friend knew even the details of the bit
of law-breaking Jake Mulligan had carried out. It had come to him by
the direct confession of one of his young Irish friends, Micky
Flaherty. Micky had listened at the Boys' Club, which Ingraham ran, to
a clear and forceful explanation of why the ballot box must be sacred.
He had given the talk at the first rumor that there had been a raid on
the ballot box by Jake, for the direct purpose of finding exactly how
the town stood towards giving him and Reuben Cowder in perpetuity the
water, gas and electric light franchises, which they had secured long
before Sabinsport dreamed of their importance. He had thought it
entirely probable that the rumor was founded on truth, also quite
probable that one or more of the likely young politicians in his club
had been used as a go-between.

His talk did more than he had even dreamed. Micky was struck with
guilt. He was a good Catholic, and confession was necessary to his
peace of mind. It was not to the priest, but to Dick, he went; telling
him in detail, and with relish too, it must be acknowledged, how at
midnight he alone had stolen from the clerk's office in the town hall
the ballot boxes, and how he had worked with Jake and two or three
faithful followers, carefully piecing together the torn ballots, until
a complete roster of the election was tabulated. When this nice piece
of investigation was finished and thoroughly finished, Micky had
returned the boxes.

Ingraham had never for a moment considered a betrayal of Micky's
confession. For one reason, he was keen enough to know it would be
useless. Micky's sense of guilt might recognize the confessional, but
it did not, and would not, recognize the witness stand. He had no
intention of giving his friend the slightest help in unearthing the
scandal. He was convinced, as he told him, that a new form of attack
must be found.

"You're a queer one, Dick," fretted Ralph. "You don't believe for a
moment that Jake and Reub are anything but a pair of pirates. You
aren't afraid. What is it?"

"I suppose, Ralph, it is partly because I _like_ Jake and don't despair
of him."

"Like him! Like him! Do you know what he calls your mission over on the
South Side--sacrilegious rascal. He calls it the Holy Coal Bin. Nice
way to talk about a man who saved a neighborhood from freezing to death
because he's too blamed obstinate and narrow to listen to the leaders
of his own workingmen. 'Runs his business to suit himself!' Think of
that in this day! Those men and women would have died of cold if you
hadn't turned your club basement into coal bins. And now he laughs at
you."

"Do you know who paid for that coal; most of it at least?" asked
Ingraham.

"You did, confound you. Of course you did. Everybody knows that."

"No, three quarters of it Jake paid for, on condition I wouldn't tell
the men. Couldn't see them suffer. Jake has possibilities. And then
there is Jack. You know how he loves that boy. You know how fine and
able Jack is. He has already swung the old man into modernizing the
'Emma.' If we will stand by him, I believe in time he will have
reformed his father. Give him a chance at least. If you don't do that,
I am certain that eventually you will drive Jack himself away from you,
and we must not lose Jack. Moreover, you have got to remember that Jake
and Reuben made this town."

"Nothing to recommend them in that," Ralph growled. "They own it from
the ground to the electric wires; and they use it twenty-four hours out
of the day--and then some."

"Listen, Ralph. It was Jake Mulligan who opened the coal mines, and for
years almost starved while he brought them to a paying point. It was
Reuben Cowder that brought in the railroad to carry out the coal. This
town never would have had the railroad if it had not been for Cowder.
You know perfectly well how little help either man has had from the old
timers. Everything that is modern here has come through those two men.
Moreover, they love Sabinsport. Did you ever hear of Jake's celebration
when the water works were finished in the '90's? He is never done
talking about the water works. His wife used to say he celebrated them
every time he turned a tap--water for turning a tap to a man who had
carried every gallon in buckets from a spring by the barn for years and
years! Pure water to a man who had seen a town he loved swept by
typhoid! You ought to realize what it took for him to bring that about;
you who are trying to do things here now. He could not budge the town.
He and Reuben practically put up the money for the water. They had
learned by the epidemic what bad water meant. They argued that towns
subject to typhoid would finally be shunned, and they put through the
waterworks with nine-tenths of the respectable men and women against
them. Afraid of taxes! The town argued that it would not happen again,
and that anyway it was the will of the Lord! Of course they bought
votes to put it through, and of course they own the franchise, and of
course they have made money. I don't defend their methods, but I can't
help feeling that Sabinsport owes them something.

"It is the same story about gas and electricity and trolleys. These two
men have planned and fought and bought and put things through, while
the respectable have been afraid to go ahead, lest they should lose
something. Now the respectable grumble. I must think that
respectability and thrift are largely responsible for Jake and Reuben."

"Confound your historical sense, Dick; it is always slowing you up. If
you would concentrate on the present, you would be the greatest asset
this town ever had."

"Drop it, Ralph. What's the news?"

"There it is--more interested in a pack of quarreling Dagoes 5,000
miles away than living things at home. What's the use when your best
friend's like that? What has it got to do with us in Sabinsport if
Austria has declared war on Serbia--what's Serbia anyhow? A little
worn-out, scrappy country without a modern notion in its head."

"Do you mean," cried Dick, springing up, "that Austria has declared
war?"

"That's what this says. It just came in,"--flinging a yellow sheet
across the table.

"My God! Man, don't you know what that means?"

"Well, I suppose it might mean a good-sized war, but I don't believe
it. They'll pull things out; always have before, ever since I can
remember. What if Germany gets in, as you said it would be the other
day; what's that? They'll clean up a little affair like Serbia quick
enough; teach her to stop running around with a chip on her shoulder.
And no matter, I tell you, Parson; it's nothing to Sabinsport, and
Sabinsport is our business. If the world is to be made decent, you've
got to begin at home. Don't come bothering me about wars in Europe!
I've got war enough if I root out Mulligan and Cowder."

But the parson wasn't listening. His face was whiter than usual, and
its lines had grown stern. "Good night, Ralph," he said curtly; "just
telephone me to-night, will you, if there's more news. I think I'll go
out to the 'Emma' after supper."

The Reverend Richard walked down the street without seeing
people--something unheard of for him.

Tom Sabins, going home, said to his wife, "The parson is worried. Met
him and he didn't see me. Has anything happened at the mines, do you
know?"

But Mrs. Sabins said she hadn't heard of trouble. Maybe Micky had been
up to mischief again.

And they both laughed affectionately. The parson never looked worried,
they often had noticed, unless somebody had been very bad or there had
been an accident in mill or mine.

But it was not things at home that sent the parson blind and deaf down
the street. He was the one man in Sabinsport, outside of the keeper of
the fruit store and a half dozen miners over the hill, who had some
understanding of the awful possibilities of Austria's declaration of
war. His knowledge came from the years he had lived as a student in
England--the summers he had spent tramping through Middle Europe.

If Richard Ingraham's education had taken a different turn from that of
the average American youth, like Ralph Gardner, it still was a kind
common enough among us. What had been exceptional about it was the way
in which it had been intensified and lengthened by circumstances of
health and family. Dick was an orphan, whose youth had been spent with
his guardian, an elderly and scholarly man of means, in one of those
charming, middle-west towns settled early in the nineteenth century by
New Englanders, their severity tempered by a sprinkling of Virginians
and Kentuckians. Great Rock, as the town was called from a conspicuous
bluff on the river, was planned for a big city; but the railroad failed
it, and it remained a quiet town, where a few men and women ripened
into happy, dignified old age, but from which youth invariably fled.
Dick had lived there, until he entered college at seventeen, in one of
the finest of the old houses, set in big lawns, shaded by splendid,
sweeping elms. "The most beautiful elms in the United States are not in
New England," Dick used to tell his college friends, when they
exclaimed over campus elms. "They're in the Middle West." And he was
right.

Dick's guardian had set out to give the boy a thorough training in
those things he thought made for happiness and usefulness. He had read
with him from babyhood until Dick could no more go without books than
without food. He had started him early in languages. He had given him
horses, and, an unusual accomplishment, as Dick afterwards learned, had
trained him to walking. A tramping trip by the two of them had been one
of Dick's joys from the time he could remember. He did not know then
that his guardian had more than pleasure in view by these trips. It was
only later that he discovered that the regular outside life into which
he had been trained was the older man's wise way of counteracting a
possible development of the disease of which both his parents had died,
and which it was believed he had inherited.

When the time came, Dick had gone East to college, and from there he
was sent for two years or more of Europe, as his taste might dictate.
At the end of his first year his guardian had died. It left the boy
quite alone and wholly bewildered. He had never thought of life without
this firm, kind, wise, counseling power. He had done what had been
suggested, and always found joy in it. He had never really wanted
anything in life, as he could remember. His guardian had foreseen
everything. And now what was he? A boy of 23, with comfortable means, a
passion for reading, for travel and for people, and that was all. He
must have a profession. It was his need of a backing, as well as a
combination of aesthetic and the aesthete in him, with possibly something
of environment--for he happened to be at Oxford when news of his
guardian's death came--that decided him to go into the Church.

Dick worked hard in term time, but all his long and short holidays he
spent tramping Central Europe. This had been his guardian's request.

"You will come back some day to your own land to work, Richard. My own
judgment of you is that you will find your greatest interest in shaping
whatever profession you choose to meet the new forms of social progress
which each generation works out. I think this because you so love
people. You'll never be content, as I have been, with books and
solitude. I don't think you realize how full your life has been of
human relations, or how you have depended on them, so I urge you to go
among people in your holidays, common people, to be one of them; and do
not hurry your return. You are young. Take time to find your place."

Dick had faithfully followed this advice. He had spent six years in
Europe without returning to the United States. He was thirty when he
came back to take a church in a prosperous and highly energetic
community. One year had been enough. They kept him busy from morning
until night with their useful activities. To this he did not object;
but while so active he had been chilled to the bone by his failure to
get spiritual reactions from his parishioners. Moreover, he had been
unable to establish anything like companionship, as he had known it,
with any one in his church. He resigned, giving as his reason: "I am
not earning your money. I don't know how." It was a sad blow to more
than one member of St. Luke's, for while they were a little afraid of
him (which, if Dick had known, would have made a difference), they were
also enormously proud of him.

His failure turned him to Great Rock, which he had never had the heart
to visit since his guardian's death. There was a girl there he had
always carried in a shadowy way in his heart, the only girl he ever saw
in the dreams which sometimes disturbed him--a fair, frank, lovely
thing, he remembered her to have been, Annie Dunne. For the first time
in his life he wanted his mate. He couldn't face life again without
one. He would go and find her. Why, why, he asked himself, had he not
done this before? It was so clear that it was she that he needed. He
did not ask himself if he loved her. He knew he did. As for Annie's
loving him? Had he waited too long? Every mile of his journey westward
was filled with recollections of their youth, the summer evenings on
the veranda, the winter evenings by the fireside. And her letters,
never many, but how dear and friendly and intimate they had been! He
felt so sure of her, almost as if she were telling him, "I knew you
would come."

It was night when he reached Great Rock. He was always thankful that it
was in the dark that he heard the words at her door, "Miss Annie? Miss
Annie is dead. She was buried a week ago."

There was a blank space after that which Dick never tried to fill. All
he knew was that he pulled his courage together and took to the road,
Swiss bag on his back. He seemed to have no friend now but the road,
and more than once he caught himself announcing to the long winding
highways he followed eastward, "You're all I have."

He was in the hills that roll up from the Ohio in long, smooth billows,
forming lovely, varied valleys for the great streams that feed the
mighty river, and mounting always higher as you go toward the rising
sun, until finally they are mountains. A fine, old post road from the
East, one that had been fought over by French and Indians and British
and trod by Washington, was Dick's main route. He knew it well, for as
a boy he had more than once walked it with his guardian. Moreover, it
was by that road that half of Great Rock, his own family included, had
made their pioneer trip into what was then the West.

He often spent his night in an old inn, a relic of those days, with
thick walls, splendid woodwork and great rooms, but low and narrow
doors, built at a time when it was not wise to have too generous
entrances or too many windows.

Now and then he found one of the old places transformed into a modern
road-house, for the automobile was creating a demand for a kind of
accommodation the country had not needed since the passing of the stage
coach. Often he struck off the highway and made detours over wooded
hills and along little traveled roads. It was in returning from one of
these excursions that, late one September afternoon, he discovered
Sabinsport.

He had been quite lost all day and walking hard. As he came across a
valley and mounted a long winding hill, he saw by the growing thickness
of the settlement that he was approaching a town. He came upon it
suddenly as he went over the brow of the hill. It lay to right and
left, stretching down and over two natural terraces to a river which
formed here a great half moon. The whole beautiful, crystal curve was
visible from where Dick stood in charmed surprise. The town that filled
the mounting semicircle, in spite of its wealth of trees, could be
roughly traced. On the high slope which ran gently down from where he
stood were scores of comfortable houses of well-to-do folk, all of them
with generous lawns. They ran the American architectural gamut, Dick
guessed, for he could see from where he stood a big, square brick with
ancient white pillars, the front of a dark-brown, Washington Irving
Gothic, and the highly ornamental cupola which he knew meant the
fashionable style of the sixties. He was quite sure, if he looked, he
would find the whole succession. "There's a _nouveau_ art concealed
somewhere," he thought to himself, and later he found he was right.

The big houses became smaller as the slope descended, giving way for
what Dick guessed was a red brick business section. "It was once a
port," he said to himself. "The Ohio boats came up here, I wager."

From the south and opposite bank of the stream rose a steep bluff
perhaps two hundred feet high. Rows of unpainted houses ran along the
river bank and were scattered in a more or less haphazard way over the
face of the bluff; their ugliness softened by trees which grew in
abundance on the steep slopes. The most striking feature of the picture
was a great iron mill to the left. It filled acres of land along the
south river bank, its huge black stacks, from which smoke streamed
straight to the east, rose formal and imperative. They were amazingly
decorative in the soft, late September day, against the green of the
south bluff, and curiously dominating. "We are the strong things here,"
they said to him,--"the things to be reckoned with."

As Dick walked down the long hill looking for a hotel, he felt more of
his old joy in discovery, more of his old zestful curiosity than in
many a day. The beauty of the place, the strong note of distinction the
mills made in the picture, had finally stirred him. His interest was
further aroused when he walked straight up to the quaint front of the
Hotel Paradise. It was like things he had seen years before in the
South; a long, brick building with steep roof and tiny gables fronted
by narrow verandas with slender, girlish, iron pillars. The arched door
was perfect in its proportions, and the big stone hall was cool and
inviting. But once inside, Dick suddenly realized that somebody had had
the sense, while preserving all the quaintness of a building of at
least a hundred years before, so to fashion and enlarge it as to make a
thoroughly comfortable, modern hotel. His curiosity was piqued, though
it happened to be years before he learned how the Paradise had been
preserved.

The night brought Dick rest, but the morning found his flare of
interest dead. He made his pack with a dull need of moving on, and he
would have done so if, when he came into the office, he had not found
there a group of white-faced, horrified men. He caught the words, "On
fire." "One hundred and fifty men shut in." "No hope." A word of
inquiry and he learned that at a near-by coal mine, they spoke of as
the "Emma," there had been a terrible disaster. He learned too that
help of all sorts was being hurried to the place by the "spur," which,
as he rightly guessed, was the road connecting the mine with the main
line of the railroad which he had traced the night before along the
south bank of the river.

Dick drank a cup of coffee and followed a hurrying crowd to where an
engine and two coal cars rapidly filling with all the articles of
relief that on the instant could be gathered, were just ready to leave.
Quickly sensing the leader, a young man of not over twenty-five, Dick
said, "I'm a stranger, but I might be useful. I understand something of
relief work. I speak languages. I would be glad to go."

The man gave him an appraising look. "Jump in," he said curtly. A
moment later they were off.

The coal road ran from the river to the top of the bluff by a steep and
perilous grade. It came out on the plateau at least three miles from
the mines, but a mile and a half away they first saw the point of the
steel tipple of the power house over the main shaft. It all looked
peaceful enough to the straining eyes of the men on the flat car. It
was not until they were within a quarter of a mile of the place itself
that they caught the outline of the crowd that had gathered. Dick's
first thought was, "How quiet they are!" They were quiet, and there was
not a sound as the men bounded from the car and raced through to the
shaft itself. There a dreadful sight met their eyes. A dozen men were
being lifted from a cage that had just come up. It took but a glance to
see that they were dead or dying.

It was days later before Dick learned what had really happened. Like so
many ghastly mine accidents, the fire, for they found out it was fire
which was ravaging the mine, had come from a trivial cause, so trivial
that the miners themselves who were within reach and might easily have
put out the first flame had not taken the trouble. An open torch had
come in contact with a bit of oily rag. It had fallen, setting fire to
the refuse on a passing car. To that no one paid attention, for over it
were bundles of pressed hay; and the tradition in the mine is that
pressed hay will not burn.

The whole thing was ablaze before the men had realized what was
happening. There was no water on that level, and they had been ordered
to run the car into the escape shaft and dump it to the bottom, and
there to turn on the hose. So great was the smoke and heat from the
blazing stuff that the men below, who had promptly enough attacked it,
were driven back. The shaft was timbered, and before they knew it the
timbers were blazing. The smoke spread through the levels. A thing, so
easy to stop at the beginning, was now taking appalling proportions.
Men who had passed by the flames on their way to the 1:30 cage and had
not even stopped to lend a hand to put it out, so little had they
thought it necessary, felt the smoke before they reached the top. The
men below on the second and third levels began to run hither and yon,
trying to notify the diggers in the side shafts. A man more intelligent
than the others urged that the fan be stopped. It was done, but it was
too late. The fire was master.

A second load of men, the last to escape, had given the people at the
top a sense of the disaster. The mine manager had called for
volunteers. There had not been a minute's hesitation. Men crowded into
the cage, not all miners. Among them was a little-thought-of chap, an
Italian street vender. Another, the driver, who moved everybody who
came and went to the mines. They had gone down without hesitation.
Halfway down the smoke began to overpower them, but they went on. The
probability is that they were unconscious before they reached the
bottom, for only a feeble signal was given, and the engineer, not
understanding, did not respond. It was only when signals did not come,
and the now thoroughly frightened crowd had pleaded and then threatened
the engineer that he had brought up the cage. And now they were taking
them out--twelve dead men.

It was four days later when, through the combined efforts of both state
and federal mine experts, a picked body of men fitted out with the most
approved life-saving apparatus made their first trip into the burning
mine. The hours of waiting, Dick remembered as long as he lived. The
whole mining village, a motley collection of nationalities now fused
into one, stood around the shaft for four hours before the first signal
was given, a peremptory call to raise the cage. As it came up and the
few that were allowed at the shaft saw who were in it, such a shout of
exultant joy as Dick had never heard came from them, "They are alive!"
  "They are alive!" And certainly here were men, believed to be dead,
alive, twelve of them, their pallor and wanness showing through their
blackened faces, too weak to walk; yet almost unaided, they tottered
out, and one after another dropped into the arms of women and children
who sobbed and shouted over them.

The news quickly spread, twenty men, who had walled themselves up had
been found alive after four days of waiting. They believed they would
get them all out alive. The cage descended and shortly after the signal
was given to raise, and eight more came up alive. Such a tremendous
burst of hope and joy as it is rarely given men to see spread through
the stricken crowd. If twenty were alive, might it not be that the
other hundred were? But it was not to be! The draft had aroused the
smoldering flames, and when the cage attempted again to descend sharp
signals were soon given. This time it was only the rescue party that
came up, and they were in various stages of collapse. The cry went out,
"She has broken out!" "She has broken out!" The reaction on the
stricken crowd, after its hours of hope and joy, was prostrating. Men
and women sobbed aloud. They knew too well that the reviving fire meant
that there was nothing to do but to seal the main shaft. No other way
to smother the fire. White-faced, heavy-hearted men did the work; and
it was not until ten days later that the experts on the ground
pronounced it safe to open the mine.

Through this long fortnight of agony and waiting, Dick stayed in the
settlement. From the time that he had bounded from the flat car with
the relief party there had never been a moment that he had not been
busy. The fact that he knew a little of everybody's language, enough to
make himself understood at least; the fact that he understood their
customs, had made many of the miners open their hearts to him in a way
which otherwise would have been impossible. Dick had that wonderful
thing, the ability to be at home with people of any sort or of any
nation. He seemed at once to the miners to be one of them in a way that
not even those in authority whom they had known longest could be.

But it was not only to the people that he had made himself a helpful
friend. In a hundred ways he had instinctively and unconsciously worked
with Jack Mulligan, the stern young man who had bid him to jump on the
flat car the morning that they had started from Sabinsport. Jack, he
had found, was the son of the man who had opened the mines, a man known
as "Jake," and, as Dick was to discover, a man notorious, but beloved.

Mining had been in the blood of Jack Mulligan. If he had had his way he
would have taken a pick at sixteen, and worked his way up. His mother,
long dead, had extracted a promise from her devoted but riotous husband
that Jack should have the best education the country would afford, if
he would take it. And because it was his mother's wish, he had taken
it; but he had turned it into the way of his own tastes. He had thrown
himself heartily into the work of the great technological institute to
which he had been sent. He had taken all of the special training as a
mining engineer that the country afforded, and he had studied the best
work of foreign mines. When he had come back at twenty-four to his own
home, it was the understanding that he was to be employed as a general
manager, not in any way to supplant the educated but tried men that had
grown up under his father, but, as he planned it, to modernize the mine.

Jack's heart was set on making the mines safe. No serious accident had
ever happened in them and to his father's mind that was proof enough
that no serious accident would ever happen, and the plans for lighting,
supporting and airing that Jack brought back he treated first with
contempt, then with a sort of fatherly tolerance, only yielding inch by
inch as he saw how much this boy, whom he adored and in whom his pride
was so great, had them at heart. Jack had finally brought his father to
consent to electrify the mines completely. The whole equipment had been
ordered. In a few months at least it would be in place, and now this
fearful thing had happened. No wonder that day after day as he went
about white and silent among the people, his heart was bitter, not
against his father, but against the horrible set of circumstances that
had led to the thing he had always feared and which he believed that he
was going to prevent. Dick little by little got the story, and his
sympathy with the boy was hardly more than he felt for the rugged, old
man, who, like Jack, never left the mining settlement, but followed his
son about in a beaten, dogged silent way which at times brought tears
to Dick's eyes.

The horror of the disaster brought scores of people to Sabinsport, and
every day they filled the little settlement. There were the Union
organizers; there was a score or more of reporters; there were
investigators of all degrees of intelligence and hysteria. Among these
Ralph circulated. He had bought the _Argus_ but a few months before the
disaster. His very lack of personal acquaintance with the stockholders,
officers or active managers of the mine left him without any of the
moderating personal feeling which a man who had long known the town
might have had. Ralph saw just one thing, that the two leading
stockholders in the "Emma," the men who had always run it, were the two
most unscrupulous and adroit politicians in that part of the world--the
two that he had set out from the start to "get." He felt that in the
mine disaster he had, as he said, "the goods." They, particularly Jake,
were responsible for this awful thing. And never a day that he did not
in the _Argus_ publish wrathful and indignant articles, trying to
arouse the community. He received no protest from his victims. Jake was
so overwhelmed by the disaster itself, so absorbed in what he knew his
son was going through, that the _Argus_ was hardly a pin prick to him.
It was Dick that discovered how hard it was for the old man. In that
hundred men who never came back alive there had been a full score that
had grown up with him, that had stood by always in the development of
the "Emma." They were the trusted men, the permanent, responsible men,
who, if they had not made money, were still in Jake's opinion his
greatest asset. And then they were his friends. With these burdens on
his heart, why should he mind a little thing like the _Argus_?

Almost immediately after the disaster, Dick found that the place was
swarming with claim agents, some of whom he instinctively felt were
untrustworthy. Familiar as he was with the whole theory of accident
compensation, he immediately informed himself about the laws of the
State. They were practically null. It was then that he went to Ralph
and laid before him the possibility of using this disaster as a means
of securing in the State a fair compensation law. And he said to him
very frankly, "I believe that if the Union leaders here, the better
class of investigators, you yourself, would but put this thing before
the officers of this mine, that they would take the lead and
voluntarily accept a liberal system of compensation. If they would do
this, it probably would clinch the campaign for a state compensation
law."

It was a wise suggestion. Ralph, who had been spending his force in
violent and personal attack, immediately began to work on something
like a program. In the meantime Dick, who by this time had won the
entire confidence of Jack, opened the matter. It needed no argument. He
lost no time in putting it before his father, who at the moment was
ready to agree to anything that the boy wanted.

The various interests of the mine were called together with expert
labor men and others who were informed and influential. It did not go
through without a fight. There were stockholders in Sabinsport and
elsewhere who, hearing of the liberal plans that were being discussed,
wrote anonymous notes, protesting against the diversion of the
stockholders' dividends in sentimental and Utopian plans. Reuben Cowder
stood steadfastly against the scheme. To him it was utterly
impractical, an un-heard-of thing. While the matter was being
discussed, Ralph hammered daily, wisely and unwisely. It touched Dick
to the heart that Jack never but once spoke of this, and that was one
day when he said, "He is right in the main, but it would be easier for
me if he would be a little less bitter against Cowder and my father."
In the end the whole generous plan was adopted. It came about by Reuben
Cowder's sudden withdrawal of opposition. It was years before Dick
learned the reason of this unexplained and unexpected change of front.

It was not until the struggle over compensation was ended that Dick
suddenly remembered that he was only a wayfarer in Sabinsport, a
traveler delayed en route. With the remembrance came the realization of
what these people had come to mean to him, that he was actually more
interested in this community than in any other spot on earth.
Unconsciously he seemed to have grown into the town, to belong to it.

In the end it came about naturally enough that he should stay on. A
little church in the town had lost by death a clergyman, twenty years
in its service. The little band of communicants were fastidious and
conservative. In the disaster which had for a time swept down all the
barriers in the community they had become deeply interested in Dick.
His hallmarks were so much finer than any they had ever dreamed
possible to secure for their church, that it was with some trepidation
that they suggested that he stay on with them. They were even willing
to wink at what their richest member, a grumbling stockholder in the
Emma mine, called his "revolutionary notions."

The Bishop was willing to wink at them too. "They need you, boy," he
had told him, "even more than they want you. They are in a fair way to
die of respectability. You can perhaps resurrect them; but don't try to
do it by shock treatment. You have the advantage of not being an
applicant."

And, consenting only for an accommodation, Dick accepted, and remained.
He soon came to call Sabinsport home. Moreover, he was happy. He
realized in his leisure moments, of which he had few enough, that he
was happy without several things that he had supposed essential to
happiness--without a home, a wife, a child, companions of similar
training and outlook to his own.

The town interested him profoundly. It was his first close contact with
an old American town which had undergone industrial treatment. He felt
its cosmopolitan character, something of which the inhabitants
themselves were quite unconscious. As a matter of fact, all sorts of
people were blending in Sabinsport. A thin pioneer stream of Scotch,
Irish and English had settled the original lands, and early in the
nineteenth century had selected as their trading post the point on the
river which had afterwards become Sabinsport.

The port had prospered amazingly in those first days. After forty years
and more it looked as if it were destined to be the metropolis of that
part of the world. Then the first railroad came across country, and it
left Sabinsport out. A smaller, poorer rival, some twenty-five miles
away, secured the prize. Slowly but surely the trade that had so long
put into Sabinsport changed its course to what only too soon they began
to call the City. Fewer and fewer boats came up the river, fewer and
fewer coaches and laden wagons came from the up-country. The town
submitted with poor grace to its inevitable decline. To this day Dick
found that the older families particularly were jealous of the city and
resented its unconscious patronage. It had become the habit in
Sabinsport to sneer at the city as vulgar, pushing and brutal, though
these feelings did not prevent her from patronizing its shops and
amusements.

This early disappointment had not by any means prevented the steady
growth of the town. Coal had been discovered, adding a second layer of
the rich to Sabinsport. The coal had brought the railroad and
factories, but it was still those early settlers who had first come
into the town and built the splendid old houses, with their spacious
grounds, that considered themselves the aristocracy. It was an
aristocracy a little insistent with newcomers on its superiority, a
little scornful of its successors. It considered itself the backbone of
Sabinsport, which was natural; and it was quite unconscious that the
facts were every day disputing its pretensions.

Slowly and inevitably Sabinsport had been and was digesting successive
waves of peoples. When the mines first opened there had been an
incoming of Welsh. Only a few of them were left in the mines now. They
had saved their money and had come into the town. Their children had
learned trades, indeed there was a corner of the high land known as
Welsh Hill; a place where one found reliable workmen of all sorts, and
a place too which was famous for its music; indeed, Welsh Hill sent a
famous chorus every year to the annual musical festival in the City. On
Christmas morning they still promenaded the streets, waking people out
of their sleep with their Christmas carols.

The Germans had come into the mines soon after the Welsh. They too had
been thrifty--bought property. There were several of them that were
counted among the best citizens; among them was a man, Rupert Littman,
who once had milked his father's cows and raked his hay and now was
president of one of the richest banks, a stockholder in every
enterprise. They had been much more thoroughly absorbed into the social
and business life than any other people, and much that was good in
Sabinsport was due to them.

As the years had gone on, as more mines had been opened, and as mills
had been built, a motley of people had come: Austrians, Serbs,
Russians, Greeks, Italians, and now and then an Armenian. With all of
these Dick felt himself very much at home. They seemed familiar to him,
more familiar, he sometimes thought, than the smiling, busy, competent
Americans of his church. There was a small group of Serbians at the
mines with whom he had been especially intimate in the years of the
Balkan War. More than one had left the mines to go back to Serbia to
fight. They had been most exultant with the outcome of the war. The
most intelligent of this group was Nikola Petrovitch, a thoughtful
fellow of thirty-five or forty, an ardent Pan-Slavist. It was only
because of an injury he had sustained in the mine at the time of the
great disaster that he had not gone out in 1912. He had followed with
Dick every step of the war, chafing bitterly that it was impossible for
him to be in the fight. When at the end of June, 1914, the news of the
murder of the Grand Duke had come, Nikola had been terribly cast down.
"If our people did it," he said, "it was a mistake." Every line of news
from that day he had discussed with Dick. He had believed from the
first that Austria intended now to use all her power to crush Serbia;
and "Germany will help her," he used to say. The practical acceptance
of Austria's ultimatum had given Dick hope in the situation. It did not
seem possible to him that any country, however autocratic and greedy,
could push demand beyond the point which the Serbians had accepted.

Dick had other friends. There was the Greek, John A. Papalagos, as the
sign on his flourishing fruit and vegetable store had it. People smiled
at the time they knew that the Parson spent with the fruit seller. What
they did not realize was that this man with his queer name was probably
as well read as any man of the town, certainly far better read in
European affairs than any of the leading citizens of Sabinsport. His
ambition was a Greek republic, and every move on the European political
checker-board he watched with excited and intelligent interest,
calculating how it was going to deter or forward the one ardent passion
of his life.

As a matter of fact it was only with Papalagos and the Serbians on the
hill that Dick was able to carry on any really intelligent exchange of
views on European politics. Ralph, who ought to have been, he felt, his
comrade in these matters, had practically no interest in them. This
indifference always puzzled and dismayed Dick. European politics, in
Ralph's opinion, were as unrelated to the United States as the politics
of Mars. One feature only he treated with interest, and that was
Germany's social work. The forms of social insurance she had devised
interested him keenly. He had regularly written enthusiastic editorials
on the way she met the breaking down of men through age, illness,
accident. Her handling of employment was one of his stock subjects.
Germany was socially efficient in his mind, preserving men power, "as
well as machines and hogs," as he put it in the phrase of his school.
He pictured her as a land where every man and woman was well housed,
continuously employed, cared for in sickness or in health, and that was
all Ralph knew about Germany. When Dick, who had tramped the land from
end to end, put in a protest and mentioned the army as the end of all
this care of human beings, Ralph broke out in a violent defense of the
military system. It was merely a way of training men physically and
arousing in them social solidarity. A nation couldn't do what Germany
did for men and women unless she loved them. It was what the United
States needed.

Outside of these devices for meeting the breaking down of human beings,
Ralph took no interest in Europe. His attitude through the Balkan War
had baffled Dick by its perfunctoriness. He published the news as it
came to him daily. He kept the maps on his walls, and now and then he
wrote a few correct paragraphs, noting the change in situation. He was
pleased that the power of Turkey was limited at the end, for he did
have a hazy notion of the undesirableness of Turkey in Europe, but
beyond this there was neither feeling nor understanding.

How, Dick asked himself, could a man of Ralph's ability spend four
years in a first-class American college and two on a great newspaper
and still be so completely cut off from the affairs of the globe
outside of the United States? It was a fact, but Dick could not
understand how it could be a fact. It gave him his first real sense of
the newness of the country, its entire absorption in itself.

Ralph defended this indifference. "They're nothing to us," he declared.
"We're too busy taking care of their scrap heaps. A million a year
coming here to be reconstructed and Americanized, why should we bother
about what Europe thinks or does? We're too busy. They can't touch us."

As Dick walked out to the "Emma" that night after supper, he felt
keenly his isolation. His mind was full of dread. Europe and her
affairs had long been like a chess-board to him. For years with his
fellows at Oxford, with _Times_ correspondents in different continental
cities, with a host of scattered acquaintances of various points of
view, he had played the fascinating game of speculation and forecast
that traps every student of history and politics who in the last forty
years has spent any length of time in any great continental center.
Dick knew something of the ambitions of every nation in Europe,
something of their temper and their antipathies. He had in mind all
possible lineups. He knew as well as any European statesman that if
Austria declared war on Serbia, there would probably be Russian
interference, and if Russia went in--"My God," he groaned to himself,
"_Der Tag_ is here at last. It's the '_naechste Krieg_.'"

He tried hard, as he walked, to push away the depression which was
overwhelming him. "Of course, they'll stop it," he told himself; "they
have before. It is folly for me to let this thing get hold of me in
this way."

It was twilight when he crossed the fields to the mining settlement and
made for the house of his friend Nikola Petrovitch. In the dim light
the little house looked very pleasant. Stana Petrovitch loved her
garden, and the severe outlines of the company house were softened with
blossoming honeysuckle, which filled the air with a faint perfume. It
was very sweet to see, but before Dick was near enough to get more than
a pleasant outline, from the house there came a burst of strong, fierce
song--a dozen voices, eloquent with emotion. How well he knew it! The
Serbian National Anthem:

                "God of Justice! Thou Who saved us
                  When in deepest bondage cast,
                Hear Thy Serbian children's voices,
                  Be our help as in the past.
                With Thy mighty hand sustain us,
                  Still our rugged pathway trace;
                God, our Hope! protect and cherish
                  Serbian crown and Serbian race!

                "On our sepulcher of ages
                  Breaks the resurrection morn,
                From the slough of direst slavery
                  Serbia anew is born.
                Through five hundred years of durance
                  We have knelt before Thy face,
                All our kin, O God! deliver!
                  Thus entreats the Serbian race. Amen."

It was what he knew. Nikola, Yovan, Marta. They were _going_.

"God help the women," he said to himself. Turning, he went around and
to the street. It was the end of a shift, and the men who had come out
had washed, eaten and now were smoking their pipes in groups at one or
another door. The women were collected too. There was excitement in the
air.

"Mr. Dick," some one called to him. "Is it true, the war?"

"I am afraid so," he said.

"And what are they jumping on poor little Serbia for, a big one like
Austria? That's your kings for you."

It was one of his Irish friends speaking.

"But they'll fight, them Serbians; they're scrappers all right. Nikola
is going in the morning. Marta too. It is good to live in a country
where they don't have wars."

"Nikola's foolish to go," broke in some one. "I told his woman so, and
she flared up and said, 'He no go, I go! Serbian men fight--not
'fraid.' I guess she's right. I don't see what she is going to do, five
kids too."

Dick walked on. One of the foremen dropped out of the group that sat on
the porch.

"May I speak with you, Mr. Dick?" he said. "A man came to-night,
Serbian. He was here when Nikola and Marta came up, and went home with
them. Nikola was just here. He told me Serbia was going to war, and
that he and Marta and Yovan were leaving in the morning. What's the
row? Is there a war?"

Dick told him all he knew. The foreman's brief comment was, "Must be
some country that will take a man like Nikola out of a job like
his--family too."

"It is," said Dick.

Back at home he called up Ralph. "Better be sure that some one is at
the 10:30 to-morrow morning, Sam. Nikola is leaving. Marta and Yovan
too."

"Leaving," said Ralph. "Why, they're the best men in the 'Emma.' You
don't mean they're fools enough to rush out without knowing whether
there's going to be a war. It will be over before they get there. Stop
'em, Dick. It is nonsense."

"There'll be a war when they get there, all right, Ralph, and no man
could hold Nikola now. Make a note of their going, won't you?"

"Sure, if you want it."

If you will examine the personal column of the Sabinsport _Argus_ for
July 29, 1914, you will find among other items, this:

  "Nikola Petrovitch, Yovan Markovitch, and Marta Popovitch, all of
  the 'Emma' mine, left at 10:30 this morning for New York. They
  expect to sail at once for Serbia, where they will join the army
  which has been called into the field by Austria's declaration of
  war. Hope to see you back soon, boys."

And thus it was that the Great War first came to Sabinsport.




                               CHAPTER II


A ripple of interest ran over a few quarters of Sabinsport when it read
of the sudden departure of three Serbian miners. At the banks, and in
the offices of the mills and factories, men sniffed or swore, "Doesn't
a man know when he is well off? I don't understand how a steady fellow
like Nikola Petrovitch can do such a crazy thing. Who is going to take
care of his family?" This was the usual business view.

A few members of the Ladies' Aid of Dick's church grumbled to him. "We
will have that family on our hands again. Couldn't you stop him?"

It was momentary interest only. Austria's declaration of war had not
entered their minds. Dick felt that if he had asked some of the members
of his congregation who had declared war, they might have said,
"Serbia." The repeated shocks of the news of the next few days battered
down indifference. Each night and each morning there fell into the
community facts--terrible, unbelievable--stunning and horrifying it.
Germany had invaded Belgium. She was battering down Liege. Why, what
did it mean? England had declared war on Germany. She was calling out
an army, but what for? And we--we were to be neutral, of course. We had
nothing to do with it.

The town discussed the news of that dreadful week in troubled voices,
reading the paper line by line, curious, awed--but quite detached. The
first sense of connection came when the _Argus_ announced that Patsy
McCullon was lost. The last her family had heard of her she was in
Belgium. They had cabled--could get no word. Now Patsy was Sabinsport's
pride.

She was an example, so High Town said, of what a girl could make of
herself, though as a matter of fact better backing than Patsy had for
her achievement it would be hard to find. Her father and mother were of
the reliable Scotch stock which had come a hundred years before to the
country near Sabinsport. Here Patsy's grandfather had settled and
prospered. Here her father had been born and here he still carried on
the original McCullon farm. He had married a "native" like himself, and
like himself well-to-do. They had worked hard and they had to show for
their efforts as comfortable and attractive a place as the district
boasted--not a "show farm," like Ralph Cowder's, but clean, generous
acres--many of them--substantial buildings always shining with fresh
paint, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, gardens, vines, orchards.

The McCullons had one child, Patsy. You'd go far to find anything
firmer on its feet than Patsy McCullon, anything that knew better its
own mind or went more promptly and directly after the thing it wanted.
Patsy was twenty-four. Since the hour she was born, she had been her
own mistress. When she was ten she had elected to go into town to
school. When she was sixteen she had graduated, and the next year she
had gone to college. Her father and mother had put in a feeble protest.
They needed her. She was an only child. They had "enough." Why not
settle down? But Patsy said firmly, No. She was going to "prepare to do
something." When they asked her what, she said quite frankly she didn't
know. She'd see. She knew the first thing was education and she meant
to have it. She'd teach and pay back if they said so, but Father
McCullon hastened to say that it "wasn't necessary." He guessed she
could have what she wanted. And so Patsy had gone East to college. She
had graduated with honor two years before the war and had come back to
Sabinsport to take a position in the high school.

If Patsy had been able to analyze the motives back of her career to
date she would have found the dominating one to have been a
determination to make Sabinsport--select, rich, satisfied
Sabinsport--take her in. She had been, as a little girl, conscious that
these handsome, well-dressed, citified people, whose origin was in no
case better and often not so good as her own--Father McCullon took care
that Patsy knew the worst of the forebears of those in town who held
their heads so high--regarded her as a little country girl, something
intangibly different and inferior to themselves. When they stopped at
the farm, as they so often did in pleasant weather to eat strawberries
in summer and apples in the fall, to drink buttermilk and gather
"country posies," as they called them, she had been vaguely offended by
their ways.

When she insisted at ten upon going into town to school, it was with an
unconscious resolve to find out what made them "different"--what secret
had they for making her father and mother so proud of their visits, and
why didn't her father and mother drop in as they did? She suggested it
once when they were in town, and had been told, "No, you can't do that.
We've not been asked."

"But they come to visit you without being asked."

"But that's different. We are country people. Visitors are always
welcome in the country. City people don't expect you to come without
invitation."

This offended her. She would find out about it. But it continued to
baffle her.

She stood high in school. She quickly learned how to dress and do her
hair as well as the best of them. She read books, she shone in every
school exhibition, but she continued a girl from the country. Evidently
she must do more than come to them; she must bring them something.
She'd see what college would do.

College did wonders for Patsy. She came to it full of health and zest,
excellently prepared; good, oh very good, to look at; sufficiently
supplied with money, and, greatest of all, determined to get everything
going. "Nothing gets away from Patsy McCullon," the envious sometimes
said. It didn't, nothing tried to: she was too useful, too agreeable,
too resourceful. It didn't matter whether it was a Greek or a tennis
score, Patsy went after it, and oftener than not carried it away.
Probably if there had been annual voting for the most popular girl in
her class, there would never have been a year she wouldn't have won.
She had friends galore. All her short vacations she went on visits--the
homes of distinguished people, it would have been noted, if anybody had
been keeping tab on her. And Sabinsport always knew it.

"Miss Patsy McCullon, the daughter of Donald McCullon, is spending her
Easter holiday in New York, with the daughter of Senator Blank," the
_Argus_ reported. A thing like that didn't get by the exclusive of
Sabinsport. There weren't many of them who would not have been willing
to have given fat slices of their generous incomes for introduction
into that fashionable household.

And when college was done with and High Town was prepared to welcome
Patsy into its innermost, idlest set, she had taken its breath away and
distressed her father and mother by asking for and getting a position
in the high school.

Her reasons for this surprising action were many. She could not and
would not ask more from her parents. They had been generous, too
generous, and she'd taken freely. It wasn't fair, unless she went back
to the farm and she wouldn't do that. She could be near them if not
with them, and still be where she could conquer High Town.

But Patsy soon learned--indeed she was pretty sure of it before she put
her ambition to test--that the thing she had set out to win so long ago
wasn't the thing she wanted. She found herself free to come and go
wherever she would in Sabinsport, but it was no longer an interest.
College had done something to Patsy--set her on a chase after what she
called the "real." She didn't know what it was, but she did know it was
something to be worked for--which is perhaps more than most of the
seekers of reality ever discover.

She was going to achieve the "real" and she was never going to be a
snob. She wasn't ever going to make anybody feel as those people in
Sabinsport, with their suburban, metropolitan airs, had made her feel.
She was going to treat everybody fair, for, as she sagely told herself,
"You can never tell what anybody may do--look at me!" Which of course
proves that Patsy was not free from calculation. Indeed, she steered
her course solely by calculation, but it was calculation without
malice, incapable of a meanness, a lie or a real unkindness.

"She's out after what she wants," a brother of one of her college
friends had said once, "but you can be darn sure she'll never double
cross you in getting it: she's white all through." She was, but she was
also hard; a kind, clean, just sort of hardness--of which she was
entirely unconscious.

Patsy's two years in the high school had won her the town solidly. And
when in June, 1914, she went abroad everybody had been interested. It
was her first trip and she had prepared for it thoroughly, drawing
particularly on Dick's stores of experience.

Ralph, who was feeling very wroth at her that spring because of her
indifference to his reform plans, sniffed at this. "I don't see why you
give Patsy so much time over this trip of hers. It will only make her
more unendurable, more cocksure, more blind to things about her. I like
a woman that sees."

"Sees what?" asked Dick.

"The condition of those about her--the future. Patsy McCullon doesn't
know there is a suffering woman or child in Sabinsport. She has never
crossed the threshold of a factory or entered a mine."

"She's no exception," said Dick. "There are not a half dozen of the
women in Sabinsport, even those whose entire income comes from factory
and mine, that know anything of the life of the men and women who do
the work. You can't blame Patsy for what is true of nearly all American
well-to-do women. Of course it is shocking. But Patsy at least has the
excuse that she gets no dividends from these institutions and so has no
direct responsibility."

"I'll give her credit for knowing what she wants," said Ralph, dryly.

"And playing a clean game, Ralph."

"Yes, I suppose so, but I hate a calculating woman." Dick eyed him
sharply. He had a suspicion sometimes that Ralph's irritation over
Patsy was partly growing fondness and partly self-protection. He feared
her closing in on him, and feared he would be helpless if she did.

"She'll have to work harder than she ever did before, but if I don't
mistake, she's beginning. I don't believe she knows it, though," Dick
said to himself.

Patsy sailed in June. He and Ralph had had several joyous notes from
her, and the day after the declaration of war on Serbia a long letter
announcing a sudden change of the itinerary she and Dick had arranged
with such pains.

  "I have run into a college mate here who with her husband and
  brother are just starting for a leisurely motor trip, half
  pleasure, half business. Mr. Laurence and his brother have
  connections over here, and it is to look into them that they go the
  route they do. Of course, Dick, it shatters all those wonderful
  Baedeker constellations we worked out for this part of the world,
  but I shall see the true French country and the little towns and
  I'll learn how the people live and I'll have no end of knowledge
  about 'conditions' to give Ralph when I get back."

"Much she'll see there if she can't see anything here," growled Ralph.
"Who is this Laurence anyway?"

  "We leave Paris around the 20th for Dijon. Mr. Laurence's firm
  makes all sorts of things for farmers. They have offices in Paris
  and Brussels and Berlin--all the big cities, and agents in many of
  the larger towns. I suppose he takes these trips to see what the
  country people need and how well the agents are persuading them
  they need it. Martha says it's no end of fun to go with him. We'll
  spend a day in Dijon--time enough to see the old houses and the
  pastels in the museum. We're going from there to a place called
  Beaune--never heard of it before, but Henry--Mr. Laurence's
  brother--he knows everything about this country--says it has the
  most perfect fifteenth century hospital in Europe. Then along the
  Meuse into Belgium. We ought to be in Brussels by the first of
  August."

And so on and on--a gurgling, happy, altogether care-free letter,
calculated above all to make a young man who still was unconscious that
he was in danger, read it and re-read it and say to himself that a girl
who could write like that at twenty-four must be a very giddy person,
and then to wake up in the night with an entirely irrelevant
thought--"She didn't say whether Henry is married. Confound him."

If Patsy had calculated her effect--which she had not, for she herself
was unconscious of why she wrote these bubbling letters so unlike her
usual ones, she could not have done better.

"I wonder where Patsy is to-day," said Dick to himself. "I hope they
turned back," but he said nothing to Ralph of his disquiet. It took
that young man forty-eight hours longer to realize that Patsy might be
caught in some unpleasant trap. He called up Dick. "The papers say
there's a panic among our tourists, Dick. Do you suppose that hits
Patsy? Don't you think we better drive out and see if the old folks
have heard from her?"

It was Sunday afternoon of August 2nd that they went out. Mr. and Mrs.
McCullon were quite serene. "Here's a letter from Patsy," they said.
"Last we've heard." It was from Paris, the 20th, two days later than
theirs, the night before they started. "She ought to be in Brussels
to-day. They say they're worried over there about getting home. I guess
Patsy can take care of herself all right. Glad she's with some real
live American business men--these Laurences seem to have pretty big
foreign interests. Patsy's all right with them."

"Of course she is," agreed Ralph. "Besides, Belgium's a good place to
be now. Belgium has a treaty with all her neighbors to keep off her
soil. France and Germany keep a strip specially for fighting purposes.
Couldn't be a better place for Patsy." And Ralph quite honestly
believed it.

But it was a different thing to Dick. He was oppressed, bewildered,
alarmed. He couldn't have told just what he feared. The world seemed
suddenly black and all roads closed. But at least he would keep his
depression to himself. He knew how entirely unreasonable it would seem
to all Sabinsport.

It was the invasion of Belgium--the thing that could not be, the
resistance of the Belgians, the attack upon Liege, the realization that
the Germans intended to fight their way to Paris--that they must pass
through Brussels where Patsy was supposed to be, that gave Sabinsport
its first sense that the war might concern them. The anxiety of Farmer
and Mrs. McCullon, which grew with the reading of the papers, stirred
the town mightily. The poor old people, so confident at first, had
become more and more disturbed as they failed by cablegram to get any
news. They spent part of every day in town, going back at night, white
with weariness and forebodings. The only thing that buoyed them up was
the series of postals they received in these early August days. Patsy
had been at Dijon and eaten of its wonderful pastry. She had been at
Beaune and seen the fireplace big enough to roast an ox in--they were
starting for a run through the fortified towns--Belfort, Verdun, Metz,
Maubeuge--and then to Brussels via Dinant and Namur. Dreadful days of
silence followed.

It was not until the 14th of August that Mr. McCullon received word
that Patsy had arrived that day in Brussels, was well and was posting a
letter. The next morning a wire from Washington said that the Embassy
reported her in Brussels, and when the New York papers came late in the
afternoon, there was her name in the State Department's list of
"Americans Found."

It was wonderful how the news ran up and down the town. Willie Butler
rushed into the house crying at the full of his lungs, "Miss Patsy's
found. Miss Patsy's found." Willie had been a year in the high school,
and his admiration for his teacher, always considerable, had been
heated white-hot by the excitement of her adventures. They talked about
it in the barber shop and at the grocery and at the hardware store
where Farmer McCullon traded and where he had been seen so often in the
last terrible days, seeking from those whom long acquaintance had made
familiar the support that familiarity and friendliness carry.

It was a topic for half the tea tables in Sabinsport that night, and
many people whom Mr. and Mrs. McCullon scarcely knew called them up to
tell them how glad they were Patsy was safe and sometimes to confide
their dark suspicion that the reason there had been no news of her was
that she was a prisoner of war!

In the long twelve days the McCullons and Sabinsport waited for Patsy's
letter, regular cablegrams notified them of her safety. Then the letter
came. Simple as it was, it took on something of the character of a
historical document in the town. It made the things they had read and
shivered over every morning actual and in a vague way connected them
with the events. There was no little pride, too, among Patsy's friends
in town that they should know an eye-witness of what they had begun to
realize was the beginning of no ordinary war.

Patsy's letter was headed

               "DINANT, BELGIUM, Friday, July 31, 1918."

"Only three weeks ago," Dick said to himself, shuddering, when the
letter came to him, "and what is going on in Dinant to-day?" for,
knowing the land foot by foot, he realized how inevitable it was that
the town must be engulfed in the Namur-Charleroi battle, the result of
which in the light of the three weeks since Patsy had written her
heading, he had no doubt.

  "My dear Folks:--It is just ten days since I mailed you a letter.
  That was in Paris. We were starting out. It was all so gay then.
  The world has changed. It is all so anxious now. It is not for any
  tangible reason--nothing I could tell you. I suppose what has
  happened to me is that I have caught what is in the air. It is like
  an infection--this stern, tense expectancy that pervades France.
  To-day we reached Dinant, this lovely little playboy of a town, its
  feet in the Meuse, its head wearing an old old citadel on a cliff
  grown up with trees and ferns. You would love it so, Mother
  McCullon. And here it is the same watchful, dangerous quiet. There
  have been rumors of war for many days, you know. The French papers,
  which I've read diligently, were full of forecastings and queer
  political calculations which I didn't understand and which Mr.
  Laurence said were not to be taken seriously. It didn't seem
  credible to me that because a crazy fellow in a little under-sized
  country like Serbia had killed even a Grand Duke that a great
  country like Austria should declare war on her, particularly when
  she's eaten as much humble pie as Serbia has. And even if she did,
  I cannot see for the life of me what Russia has to do with it or
  why France should be alarmed.

  "I only know that it seems as if the very air held its breath, as
  if every living thing was about to spring and kill--I can't escape
  it. Perhaps it would not have caught me as it has if I had not been
  so close to the frontier. When I wrote you ten days ago--it seems a
  year--I told you that we were to follow the frontier from Belfort
  through Toul and Verdun with a side trip to Metz, then on to
  Maubeuge and into Belgium. The men have a passion for forts, and
  they were obliged to go to Metz for business.

  "On the evening of the 28th, just as we reached Verdun, the news
  came that Austria had at last declared war. We got into town all
  right and they took us into the hotel, but I thought we'd never get
  out. The air suddenly seemed to rain soldiers--and suspicion--the
  street swarmed with people and nobody talked or smiled.

  "Verdun is so lovely. You look for miles over the country from the
  high terraces--the houses are so clean and trim. They look so
  stable--everything seems so settled to me here as if it had been
  living years upon years and had learned how to be happy and grow in
  one place. I wonder if that is the difference between the American
  and French towns. These places look as if nothing could disturb
  them. I'm sure if when I'm old and gray and come back to Verdun, it
  will all be the same and I'll sit on the terrace looking out on the
  Meuse and drink my coffee just as I did last Thursday
  night!--Only--only if the Germans should get near here--they can
  throw their hideous shells so far, the men say--I could fancy them
  popping a big one down right into the middle of our garden,
  scattering us right and left.

  "Up to the time we reached Verdun we had sailed through. The most
  secret places were opened for us. But the fact that Austria had
  declared war on Serbia certainly slowed up our wheels. It looked on
  Wednesday as if we wouldn't be able to leave Verdun. Henry's
  friend--he always knows a man everywhere--wasn't there--he'd been
  suddenly called, transferred. Nobody knew us and everybody
  suspected us, but Mr. Laurence was determined to get into Belgium
  at once. We'd be free there, he said, and could play around until
  things settled down. He had to use all his influence to get out. It
  was only when he enlisted our officer friends at Toul by telephone
  that he was allowed to go. We had just such a time at Maubeuge
  yesterday and certainly it looked like war there.

  "They were beginning to cut down the trees--to open up the country
  and to put up barbed-wire fences--to hold up people--I couldn't
  help wondering if the wire came from Sabinsport. I never heard of
  such a thing. Henry says that his officer friend told him that the
  Germans on the other side of the frontier began clearing out trees
  and preparing wire entanglements five days ago and that was before
  Austria declared war. What does it mean?

  "But here we are in Belgium--nice, neutral Belgium!

                                                    "Saturday, Aug. 1.

  "I certainly can't make head or tail of European politics. We run
  as fast as they will let us from a country that hasn't declared war
  and that nobody has challenged, as I can see, but which merely
  thinks it may be attacked, to get into a country that everybody has
  signed a compact to let alone and live. This morning when I came
  down into the garden of this darling hotel to drink my coffee, I
  hear bells and commotion and I am told an order has come to
  _mobilize_. But what for? When Mr. Laurence and Henry came they
  said it was merely to protect neutrality. I don't see much in a
  neutrality that calls all the men out. It is harsh business for the
  people. I've been out in the streets and walking in the country for
  hours and I'm broken-hearted. It seems that the bell the police go
  up and down ringing means that they must go at once. There are
  posters all over the walls to the _Armee de Terre_ and _Armee de
  mer_, telling them to lose no time. Why, this morning the man who
  was serving us left in the middle of our meal, just saying
  '_Pardon, c'est la mobilization_,' and in three minutes Madame was
  fluttering around apologizing for a delay and telling us it
  wouldn't happen again, that she would serve us. Poor thing! she'll
  have to, for every man about her place, her only son included,
  followed that horrid bell. There's many a woman worse off than our
  landlady. There are the farmers' wives, left quite alone with cows,
  pigs, horses and the crops ready to harvest--some of them with not
  a soul to help them. They never complain, only say, '_C'est la
  guerre_,' but it isn't _la guerre_--at least, not in Belgium. How
  can it be, with her treaties!

                                           "DINANT, Tuesday, August 3.

  "I did not send this letter as I expected to. Mr. Laurence advised
  us to mail no letters until after the mobilization is well under
  way--says the tax on transportation is so heavy that the mails are
  held up. There is great difficulty even in getting Brussels by
  telephone or telegraph, and we've had no papers for three days.

  "You see, I am still at Dinant, though we will leave in a few
  hours--if nothing happens! We were held by an incident of
  mobilization. Sunday afternoon while we were in a shop buying some
  fruit, a man came in hurriedly, leading a little boy and girl. He
  wanted the woman to take them while he was gone. Their mother was
  dead, he said. He had no one. The woman cried. She couldn't, she
  said; she had her own--her husband must go. She must keep the shop.
  How could she do it--how could she--and she appealed to me. The
  poor fellow looked so wretched and the children so pretty that
  Henry, who has the kindest heart in the world, said, 'See here, let
  _me_ have the kids. I'll find somebody to keep them.' 'But I have
  no money,' the man said. 'Well, never mind--I'll see to that,' and,
  would you believe it? that man marched off leaving Henry Laurence
  with two solemn little Belgians. Well, we had to stay in Dinant
  forty-eight hours longer than we'd expected while Henry found a
  place for them. We had such fun! He found a dear old lady in a nice
  little house, and everybody said she'd be kind to them, and Henry
  arranged at the bank for weekly payments as long as the father has
  to be away. He could do that without trouble because his firm has a
  branch in Brussels, and a man here handles their goods. We're going
  this evening to say good-by and then north to Namur, which is only
  fifteen miles away. We follow the Meuse--it will be a lovely ride.

                                                     "NAMUR, August 5.

  "An awful, a wicked thing has happened. I can't believe it is true.
  Last night when we reached our hotel here, the first thing we heard
  was that Germany had crossed the Belgian frontier. Mr. Laurence and
  Henry grew quite angry with the proprietor--whom they know very
  well, as the firm has offices here--for repeating such a rumor, but
  he insisted he was right. Germany couldn't do such a thing, Henry
  insisted. The man only shrugged and said what everybody says here:
  '_Guillaume est la cause._' ('William did it.') You hear the
  peasants in the fields say the same thing. They don't say the
  kaiser, or the emperor, or William II; just William--as one might
  speak about a rich and powerful relative that he didn't like or
  approve of but had to obey.

  "Well, it is true. They crossed on Tuesday at the very time we were
  having such fun placing our two little Dinantais--and to-day, oh,
  Mother dear, I can't write it--they have attacked Liege. Nobody
  seems to know just what has happened. It is sure that the Belgians
  were told by Germany that they would not be disturbed. Henry came
  in this afternoon with a copy of a Brussels paper in which only two
  days ago the German Minister to Brussels said in an interview that
  Belgium need have no fear from Germany.

  "'Your neighbor's house may burn but yours will be safe'--his very
  words. Think of that!--and at the very time he uttered them their
  armies were there ready to cross. The King must be a perfect brick.
  The Germans sent him a message, telling him what they proposed to
  do. He called the parliament instanter and read them the document.
  It was in the Brussels papers. It began by saying that the French
  intended to march down the Meuse by Givet--a town on the border
  only a little distance from Dinant--and then on to Namur into
  Germany!

  "There never was such a lie. Why, we have just come from there.
  There wasn't a sign of such a thing. The French army didn't begin
  to mobilize until Sunday, and it will take days and days, and here
  Germany is _in_ Belgium. She says that she won't hurt the Belgians
  if they will let her march through so as to attack France--and she
  gives them twelve hours to decide--think of that. Doesn't it make
  you want to fight yourself? The cowards! It is like a knife in the
  back. But I am proud of little Belgium. They say the king and
  parliament sat up all night going over things and in the morning
  they sent back word 'No, the Germans could not pass with Belgium's
  consent and if they tried to she'd fight,' and she's doing it!

  "Everything has gone to pieces, mail--news--even money. The men
  can't get any, and we're down to about five francs apiece. You
  ought to see the high and mighty Laurences without a dollar in
  their pockets--I wouldn't have missed it for a fortune. They are
  like two helpless kids. They've always had it and depended on it to
  get them everything they wanted and to make everybody else do
  everything they wanted done. Now they can't get it and they
  wouldn't be more helpless if their legs had been unhooked. The
  trouble is we can't get to Brussels without money--for they've
  _taken the car_! Doesn't it sound like a comic opera, Mother dear?
  I forgot you never saw one, but it's just such crazy things they
  do. We've credit, at least, for the firm has an agent here--a big
  one; but the office is closed, for the agent and bookkeepers are
  mobilized. Suddenly we, Mr. Laurence and Henry and their proud
  corporation, are nobody. It won't last. It's inconvenient, but it's
  good for them. They somehow were so sure of things--of Germany, of
  the power of the firm, of themselves--when they had their pockets
  full and now--why, now we're beggars! But we're American beggars
  and I tell you it does brace one up to remember that.

                                             "NAMUR, Friday, August 7.

  "We are still here at Namur, dearest one, and when the wind is
  right we can hear the guns firing. It is the Germans at Liege. So
  far the Belgians are holding them. Isn't it glorious? The people
  are crazy with pride and joy. Of course we would not be here if it
  were not for the trouble about money and the delay in getting back
  our car. Mr. Laurence would not have waited for that, but Martha is
  really ill and he was afraid that the journey to Brussels in the
  over-crowded trains and with the delays and discomforts might be
  serious for her. We couldn't be in a safer place, I suppose, if we
  must stand a siege. The people say Namur has the strongest
  fortifications in Belgium. There are nine great forts around the
  town--not close--three or four miles off. There is a wonderful old
  fortification on the hill above the river, and from there you can
  see over the country for miles--a much better place for a fort it
  seems to me than off out in the country, but I suppose that's my
  ignorance.

  "You would never believe the place was preparing for a siege. It is
  more like a fete. There are flags everywhere--the French and
  English with the Belgian. There are no end of soldiers. They are
  building barricades in the streets, but people go on so naturally.
  The old men and women are harvesting. Here and there on the river
  bank you see a fisherman holding his pole as placidly as if there
  was not a German in a thousand miles. The fussy little steamers and
  boats with lovely red square sails go up and down the rivers just
  as usual. And yet this moment if I listen I can hear a distant roar
  that they tell me is the guns at Liege,

                                                     "Thursday--Later.

  "We are going in the morning--if they will let us. The car has been
  turned back. News has just come that yesterday the Germans were
  seen in Dinant--looking for the French that they made their excuse
  for invading Belgium, I suppose. It has frightened Mr. Laurence and
  Henry and they want to get to Brussels. The news from Liege is very
  queer. We can't tell how true it is, but the attack seems to be
  heavier and to-day there flew over this town a great German
  airplane! spying on us, of course. It was white, with a big blue
  spot on each wing, and looked for all the world like a great
  scarab, and such a racket as it made!

  "I watched it from the street floating over the town so insolent
  and calm, and I wanted to _kill_ it. I wasn't the only one. I saw a
  Belgian workman do the funniest thing. He shook his fist at it,
  screaming threats and then--spit at it!

                                                 "BRUSSELS, August 10.

  "We are here at last, dearest, and they tell me I can get off a
  letter--maybe. We were all day yesterday getting here--about sixty
  miles--think of that for a car of the Laurences. It is all funny
  now, but there were moments when it was anything but that. The
  entire Belgian population between Namur and Brussels seems to be on
  guard. They are spy mad. We were not out of sight of one set of
  guards before another had us. We had all sorts of passports, but
  they took their own time making sure and sometimes it was long, for
  I don't believe they could always read. There were soldiers and
  civil guards all holding us up, and when they were not on the road
  it was the peasants themselves. Why, in one little town a regiment
  of armed peasants stopped us. Mr. Laurence said they must have
  raided the firearms' department of a historical museum to get the
  weapons they carried; rusty old antiques that probably wouldn't
  work if they did try to fire. They arrested us and took us to the
  Burgomaster, and it took two hours to convince him we weren't
  spies. I'm sure he couldn't read our passports. Finally the cure
  came in and he understood at once. He scolded them like
  children--told them they would offend their noble English ally if
  they stopped Americans. So they let us off and even cheered us as
  we went.

  "We reached Brussels finally and found that Mr. Laurence's people
  had arranged everything. You feel so safe here as if you could
  breathe. I suppose it's because of our embassy and the office,
  though the office has been turned into a hospital. Hundreds of
  wounded are coming in. The Red Cross is at work raising money, and
  somebody jingles a cup under your nose every time you go out. The
  town is full of boy scouts, too--they say they've taken over all
  the messenger service.

  "Mr. Laurence had just come in and says letters will go. He tells
  me, too, that you've been worried--that his cablegram from Namur
  didn't get through--that there are inquiries here at the embassy
  for _me_. He says you think I'm lost. Oh, my dear, I never thought
  of that. But you'll surely get your wire from Washington to-day, he
  says. His New York office will wire every day. I couldn't sleep if
  I thought of you worried. Will see you are regularly posted. Will
  leave for London as soon as Martha is stronger, and I will sail for
  America as soon as I can get a ship.

                                                  "Your loving PATSY."

It was on August 22nd that the McCullons received this letter. That
afternoon came a message saying that Patsy had reached London. It was
many days before they were to know of the experiences of the ten days
between letter and message, experiences which were to kindle in the
girl that anger and that pity from which her first great passion for
other people than her own was to spring.

It was not necessary for Sabinsport to receive Patsy's letter in order
to make up its mind about the invasion of Belgium. There were many
things involved in the Great War that Sabinsport was to learn only
after long months of slow and cumbersome meditation, months upon months
of wearing, puzzled watching. They were things hard for her to learn,
for they contradicted all her little teaching in world relations and
bade her enter where the traditions of her land as she had learned them
had forbidden her to go; they forced her, a landsman, to whom the seas
and their laws and meanings were remote and unreal, to come to a
realization of what the seas meant to her, the things she made and the
children she bore; they forced her to understand that the flag and laws
which protected her homes must protect ships on the water, for as her
home was her castle so were ships the sailor's castle; they forced her
to lay aside old prejudices against England; they forced her to a
passion of pity and pride and protective love for France; they forced
her to an understanding of the utter contradiction between her beliefs
and ideals and the beliefs and ideals of the Power that had brought the
war on the world. Poor little Sabinsport! Born only to know and to
desire her own corner of the earth, wishing only that her people should
be free to work out their lives in peace--she had a long road to travel
before her mind could grasp the mighty problems the Great War had put
up to the peoples of the earth, before her heart could feel as her own
the passions and aspirations that burned and drove onward the scores of
big and little peoples that fate had brought into the struggle.

But there was no problem in Belgium's case. Germany had sworn to
respect her neutrality and she had broken her oath. She had followed
this breach of faith with unheard of violence, destruction, wantonness,
pillage, cruelty, lust.

This was true.

Now Sabinsport was simple-minded. She was not very good--that is, not
without her own cynicism, hard-headedness, hypocrisies. She didn't
pretend to any great virtue, but she would not stand for broken
contracts. "You couldn't do business that way," was the common feeling
in Sabinsport. She was harsh with people who broke bargains and saw to
it always they were punished. If the sinner was able by influence in
bribery or cleverness to escape the law, Sabinsport punished him in her
own way. She never forgot and she built up a cloud of suspicion about
the man so that he knew she had not forgotten. Men had left Sabinsport
because of her intangible, persistent disapproval of violated
agreements, repudiated debts. The invasion of Belgium, then, was
classed in the town's mind with the things she wouldn't stand for.

Moreover, the deed had been done with cruelty, and Sabinsport could not
stand for that. She might--and did--overlook a great deal of the normal
cruelty of daily life--cruelties of neglect and snobbery and bad
conditions, but the out-and-out thing she wouldn't stand. A boy caught
tying a tin can to a dog's tail in Sabinsport would be threatened by
the police, held up to scorn in school and thrashed at home. A man who
beat his wife or child went to jail, and one of Sabinsport's reasons
for mistrusting the motley group of foreigners in its mines and mills
was the stories of their harsh treatment of their women.

The steady flow of news of repeated, continued violence in Belgium
stirred Sabinsport to deeper and deeper indignation. The Sunday before
Patsy's letter arrived a group of leading men and women asked Dick to
start a relief fund; the Sunday after, almost everybody doubled his
subscription, for the letter clinched their personal judgment of the
case. "She's been there; she says it as we thought."

There was another element in Belgium's case that took a mighty grip on
Sabinsport, particularly the men and boys. It was the little nation's
courage. Many a man came to Dick with a subscription because it was so
"damned plucky." Belgium's courage had no deeper admirers than Mulligan
and Cowder. Jake swore long and loud and gave generously. Cowder said
little, but the largest sum the fund received in these first days was
slipped into Dick's hand by Reuben Cowder with a simple, "Got
guts--that country has."

It is not to be supposed that there were no dissenting voices, no
doubts, no qualifications in the matter on which the town formed its
final judgment on Belgium. There were people who intimated that Germany
simply had beaten France and England to it. Sabinsport knit her brow
and pondered. Possibly England had arranged with Belgium to let her
through in case of attack--possibly France would have broken her word
in case of need. However that might be, the fact was that it was
Germany that had abused her oath and not France or England, and she did
it at the moment when neither of the others was thinking of such a
maneuver and was unprepared for it. Belgium might be surrounded by
rogue nations, but still there is a choice in rogues. Only one so far
had proved itself a rogue. Sabinsport dismissed the doubt from her
mind. The facts were against it.

There were people, too, a few, who protested against Belgium's
resistance to Germany. Dick was not surprised to hear that a certain
important pillar on the financial side of his own flock had decried the
sacrifice as "impractical." "All very well to be brave," he said, "but
one should distinguish in important matters in this life between the
practical and impractical. I call this foolish resistance--couldn't
possibly hold that army, and if they had let it pass they would have
been paid well. Foolish waste of life and property I call it." But the
gentleman ceased his talk after listening a few times to the strongly
expressed contempt of those of his colleagues who did not fear him for
his gospel of honor when practical.

Whatever the dissent, the protest, the argument, Dick had a feeling
that it was weighed and that it tipped the scale of opinion not the
hundredth part of an ounce more than it was worth. It seemed to him
sometimes that he was looking at a mixture of chemicals watching for a
crystallization--would it come true to the laws in which he had faith?
And it did; whatever the fact and fancy, the logic and nonsense, poured
into Sabinsport's head, a sound sensible view came out. His
satisfaction in the popular opinion of the town, as he caught it in his
running up and down, was the deepest of his troubled days. And the
Reverend Richard Ingraham's days were full of trouble.

There was Ralph Gardner--his dearest friend. They were not getting on
at all. The war had broken in on Ralph's schemes for regenerating
Sabinsport at a moment when her open indifference to her own salvation
was making him furious and obstinate. It had cut off all possible
chance for a campaign. It filled the air with new sympathies and
feelings. It thrust rudely out of field matters to which men had been
giving their lives. It demanded attention to facts, relations,
situations, ideas that until now were unheard of. Insist as Ralph did
in the _Argus_ and out that the war was the affair of another
hemisphere, it continued to force his hand, challenge his attention,
change the current of the activities which he held so dear. As the days
went on it grew in importance, engulfed more and more people, began to
threaten ominously the very existence of the town itself.

Ralph struggled hopelessly against the flood, refusing to accept the
collected opinion, the popular conclusions. Particularly did he refuse
to join the condemnation of Germany. Let us understand Germany, was his
constant plea. He was seeking to bolster the long-held faith that in
the social developments of Germany lay the real hope of civilization.
Their relation to German Kultur, he did not even dimly see. They were
Kultur for him and all there was of it. Because Germany had worked out
fine and practical systems of social insurance and industrial safety,
and housing and employment, he could not believe her capable of other
than humane and fair dealing with all the world. He was ready, for the
sake of this faith, to explain away a great and growing mass of facts
which to people of no such intellectual engagement were unanswerable.
He found himself more and more at disagreement not only with Dick, his
best friend, and the town, but with certain imperative, inner doubts
that would not be quiet, and in this struggle he was getting little
help from Dick.

The war had quickly opened itself to Dick as something prodigious,
murderous--all-inclusive. He saw the earth encircled by it--felt the
inevitableness finally of the entrance of the United States. From the
start it had been clear to him, as it could not have been to one who
had not known the thought and passion of the German ruling class, that
this must become the most desperate struggle the earth had yet seen
between those who felt themselves fit and appointed to plan and rule in
orderly fashion the lives of men and the blundering, groping mass
fumbling at expression but forever indomitable in its determination to
rule itself.

Dick felt that he must get into it, the very thick of it, nothing but
the limit--the direct, utter giving of himself--his body, his blood,
would satisfy the passion that seized him. He would go to Canada and
enlist. And with the determination there came a tormenting uncertainty.
Would they accept him? All his life he had lived under a restraint--his
guardian--physicians in almost every great center of the world had
impressed it repeatedly upon him: "No great exertion, no great
excitements. Nothing to fear with normal, steady living, everything
from strain."

His guardian had put it to him early: "This is a sporting proposition,
Dick; you were born with this physical handicap. You can live a long,
full, useful life without danger if you are willing to live within
certain physical and mental limitations. Moderation, calm cheerfulness,
courage; that will carry you through. It's a man's code, Dick. Make up
your mind now and never forget the limits."

Dick had done it easily--at the start. Restraint had become the habit
of his life. Only now and then he felt a pang. Sports of the severe
sort were closed to him. He went through Europe for years with the
imperative call of the snow mountain in his soul and never answered it.

And now? He determined before the close of August that, come what
would, he would enlist. He could slip past some way, and so with only
an evasive explanation to Ralph he went to Montreal. It was a ghastly
and heart-breaking experience. He tried again and again, and no
examiner would pass him. He went to the greatest of Canadian
specialists--a wise and understanding man. "Give up the idea, boy," he
said gently. "You might live six months. The chances are you would not
one. You have no right to insist for the good of the service. And let
me tell you something. You are not the only man to-day who feels that
to be denied the chance to fling himself into this mighty thing is the
greatest calamity life could offer. We men who are too old feel it.
Many a man with burdens of political, social, professional, industrial
responsibility in him so imperative that he must remain here, feels it.
You are one of a great host to whom is denied the very final essence of
human experience, giving their blood--for the finest vision the earth
has yet seen. Don't let it down you. Go home to the States and help
them to learn what this thing means. They can't know. It is different
with us. Where England leads, Canada follows. The States will go in
only as the result of an inner conviction that this struggle is between
the kind of things they stand for and the kind of things which led them
to their original break with England, their original vision and plan of
government. That is what it is, but your people will be slow to see it.
They are not attacked. England and France are. It is not fear of attack
that will finally take you in. You yourself have said that. It is the
consciousness that the right of self-government by peoples on this
earth is threatened. Go back and help your land see it."

Dick scarcely heard the counsel. He was conscious only of his sentence
and he refused to accept that. He went in turn to the leading
specialists in the States, men whom he had consulted in the past, and
from each heard the same verdict. He knew they were right. That was the
dreadful truth. He knew that forcing himself into service, as he might
very well do in England under the circumstances of the moment there,
would mean training a man who could not hold out instead of one who
could.

Dick went back to Sabinsport a beaten, miserable man. Ralph was quick
to sense that some overwhelming rebuff had come to Dick. He suspected
what it was. If Dick had not been too crushed at the moment to realize
that his dear but limited and obstinate friend was making awkward
efforts to show his sympathy, it is quite possible that they might have
come together sufficiently to discuss the war without rancor. But Dick
was blind to everything but his own misery. He failed Ralph utterly.

He said to himself daily, "I am of no use on the earth; thirty-five--a
fortune I did not earn, an education, relations, experiences prepared
for me; a profession adopted as a refuge in a time of need; a citizen
of a country in which I have not taken root; an accident in the only
spot on earth where I've ever done an honest day's work; the very
companions of my student days throwing themselves into a noble struggle
in which I would gladly die and from which I'm hopelessly debarred. A
useless bit of drifting wreckage, why live?"

It was the victory of the Marne which, coming as it did at the moment
of his deepest despair, pulled Dick back into something like normal
courage and cheer. The probability that Paris would fall into German
hands had filled him with horror. When he read the first headlines of
the turn of the battle, he had bowed his head and sobbed aloud, "Thank
God, thank God."

All over the land that September morning hundreds of Americans who knew
and loved their France like Dick, sobbed broken thanks to the Almighty.
If for the millions it was simply an amazing turn in the war, an
unexpected proof that Germany was not as invulnerable as she had made
them believe, for these hundreds it was a relief from a pain that had
become intolerable.

Dick was not the only one in Sabinsport, however, that the victory of
the Marne stirred to the depths. John A. Papalogos hung out a French
flag over his fruit and startled the children by giving them handfuls
of his wares, the grown-ups by his reckless measures and everybody by
an abandon of enthusiasm which not a few regarded as suspicious. "Must
have been drinking," Mary Sabins told Tom when he came home for lunch.

At the mines the effect was serious. The Slavs fell on the Austrians
and beat them unmercifully. It was the only way they knew to answer the
arrogance that the German advance had brought out. It was worth noting
that in the general melee the Italian miners sided with the Slavs.

The barrier between Dick and Ralph was still up when Patsy arrived.
They all knew by this time something of what the girl had seen between
her letter of August 10th mailed in Brussels and her arrival in London
the twenty-first. Held by the unwillingness of Mr. Laurence to allow
his wife to travel until she was stronger and by his inability to
believe that the invasion of Belgium could be the monstrous thing it
proved and by his complacent faith that nothing anyway could harm an
American business man, it was not until the 19th he obeyed the
imperative order of the embassy to go while he could. In those days of
waiting, Patsy had come into daily contact with the horrors and
miseries of war. She had seen Brussels filling up with wounded, had
spent lavishly of her strength and of Laurence money in helping
improvise hospitals and in feeding, nursing and comforting refugees.
She had lived years in days.

The letters they had received before she arrived were broken cries of
amazed pity. "I cannot write of what I see," she had said. "Refugees
fill the streets, coming from every direction, on foot, beside dog
carts, on farm wagons piled high with all sorts of stuff. They are all
so white and tired and bewildered--and they are so like the folks
around home. It's the old people that break my heart. Somehow it seems
more terrible for them than even the children, though they take it so
quietly. We picked up an old woman of eighty to-day. She might have
been old Mother Peters out at Cowder's Corners--never before in a great
city--her son killed at Louvain--her daughter-in-law lost--nobody she
knew--no money--a poor, wandering, helpless old soul. Of course we've
found her a place and left money, but what is that?--she's alone and
we're going and there are so many of them and the Germans are
coming--what will they all do--what will they all do?"...

On August 18th she wrote:

  "We're going, rushing away almost as the poor souls we've been
  helping rushed here. We're leaving them--I feel like a coward, but
  we're only in the way, after all. Nothing you can do counts."

On August 22nd she had written from London after a flight of hardship
and horrors:

  "We're here at last. I cannot believe that there is a place where
  people are safe, where they do not fly and starve. England after
  Belgium! It is so sweet, but it does not seem right. I cannot
  consent to be calm when just over there those dreadful things are
  happening. But every one here is working to care for the refugees
  that are coming in by the hundreds. You must not be surprised if I
  come home with an armful of Belgian orphans."

A paragraph in a last letter aroused keen interest in Sabinsport when
it was noised around.

  "At one of the stations for Belgian refugees I found Nancy Cowder.
  It was she who recognized me. I was giving my address, promising to
  raise money in America, when a girl standing near said, 'Did you
  say Sabinsport? It is your home? You are returning?'

  "'Yes,' I said.

  "'It is my home, too. I am Nancy Cowder. Will you tell my father
  you saw me, that I am well, and that he is not to be anxious?'

  "I was never so surprised. Why, Mother, she looks the very great
  lady. I know all of that hateful gossip about her is not true. It
  can't be. I've found out a lot about her here."

"Trust Patsy for that," growled Ralph, when he and Dick read the letter.

"She has heaps of friends and is staying with Lady Betty Barstow. She's
been working day and night since the war began. At the Embassy an
attache told me she was about the most level-headed and really useful
American woman he'd seen--'And beautiful and interesting and generous,'
he added. This is another case where Sabinsport has been wrong."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Dick and Ralph were curious about Patsy's encounter, for they long ago
had discovered that Nancy Cowder was one of Sabinsport's standing
subjects of gossip, that the town considered her highly improper. There
seemed to be two reasons: one was the general disapproval of anything
that belonged to Reuben Cowder, and then the notion that "a girl who
raised dogs and horses and took them east, even to England, could not
be 'nice.'"

Dick was much amused when he learned that the Sabinsport skeleton, as
Ralph had always called Nancy Cowder, was visiting the Barstows. "She
must be all right," he mused, "or she would not be in that house." You
see, Dick had known Lady Barstow's brother at Oxford and more than once
had passed a week-end with him at his sister's place.

But Nancy Cowder was quickly forgotten in Patsy's return. She came a
new Patsy, thin and pale, with the energy and the spirit of a Crusader
in her blazing eyes. Belgium and her wrongs had been burnt into Patsy's
soul. It was her first great unselfish passion. It had made her tender
beyond belief with her father and mother. The two restrained,
inexpressive old people were almost embarrassed by the tears and the
kisses she showered on them. This was not their business-like,
assertive girl, absorbed in her own plans and insisting on her own
ways. It was a girl who watched them with almost annoying persistence,
who wanted to save them steps, guard them from imaginary danger, give
them pleasures they had never even coveted. What they did not realize
was that, as Patsy looked into their faces, visions of distracted,
homeless Belgian women, of broken, wounded Belgian men, floated before
her eyes, that she found relief in doing for them even unnecessary
services since she could do nothing for those others.

Patsy's passion made her hard on the town. She demanded that it
champion Belgium's cause as she had, with all its soul and all its
resources; that it think of nothing else. But this it could not do.
Sabinsport, ignorant and distant as it was, had developed something of
a perspective and was sensing daily something of the complexity of the
elements in the war. It could not think singly of Belgium.

Ralph, bitter in spirit at finding Patsy so changed, so absorbed in her
conception of her own and her friends' duty, took her to task for
emotionalism. He forced arguments on her: that Germany was the only
bulwark between civilization and the Russian peril; that she had been
hampered by an envious England; that if Germany had not violated
Belgium, France would. If Ralph had not been stung to jealousy by
Patsy's interest in something outside himself he would never have been
as stupid and as unreasonable as he proved. He knew he was wrong. He
knew that he admired her for the unselfish passion she showed. He knew
he hurt her, but he _wanted_ to hurt her!

Patsy--bewildered, shocked, wounded to the heart by Ralph's
talk--promptly forbade him ever to speak to her again and went home and
for the first time in her life cried herself to sleep. She had not
known how completely she was counting on Ralph's sympathy. She had said
to herself: "Now I know something of what he feels about people who
suffer; he'll know I understand; we can work together." And here was
her dream dissolved. Patsy was learning that war is not the only
destroyer of human happiness and hopes.

Ralph charged their quarrel to the war, as he did everything not to his
liking. Every day he pounded more emphatically on the wrong of all wars
and particularly this war. Every day he preached neutrality, though it
must be confessed that he did it all with decreasing faith. It was a
hard role. He was a man without a text in which he believed to the
full. Then suddenly in October he found what he was searching. Reuben
Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was to convert a factory made
idle by the war and build largely. Ralph was himself again. No
self-respecting community should permit money to be made within its
limits from war supplies. It was blood money.




                              CHAPTER III


You might be a town 500 miles from the Atlantic coast and 3500 miles
from the fighting line, but, nevertheless, you would have felt, in
October of 1914, as Sabinsport did, a very genuine concern about your
ability to get through the winter without hunger and cold. The jar of
Germany's first blow at Western Europe was felt in Sabinsport
twenty-four hours after it was dealt. When the stock exchanges of the
cities closed, credit shut up in every town of the country. The first
instinctive thought of every man and woman who had debts to pay or
projects to carry out was, "Where will I get the money?" The instant
thought of every bank was to protect its funds--no panic--no run--but
caution. Sabinsport began to "sit tight" in money matters on August
5th--and she sat tighter every day--and with reason. Orders in her
mills and factories were canceled. Men went on half time. The
purchasing power of the majority fell off. Men began to figure the
chances of the length of the war in order to decide what they as
individuals could do until they would be able again to get orders and
so have work to offer; when they would be able to get a job and so pay
the grocer; when they must stop credit to the retail buyer because the
wholesaler had cut off their credit--these were the thoughts that
occupied the mind of Sabinsport much more generally than the European
war and its causes. There was a strong feeling that it would be a short
war--another 1870--take Paris and the business would be over,
Sabinsport believed; and, though there was real satisfaction over the
turning back of the Germans at the Marne, there was a sigh, for they
knew the anxiety they felt was to continue and increase.

"You see," Ralph said to Dick, "they're only concerned about themselves
and what the war will do to them."

"Don't you think it's a matter of concern to Sabinsport whether the
mills are open or shut this winter, whether we have half or full time?"
asked Dick.

"It isn't the working man they think of; it's themselves," Ralph
insisted.

"And I suppose the only one the working man thinks of is himself. We
must each figure it for himself, Ralph, or become public charges. It
strikes me this concern is quite a proper matter for men who are not as
lucky as you and I are. We have our income; no thanks, however, to
anything either of us ever did. Our fathers were men of thrift and
foresight, and the war will hardly disturb us. But there are few in
Sabinsport like us. I should say it was as much the duty of Sabinsport
business men to concern themselves about orders as it is the business
of Paris to put in munitions. No work and you'll soon have no town."

"It is a rich town," challenged Ralph. "There's lot of money here--they
could keep things going if they would."

"Rich when there are orders to fill, and only then. Don't be
unreasonable. You know this town lives by work."

"Reuben Cowder and Jake Mulligan have $500,000 a year income if they
have a cent; do you suppose they earn it?"

"Well, they won't have a hundredth part of that, Ralph, if the mills
and mines are closed this year. You certainly are not supposing that
the money they circulate here is piled up in a chest in the banks. It
comes from the sale of coal and barbed wire and iron plates and bars
and hosiery and sewer pipe, and stops when they are no longer made. Let
the shut-down continue, and who is going to use the street railways and
the electric lights that Mulligan and Cowder and half High Town draw
dividends from? Who is going to support the shops, buy the farmers'
produce? Sabinsport is rich only when her properties are active. You
know that. There are few men in the country who make every dollar work
all the time as Mulligan and Cowder do, and if the work stops, their
incomes stop. Their activity is the biggest factor in the life of the
place, and every business man knows it."

But Ralph broke in with a bitter harangue. Sabinsport, he declared,
thought only of herself, her comfort, her pleasures. She had no real
interest in human betterment, no concern that the men and women who did
the work of her industries were well or happy. If her business men
worried about having no work to give now it was simply because, as Dick
himself admitted, that they would have no income if the fires were out.
Did they concern themselves about the worker when things were going
well? Not for a moment. Did they study a proper division of the returns
of labor? Not on your life, they studied how to get the lion's share.
Ralph's ordinary dissatisfaction with affairs in Sabinsport was
intensified by his disgust at the incredible turn things had taken in
his world and by his helplessness to change them or to escape them. He
might rail at the war in the _Argus_, but nobody listened. He might beg
and implore that they put their house in order instead of keeping their
eyes turned overseas, but it was so useless that even he sensed it was
silly. Sabinsport was concerned only with figuring where she was going
to get bed and board for 15,000 people through the coming winter.

The first relief from threatening idleness and bankruptcy that came was
an order for barbed wire for England. Reuben Cowder had gone East and
brought it back. It looked easy enough to Ralph, but Cowder himself had
put in two as hard and anxious weeks as he had ever known, landing the
contract. The "big ones" were after all there was and they got most of
it. Moderate-sized, independent plants, like the Sabinsport wire mill,
had to compete with companies which as yet were only names--but they
were names backed by the great bankers that controlled the orders.
Companies long ago launched by financiers for making rubber shoes or
tin cans or vacuum cleaners--anything and everything except what was
needed for war--landed huge contracts, and the orders waited while they
converted and manned the plants and sold at high prices stock that had
long lain untouched in the tens or twenties or thirties. This was
happening when men like Cowder, ready at once to go to work, begged and
threatened to get what they felt was their share.

The news that the wire mill would open at once on full time ran up and
down the street on quick feet, and such rejoicing as it brought! Women
who had ceased to go to the butcher's went confidently in. "Jim goes to
work to-morrow, can you trust me for a boiling piece?" and the butcher,
as pleased as his customer, said, "Sure," cut it with a whistle and
threw in a few ounces. Over on the South Side where there had been
grumblings and quarreling for nights, there was singing and laughing.
The women cleaned houses that, in their despair, they'd let grow
sloven, and the men brought in the water and played games with the
children. Oh, the promise of wire to make stirred all Sabinsport with
hope. Dick, going over to the live South Side Club, found a larger
group than usual and a livelier curiosity about the war. They could
think of it, now that they were not forced to think so much and so
sullenly of where the next meal was coming from.

A few weeks later a new reason for hope came to Sabinsport. Reuben
Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was going to convert the
linoleum factory "around the point." It was to be a big concern, give
work to a thousand girls besides the men. The wages were to be "grand,"
the girls in the ten-cent store heard, and more than one of them on six
dollars a week said, "Me for the munitions if it's more money."

The rumor was not idle, for early in December the building began.
Sabinsport would not go hungry in the winter of 1914-15. The war that
had raised the specter had taken it away.

"And because the war has made us easy in our pockets again, we are all
for the war," sneered Ralph.

"Are we?" said Dick. "I doubt it. So far as I can see, we are puppets
of the war as is all the rest of the world."

"We could refuse to make its infernal food. We could hold ourselves
above its blood money. Reuben Cowder doesn't care how he makes money if
he makes it."

"And by that argument the men and women in the mills and to be in the
new mill don't care as long as they make it," retorted Ralph.

"We're hardening our hearts,"--and to save Sabinsport's soul, as he
claimed, Ralph began a lively campaign against the making and exporting
of munitions to other nations. It was a new idea to Sabinsport. To make
what the world would buy, of the quality it would take, was simply
common sense to her mind. She had nothing in her code of industrial
ethics which put a limitation on any kind of manufacturing except beer
and whiskey. Sabinsport had never had a brewery or a distillery. It
would have hurt her conscience to have had one. Indeed the only time
she had ever out and out fought and beaten the combination of Mulligan
and Cowder was when they attempted to establish a brewery. The
opposition had been so general and it had been of such a kind that the
men had withdrawn. "It isn't worth fighting to a finish," Cowder had
told Jake. "We'll have bigger game one of these days, and we don't want
the town to be against us."

But Sabinsport had seen without a flicker of conscience the cheapest of
cheap hose, the kind that ravels at a first wearing, turned out by the
tens of thousands. Somebody had once remarked that the firm must use
the fact that its hose could be guaranteed to break the first time
worn, with buyers. "The more sold the larger the commission," laughed
Sabinsport. It didn't hurt her conscience that there was truth in the
remark. It didn't disturb her conscience now as a town that the mills
were turning out hundreds and hundreds of spools of a crueller barbed
wire than they had ever before seen. It didn't disturb it that around
the point a great-scale conversion of the never-very-successful
linoleum factory into some kind of a shell factory was going on.

But if not conscience stricken, Sabinsport was interested in the
discussion. It stirred deeper than Ralph in his disgust with the
situation had dreamed. Letters to his _Pro Bono Publico_ column flowed
in daily. From the mill came a violent arraignment of capital for
making the war in order to make munitions. It was from the leading
Socialist of the labor group, an excellent fellow who talked well but
difficult to argue with, both Ralph and Dick had found. There was
nothing to argue about the ruining of the world, in John Starrett's
judgment. His system would remove all evils. His task was the simple
one of affirmation. All evils come from capitalism--do away with
capitalism, institute socialism, and the machine will run itself. The
_Argus_ was right in disapproving of munition making by a neutral
country, said John Starrett, but so long as the _Argus_ failed to see
that it was the iniquitous system it supported which was to blame,
etc., etc.

The one always-to-be-counted-on pulpit radical in the town seized the
chance for opposition and preached eloquent and moving sermons on the
horrors of wars, the gist of which he weekly sent, neatly typewritten,
to Ralph for the P. B. P., as it was called in the office. His argument
was that this wicked thing could not go on if all men everywhere would
refuse to work on guns and shells and powder, that it was the duty of a
great neutral country like the United States to head the movement, and
why should not Sabinsport start it? She would go down in history as the
leader in the most beneficent reform of modern times. The Rev. Mr.
Pepper worked himself into a noble enthusiasm over this idea, and spent
time and money his family really needed for food and clothes in writing
and mailing letters to a long list of well-known radically inclined men
and women in various parts of the country, begging them to join the
Anti-Munition Making League. Ralph published the digests of the Pepper
sermons, printed free his long circulars and listened to his argument,
and Sabinsport read and smiled and went ahead with her work.

The two or three pacifists in the Woman's Club seized on the Reverend
Pepper's idea with avidity. It was so simple, so sure--stop making
munitions everywhere, and war would have to stop. But the Woman's Club,
although in the main sympathetic, handled the matter gingerly. In the
first place, the Rev. Mr. Pepper had always been "visionary," so the
men said. Then, too, they had the relief work of the town to consider.
Stop munition making, close the wire mill, and what were the workmen to
do? It wasn't right. Somebody would make munitions, why not Sabinsport?
Of course, if the League did succeed and other towns went in, they
would be for it; but they thought they better wait. In this policy of
caution, it is useless to deny that there was an element of
self-interest. The husbands of not a few of the ladies had stock in the
wire mill and in the works "around the Point."

The hottest opposition that Ralph met in his anti-munition campaign was
from the War Board, as he and Dick had come to call it. This War Board
had evolved from a group which for years had met regularly after supper
in the men's lounging room of the Paradise Hotel. Both Ralph and Dick
considered it far and away the most entertaining center of public
opinion in the town, for it offered a mixture of shrewdness and
misinformation, of sense and cynicism, which were as illuminating as
they were diverting--a mixture which spread, diluted and disintegrated,
of course, into every nook and cranny of the town.

The War Board was made up of socially inclined guests and a group of
citizens whose number varied with the character, the importance and the
heat of public questions. Dick, who, since he first arrived in the
town, had taken his dinners at the Paradise, found that the war was
having the same drawing power as the choice of a mayor, a governor, or
a president. Almost every night more or less men dropped in to discuss
the progress of the campaigns and wrangle over the problems raised for
this country.

A member of the War Board that never missed an evening was Captain
William Blackman, as he appeared on the roster of Civil War veterans;
"Cap" or "Captain Billy" as he was known at the Paradise--"Captain If"
as he came to be known a long time before we went into the war.

Captain Billy was seventy-two years old. He walked with a limp, the
result of a wound received two days before the evacuation of Petersburg
on April 2, 1865. His comfortable income was derived not from a pension
which he had always spurned--he had _given_ his services--but from a
wholesale grocery business established in Sabinsport after a long and
plucky struggle and on which he still kept a vigilant eye. Neither limp
nor grocery had ever taken from Captain Billy's military air or dimmed
his interest in the battles of the Potomac, in many of which he had
taken part.

Captain Billy frequented the Paradise pretty regularly at election
time, for he was a Republican of the adamantine sort and felt it his
duty to use every chance to impress on people the unfathomable folly of
allowing a Democrat to hold any sort of office. But it was when there
was a war anywhere on the earth that Captain Billy never missed a
night. He never had any doubt about which side he was on, about the
character and ability of generals or what they ought to do. He never
for an instant hesitated over Belgium's case, or doubted the guilt of
Germany. Much as he hated England--Civil War experience on top of a
revolutionary inheritance--he defended loudly her going in, thought it
the decentest thing in her history. It took Captain Billy at least
three months to grasp the idea that we should have taken a hand at the
start, but in this he was in no way behind the most eminent advocates
of that theory. Like all of them at the start he accepted with sound
instinct the doctrine of neutrality. Before Christmas, however, Captain
Billy was hard at the Administration. "If we had done our duty in the
beginning," was his regular introduction to all arguments--hence the
name which was soon fixed on him of "Captain If."

Mr. Jo Commons was as steady an attendant of the War Board as Uncle
Billy, and in every way his antithesis. He had for years been the
leading cynic and scoffer of Sabinsport. You could depend upon him to
find the weak spot in anybody's argument, the hypocrisy in any generous
action. According to Mr. Jo Commons there was no such thing as sound or
noble sentiment. All human thought and feeling he held to be worm-eaten
by self-interest, and he spent his leisure, of which he had much, for
he was a bachelor with a law practice which he had studiously kept on a
leisure basis, in unearthing reasons for mistrusting the undertakings
of his fellowmen. The war gave him a wonderful chance. His was the
first voice raised in Sabinsport in defense of the invasion of Belgium.
His defense of Germany and his contempt for England were Shavian in
their skill.

If Captain Billy contributed certainty, idealism and emotion to the
Board, and Mr. Jo Commons doubt, realism and cynicism, a traveling
salesman, Brutus Knox by name, kept it in suspicion and gossip. Brutus
was a stout, jolly, clean-shaven, immaculate seller of "notions and
machinery," and under this elastic head he handled a motley lot of
stuff in a district where the Paradise was the most comfortable hotel;
and it was his habit to "make it" for Sundays if possible.

Brutus was a master-hand at gossip. He liked it all, and told it
all--gay and sad, true and false, sacred and obscene. He was always
welcome at the Paradise, but never more so than since the war began,
for he brought back weekly from Pullman smoking rooms, hotel lobbies
and business lunches a bag of "inside information" which kept the War
Board sitting until midnight and sent it home swollen with importance.

The War Board prided itself on being neutral--this in spite of the fact
that nearly every one that attended had the most definite opinions
about all parties in the conflict and that no one hesitated to express
them with picturesque, often profane, violence. Almost to a man the War
Board looked on the invasion of Belgium as rotten business. King Albert
became its first hero. His picture--a clear and beautiful print from an
illustrated Sunday supplement--was pinned up the third week of August.
It came down only once--to be framed, and it was to be noted that on
all holidays "Albert," as they called him, always had a wreath. The
general verdict was that he was "American"--"looks like one"--"acts
like one"--"been over here"--"no effete king about him." After the
Marne, Joffre joined Albert on the lobby wall, and the two of them hung
there alone--for nearly two years.

The War Board treated Ralph's ideas on munition making with almost
unanimous ridicule. Indeed the only help he had at this body in
defending his position came from a new friend, one who had begun
occasionally to attend the sessions at the Paradise just after the war
broke out. This was Otto Littman, the only son of Rupert Littman, the
president of the Farmers' Bank, one of Sabinsport's most beloved
citizens. Rupert Littman had been only ten years old when he and his
father, a revolutionist of 1848, obliged to fly for his life, had
settled in Sabinsport. The history of father and son was as familiar
from that day to this as that of the Sabins, and Cowders and Mulligans
and McCullons. Otto, however, was not so well known. He had been much
away--four years in college, six in Germany studying banking and
business methods, only eighteen months at home, and in these eighteen
months he had not been able to adjust himself to the town. The town
felt that he sneered at her a little, which was true, felt himself
"above her," which was true. Rupert Littman, dear heart, had been very
much concerned that Otto did not "take" to Sabinsport, and he had
confided to Dick once that he feared he had made a mistake in sending
him back to Germany so long.

With the coming of the war Otto had begun to circulate more freely in
Sabinsport. He had quite frankly undertaken to make the town
"understand Germany," as he called it, and as Ralph had shown from the
start his belief in neutrality and now his hatred of munition-making
and exporting, Otto began to talk freely. According to Otto, it was
England that had forced the war. "I like your consistency," he told
Ralph. "It is the only attitude for Americans, but so few are
intelligent enough to understand this case. Pure sentiment, this guff
about Belgium. It is sad that people should get hurt in war. Read what
the emperor says of his own grief at the disaster Belgium has brought
on herself. Why should she resist? No reason save that France and
England bribed her to it. They were both ready to attack Germany _via_
Belgium. I know that. I can get you the proofs. What could Germany do
when she knew that and knew Belgium had sold herself? Oh, you innocent
Americans! It is always a little hurt or hunger that sets you
crusading. You never look deeper. I'm glad to know a man that has more
sense."

Otto kept Ralph stirred over England's seizures and examination of our
ships and mail. "You see," he said, "talk about freedom of the
seas--there is none. She can do as she will with the shipping of the
world. What can the United States do if the day comes that England
wants to drive her from the sea as she has tried to drive
Germany--bottle us up. I tell you, Gardner, if we don't join Germany in
her fight for liberty, England will ruin us. England is the enemy of
this country as she is the enemy of Germany. She can't tolerate
greatness. She fears it. She has expected to keep Germany shut in; she
can't tolerate our having a single colony. It's your duty to America's
future to do your utmost to explain to Sabinsport what England's inner
purpose is.

"Take what is happening to-day. She's forcing us to unneutral acts by
her arrogance. She's preventing us from carrying out our right to sell
to all nations--stopping our trade--destroying our goods. She has the
power, and that's enough for her. There is no way to meet this but an
embargo on munitions. If England won't let us sell to all lands, as is
our right, we shouldn't sell to anybody." Ralph was entirely with him.
That course would put an end to Cowder's pollution of Sabinsport's soul.

Now, Cowder and Mulligan were clever men. They knew, as Dick had
frequently warned Ralph, that attaining your objective depends largely
on your skill in maneuvering; that if you are going to hold your main
line, you must sometimes give up long held positions. They had spiked
small guns of Ralph's several times in the course of their fight in
handling the mines and factories of Sabinsport by withdrawals from the
points which he was besieging. There was accident compensation. After
the accident at the "Emma" they had won the favor of labor leaders and
the liberal-minded throughout the State by working out and putting into
effect a compensation plan much broader than any reform agency had yet
suggested. It was a shock to Ralph to see them honored.

Then there was the case of the cooperative stores. After much
grumbling, they had consented to let Jack try it out at the mines; and,
having consented, they both had stirred themselves to make it a
success. Mulligan particularly had spent much time among the miners,
the men who had grown up with him, and who at the start no more liked
the change than he did--explaining why they did it, how it was to be
done, and how it might cut down their expenses if it was a success.

It put Ralph into a corner. You couldn't abuse men for doing the things
you had abused them for not doing. You could hint that they were
"insincere," but that was a little cheap--looked like sour grapes. It
held up his campaign, which, for rapid promotion, had to have a
villain, a steady, reliable villain that couldn't be educated, that
wouldn't budge from his exploitation and greed. To have the villain
come around to any part of your program was as bad as having a hero
with feet of clay.

Cowder and Mulligan, watching the progress of the anti-munition
campaign in the factory, decided something must be done. "I say," Jake
told his friend, "that we put it up to the boys. The _Argus_ is always
howling about their not having anything to say about the way the mills
are run; let's give 'em a chance. You know out at the mines that boy of
mine has been having what he calls 'Mine Meetings.' He built a little
clubhouse out there a year or so ago, and one night a week he goes out,
and everybody that works in the mine can come in and they discuss
things. There ain't anything about the mine that Jack don't let them
talk about. I thought he was crazy when he started it, but ever since
the accident I've kept my hands off, as you know. The funny part is
that it seems to help things, and Jack claims he gets all sorts of good
ideas. He says he is going to have these men running the mines, and I
don't know but he will. I don't see where we will come in, but I
promised to give him a free hand. I don't see, Cowder, why we shouldn't
try something like that now. Call the boys in the wire mill together
some noon. Put it up to 'em. Let 'em vote whether they want to make
wire or not. I'd like to see what the _Argus_ would say if we tried
that."

Reuben shook his head. "I'll think about it, Jake, and we'll talk it
over again to-morrow."

There were few people in Sabinsport who credited Reuben Cowder with
having a sense of humor, but deep down in his stern, suppressed nature
there was considerable, and it came to the top now. To call a shop
meeting appealed to him as effective repartee. I am quite sure,
however, that if he had not been convinced that the men would vote to
go on with the work, he would not have risked it. What he did want to
do was to prove to Ralph and the shop agitators, whoever they might be,
that ninety-five per cent. of the laboring body in the wire mill would
not strike against making wire to sell to the Allies. They might strike
for other reasons, but not for that. He was willing to try them out.

And so it happened, one morning in January, that the men coming to work
found in conspicuous places around the yards and through the mills, a
notice calling for a floor meeting at one o'clock the next day (you
will note that Cowder and Mulligan were not taking the time for the
gathering out of the men's noon hour), to discuss a question which
concerned both the executive and laboring ends of the mill, preparatory
to taking a vote.

There was not an inkling in the broadside of what the question to be
discussed was; and when one o'clock of the day set came there was not a
man of all the 1800 in the wire mill that could be spared from his
post, who did not appear on the floor of the main building of the
plant. They were a sight for sculptors and painters, gathered there
around the great machines in the dusky light which filled the immense
building--labor in all of its virile strength, men from a dozen
nations, in greasy, daubed garb lifted their strong, set faces to Jake
Mulligan, who, from a cage dropped to a proper level by a great crane,
addressed them.

He put it direct. "Boys," he said, "you know as well as I do that
there's a lot of talk going up and down this mill about the wickedness
of making things for war. Now, I never did, and never will, ask a man
to do a thing that is against his conscience; and Mr. Cowder and I have
concluded that we would like to know whether this is just talk or
whether there is some of you fellows that really are doing something
that you think is wrong. We have decided to take a vote on it, to find
out how many of you think we ought to give up this contract.

"Of course you know--or you ought to know--that giving it up means
shutting down the mill. There are no contracts for barbed wire to be
had at present, except for war. I don't say that we will shut down even
if you vote against it, but what we will do is to give you boys a
chance to get another job somewhere else and we will get a new set of
men. Or, if the most of you want to go on with the jobs that you are
in, and a few of you really feel hurt about this thing, we will do the
very best we can to find you something else to do. I don't say we will
give you as good wages as we are giving you here. You know there is
nothing else around this country that is paying like this mill, can't
afford to.

"We want this to be a square vote. To-morrow night, when you leave the
plant, the same time you punch the time clock, you are to put a ballot
in a box at the gate. Nobody will know how you vote. The only thing we
want is that everybody votes. It seems to me that's fair. That's all.
Now you may go back to work."

The men, taken by utter surprise by the proposition, separated almost
in silence. The crane dropped the cage containing Mulligan and Cowder
to the floor, and the two walked out, saying, "Hello, Bill!" "Hello,
John!" as they went along, as naturally as if nothing unusual had taken
place.

There was a great buzz in Sabinsport that afternoon and the next day
over this revolutionary procedure. At the banks and in the offices,
Cowder and Mulligan were roundly condemned--not that there was much
fear of how the men would vote. Business cynicism was strong in those
circles. They felt sure that the wire-workers were like themselves, not
going to give up a good thing for what they called an impractical
ideal. What they did object to was the precedent. "You get this
started," they told the pair, "and what does it mean for all of us? We
cannot run our own business any longer. Putting things up to day
laborers! I tell you it's a dangerous thing you have started in
Sabinsport."

The maneuver had all the disquieting effect on Ralph that Cowder and
Mulligan had anticipated. He felt very doubtful of the result, but he
spent himself in an eloquent harangue to vote against the nefarious
business into which capitalism had thrust them. Among the men the same
kind of mistrust of the procedure that prevailed in financial and
managing circles cropped out. The procedure was too new for them; and
the suspicion that there was a trick somewhere which they did not see,
ran up and down the shop. "Don't give up the job. They are trying to
put something over on you." They did not give up the job. When the
votes were counted, it was found that exactly ninety-eight per cent,
were in favor of continuing the making of wire for war purposes.

But, even if the management had, as Jake claimed, "put one over" on the
_Argus_ and its sympathizers, it had also given Ralph a text--an
appealing text, too. "How? How?" said Ralph, "could you expect men
whose bread and butter depend on day labor and who are told that the
only labor to be had in this town where they live and have their
families is making munitions of war, to give it up? What can they do?"
And Ralph went far at that opportune moment to argue with his Socialist
friend, John Starrett. His arguing was not heeded. For Sabinsport the
matter was settled--ninety-eight per cent, of the wire workers had
decided for going on with the work. Ralph found himself again
outwitted. He realized that he must get another line of attack.

Zest and a bit of mystery was added to the discussion in the spring of
1915 by an incident which set the town to gossiping, but of which few
ever knew all the facts--Dick, and Ralph through him, being among the
few. It began by a rumor that Reuben Cowder had thrown a man out of his
office! There was a suspicion that Otto Littman was the man, but _that_
few believed--"It couldn't be!" Something had happened, however, and
Cowder went about for days in one of the black moods which men knew
only too well. He held a long conference with Rupert Littman, Otto went
to New York for a time. It was said that there had been trouble over a
munition contract.

One evening shortly after the rumor started, Dick was startled by a
call from Cowder, the first he had ever received. That the man was
deeply stirred was clear.

"I've got to talk to somebody, Ingraham, and there's nobody in this
town but you I'd trust. It's against my habit to talk, you know that,
and maybe I'm a fool to do it; but there's something going on in
Sabinsport I don't like. I can't get my fingers on it. Maybe I'm
suspicious--maybe I ain't fair. Rupert Littman says I'm not, and he's
an honest man and as good an American as I am. I'm not neutral. I don't
pretend to be, though I don't talk much. You know we've begun to run
around the Point. Turned out our first shells last week--good clean
job. Inspector said he'd seen none better.

"Well, you know Otto holds quite a block of stock in the plant. I was
surprised when he took it, but thought it was a good idea, and his
father was tickled to death--told everybody he saw how Otto was going
to settle down here now--had found out where his country was at last.
Otto always seemed to take a lot of interest in the plant, got me two
or three of the best workmen I ever saw and a wonder for the
laboratory. Of course he knew where I got the contract--England. Of
course he ought to have known I'd see the whole damned thing in the
river before I'd sell a pound to Germany. He knows my girl's in Serbia.

"Well, in spite of that he came into my office the other day with a
friend of his--never been here before--and wanted to make a contract
big enough to tie up that plant for three years--and who do you suppose
they said it was for? Sweden! 'But, suppose you ain't able to ship to
Sweden?' I asked. 'Never mind,' they said--'the contract holds--you're
sure of the money.'

"'Otto,' I said, 'you're lying--your friend is lying. You can't make a
contract with me.'

"'And that's what you call being neutral?' his friend said, with a look
I didn't like.

"'I never said I was neutral,' I said. I guess I swore some. 'I ain't
neutral. I want to see the French in the streets of Berlin and every
damned Hohenzollern on earth earning his living at hard labor, that's
how neutral I am.'

"Well, sir, Otto went white as death and he jumped at me as if he was
going to hit me--and, well, I took him by the collar and threw him out
and his friend after him.

"Now, one of the reasons I am telling you this is because I want you to
keep your eyes open. Otto has a lot of influence over that young fool
that runs the _Argus_. I must say I like that boy in spite of his
fire-eating. He'll learn and he can write--but he's all muddled on the
war, and I believe it's Otto that's keeping him so stirred up against
England and so friendly to Germany. Why, it's vanity and ignorance that
ails him, and he'll see it one of these days all of a sudden--but you
watch him, Mr. Ingraham, and watch Otto."

The man stopped and sat for a long time in silence, his head dropped.
When he looked up his mouth was twitching. "Otto Littman is the son of
one of the best men that ever lived. He's a friend of my girl. The only
boy here she ever let go out to see her. She has seen him in Europe. I
guess they write sometimes. And I have quarreled with him. I have
warned his own father against him. It is an awful thing to do, but, so
help me, God, I can't do anything else. My girl's over there, Ingraham;
I don't know as I'll ever see her again. Maybe you don't know about
her. Maybe you've heard people here sneer at her--call her horsey and
fast, but I tell you if there's a thoroughbred on earth it's Nancy. She
was born out there at the farm, and her mother died when she came." The
hard face worked convulsively and the hands gripped the arms of his
chair until the brown skin showed white over the knuckles.

"She grew up out there. I had as fine a woman as I could
find--educated--horse sense--to look after her, but we never could do
much with Nancy. She wouldn't go to school but she'd read more books
than all the girls in Sabinsport before she was sixteen and spoke
French and German like a native. She hated the town and she loved dogs
and horses, and, by George, how she understood 'em. I never saw
anything like it. Of course, I let her have all she wanted, and before
I knew what I was getting into she was breeding 'em--had a stable,
kennels, began to go East to horse shows, dog shows; go anywhere she
heard of a good animal. Regular passion--didn't think of anything else.
Funny to see her--so slight and fine and free-moving, talking to
jockeys and breeders and bookmen--never seeing them--only the horses.
'Twan't long before horsemen began to listen to her, and she began to
enter her own and then I lost her from here. Mrs. Peters is always with
her, but Nancy is all right. Just naturally don't know anything but the
best men or horses. Has an instinct for points. She is always saying
she'll come back some day and stay. I wanted to build in town for her
but she won't have it. Farm's home to her. But I don't expect ever to
see her again, Ingraham.

"It was like her to throw herself in this thing. Never could stand it
to see anything suffer--hated anything she thought was unjust.

"I tell you she rules me. Remember once you complimented me for leaving
the old Paradise just as it came down to the town, building in the big
addition as a kind of background, to set off the original? That was
Nancy--would have it so--sent an architect here that she had coached
herself. And you remember four years ago when I turned front on
compensation--time of the big accident in the 'Emma'? Well, that was
Nancy--got my orders from her. Queer thing how she keeps track of
things here--reads the _Argus_ every day, no matter where she is. She
was all crumpled up over the 'Emma,' naturally enough--and when the
_Argus_ began on compensation she wrote me a better argument than ever
Gardner put up and told me she'd never take another dollar from me if I
didn't support it. What could I do? I knew she meant it.

"She was visiting in London when the war came. Patsy McCullon saw her
there--like her to go to Serbia. She said the Belgians were near and
bound to get help, but everybody seemed to have forgotten Serbia. She
went in October. I've had only a few letters--all cheerful--wouldn't do
anything else--she's putting in all her income and it's a pretty good
one. Nancy's rich as a girl ought to be, from her granddad and mother.
I don't believe she'll ever come out. They're bound to run over the
country. Nancy will stick till she drops. God, Ingraham, it's hard to
lose her.

"It's her being there makes me suspicious, maybe--Littman says
so--laughed at the idea that Otto was working for anybody but America.
But I don't know, Ingraham--I don't know. I ought not to have thrown
him out, maybe, but I didn't like it. Sweden! That means Germany, and
Otto Littman knows it, or--it means tying up the plant if they can't
ship.

"Another thing I'm telling you this for--it ain't natural the feeling
in the town against selling munitions to the Allies should be so strong
as it is. It would have died out long ago if somebody from outside
wasn't stirring it up. There are more pacifists around town than is
normal, more in the factory and even in the wire plant. Don't seem to
go deep enough to make 'em give up their jobs--just talk, and there
must be somebody behind it. I'm making allowance for those that's
honestly against it, those that think not believing in war will make a
difference. Couldn't stop an earthquake that way, and that's what this
war is, Ingraham--earthquake--convulsion. Guess men have 'em--burst
their bonds like the earth its crust. Guess we won't end them until we
put more give into the bonds--make 'em more elastic. That's the way I
see it. Hope you won't mind my disturbing you. Had to get it off my
mind."

Dick had listened in amazed silence through the talk. He reached out
his hand, deeply moved. "Disturb me, Mr. Cowder? I think your
confidence an honor, and I don't think your suspicion idle. On the
contrary, I agree with you that the feeling against munition making
here isn't normal, but I take it that we must expect propaganda. I
don't like the secrecy of it, if it is propaganda. As for Littman, I
often talk with him. He's quite openly for Germany. He has lived there
as a student, you know. He has caught the faith that consumes Germany
and is driving her now--her faith that her destiny is to rule the earth
by virtue of her superior ability, knowledge, strength. It's not easy
for young men of Otto's type to resist. Whether he is being used as a
tool consciously or unconsciously, I cannot say. It would be quite in
keeping with Germany's practice to stir up trouble here with England if
she could. She naturally wants to take our minds off Belgium--to build
back fires. I am not sure but the feeling growing in the country
against Mexico--the fear of Japan--is largely German propaganda. And
Otto may be helping it on, not out of disloyalty to the United States
but because his German advisers--if he has them--have made him believe
that the country is threatened in these directions. It was Otto, you
remember, who brought that lecturer here a few weeks ago to warn us
about a Mexican-Japanese alliance. It might have happened naturally
enough, to be sure. But if pro-German citizens are introducing such
lecturers into quiet towns like ours, all over the land, I should feel
it was distinctly a disloyal act. I don't know that they are, though
it's sure the lecture we heard and the maps we saw had been used
before--frequently I should say."

"I don't think it worried anybody," said Cowder, dryly.

"I rather think it would be difficult to make Sabinsport nervous over a
Mexican-Japanese attack," laughed Dick. "It was evident the audience
regarded it as a fairy tale."

"It's nothing else as far as I can see."

"There you are," said Dick. "I think we can afford to wait awhile.
After all, Otto and his friend would not be guilty of treason in making
a contract with you for munitions for Germany. You have the same right
to sell to her as to England. I'm glad you won't do it--but you would
be breaking no law--you would be strictly within neutral rights."

Cowder glowered at him. "I'm no damned reformer," he said, "but I never
yet helped a burglar to tools or a murderer to a gun."

"Good," said Dick, "and believe me, I'll keep an eye on Otto for you.
He may be helping Germany now, but I shall be very much surprised if
the time comes when we go into the war if he doesn't fall in
line--unless he goes too far now."

"You believe we will go in?"

"Surely--some day."

"You don't believe the time has come?"

"No--no. I can't say I do."

Cowder sighed. "I don't know what to think, Ingraham. I wish to God I
could make up my mind. I'd feel easier if we were in, but I don't see
any use dragging in a country that don't see it. Why, Sabinsport is
living on the war and don't know it. Don't see that you can't live in
this country to-day except on the war. But she does take an interest.
Ever notice that South Side Alley over next the wire mill, where the
kids play. Got trenches there that wouldn't be bad in Flanders.
Wonderful how things spread in the world. Good night, Ingraham, and
thank you."

Long after the man was gone Dick sat watching his fire. What a grief
the man carried! To have a daughter like that and in Serbia; to believe
he would never see her and yet to go on day in and day out--"Nancy
Cowder"--nice name and she knew Lady Betty. Serbia! What was the latest
news from Serbia?--he'd seen something in the London _Times_ lately
about the English nurses there. He'd look it up. What part of Serbia?
He hadn't asked. He would--maybe he had been there. Not much chance if
she was in the way of the Bulgars. Still, women like Nancy Cowder
somehow imposed themselves. She'd not be afraid of all the armies and
all the kings. "So slight and fine and free-moving," that was her
father's description--"talking to jockeys and breeders and bookmen and
not seeing them, only the horse." "Thoroughbred--that girl." What a
different impression he had formed of her from Sabinsport gossip! He
had not realized it before but he had in his mind a strapping big girl
with a stride like a man's, a girl with clear gray eyes and a hearty
laugh.

He rose and looked over the _Times_ for the article from Serbia. To
think that a girl could give her life and he must sit here quiet by his
fire. He laughed aloud in bitter self-contempt.

The next day when Dick paid his usual late afternoon visit to the
_Argus_ office, he went over the talk he had had with Cowder, giving in
detail the report of the quarrel with Otto and his own version. To his
surprise, Ralph said nothing in defense of Otto.

"He isn't neutral. He is for Germany, just as Patsy and you are for the
Allies. Nobody in Sabinsport is really neutral as far as I can make
out. This town is almost solidly against Germany, and you know it. The
opposition is to our having anything to do with the infernal business.
Sabinsport doesn't believe in war or doesn't believe in this war for
us, and that's where I am--now. I'm for the people. We're trying to
keep neutral and trying to see both sides. But I'm sick of it--beastly
business--think of Cowder and Littman quarreling. Another war
casualty," he said, bitterly, "suspicion, broken friendships--a world
thrown back and all its hopes of making it a place fit for men to live
in destroyed. Everything we've been trying to do the last twenty years
gone to pot. There won't be a law protecting labor left in the country
if this goes on. Who's going to think about hours and wages and safety
and social insurance with that thing going on over there? Who cares any
more in Sabinsport whether it's right or wrong to let two men gobble up
the franchises? Who asks, now that we are beginning to make money and
have good prospects of continuing as long as there's a war, whether
it's right to turn a town into a mill for destruction? I'm sick of it,
Dick. It's ruining things for us all. I'm so sore I can't bear to go
anywhere any more, and if I do I always have a row with somebody. Went
to Tom Sabins' last night and Patsy was there. We both tried to patch
it up, but somebody said something about the freedom of the seas and I
said I couldn't see why a German embargo was any more reprehensible
than an English one, and Patsy went up like a rocket and said I wasn't
human--had no sympathy--that if I'd seen Belgium as she did--she's just
Belgium mad. Of course, like a fool, I said that there was always
plenty of a suffering near at hand, and people of real human sympathy,
not mere emotionalism, could see it. I was a brute. I know Patsy is
right. She left the room, and I didn't see her again, and Tom said she
cried.

"And you, Dick--the war's got you. You needn't think I don't realize
how it's hurting you to have to stay here. I know you'd give your life
to go. Nothing makes me so sore as to see you standing up so gamely to
your sentence, and all the time I can't see how you feel like you do. I
can't get it as a thing for me, Dick. It isn't that I am all
obstinate--won't see it--as you think. I can't see why it's up to us to
go crazy because a good part of the world is crazy, but, honest to God,
Dick, I'm beginning to wish I could. I can't follow Otto--nor Patsy,
nor the Socialists at the mill--I don't seem to agree with anybody--and
what I want is to be with you--"

"And Patsy," smiled Dick.

"I wonder," said Ralph inadvertently, "if Patsy has heard from that
Henry Laurence she wrote so much about?"

"She hears from Mrs. Laurence, but not at all from Henry, I think,
Ralph. Why?--"

"Oh, nothing," he said, suddenly cheerful, then added, sagely, "Such an
experience as they went through together would naturally draw two young
people together."




                               CHAPTER IV


Dick was coming in from a five days' walking trip. He had fled from
town on Monday, seeking what the road and the sweet early May air and
greenery would do for his jumping nerves and tormented mind. "Forget
the war," counseled Ralph, when he telephoned he was off. He had done
it fairly well. Spring is a lovely thing in the highlands around
Sabinsport. It covers the earth with delicate blossoms, turns the brown
tracery of the trees to soft yellows and reds and greens, peoples the
air with songsters. It was early this year, and had opened the doors of
the farmhouses--started gardens, set men to plowing fields, women to
sewing on the porches, children to wandering in the woods. Dick walked
without other compass than his own experienced sense of direction and
distance, shunning highways, following lanes and little-used roads,
stopping only when the day grew dusky and sleeping by preference in
friendly farmhouses.

It was Saturday morning, warm, brilliant, fragrant. He would be in
Sabinsport by noon, he calculated. How changed he was! How rested! How
bright things seemed again! It would be good to get back. He believed
he could preach to-morrow. It should be of the healing of the air and
the sun.

It was ten o'clock when he struck Jo's Mills, as it was called--a tiny
settlement slightly up a hill from the point where a gray old mill
stood on the edge of a stream which took a long tumble here. There were
a half dozen, comfortable, old-time, white houses on the street, with
apple-trees and lilacs and gardens. There was a big general
store--relic of early days when things were busy--only half occupied
now--a church--a school--a post-office in the wing of Miss Sally
Black's house--a neat, prim post-office where nobody warmed his back
long--though Miss Sally was not above keeping everybody long enough to
feel out the news. There was a public telephone in the post-office, and
over this it was the custom of the Sabinsport operators to communicate
to Miss Sally anything particularly important. It was evident to Dick
as he approached that Miss Sally must have received something that the
neighbors were interested in, for there was a little group standing
around, looking rather glum. He stopped and quite instinctively
inquired, "What's the news?"

"Well," said one of the men--"it don't sound good to me--mebbe 'tain't
so--they say the Germans have sunk a ship--a big one with a lot of
Americans and women and children--didn't give no notice--nothing--just
sunk 'em."

"Well--what I say is," said another, "that ain't likely. How could a
submarine do that--sink a ship like that?--she'd have to blow up inside
to sink so quickly. Likely her engine exploded."

Dick didn't stop to debate the power of the submarine, but quickly
stepped in and called Ralph at the _Argus_ office in Sabinsport.

"Hello, Ralph," he said. "I've just walked into Jo's Mills. There's an
ugly report here of the sinking of a vessel with big loss of
Americans--anything in it?"

"Everything in it, the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed yesterday--she sank in
a few minutes. There is a loss of twelve hundred lives reported, one
hundred of them Americans."

"My God!" exclaimed Dick.

"Yes," replied Ralph, savagely, "my God!" and both men hung up.

It was but five miles into Sabinsport, but Dick always thought of it as
the longest and blackest five miles he ever walked. As one drew nearer
the town, the valley and the river unfolded, giving glimpses of rare
loveliness, but they were lost on him now, though he had been looking
forward to them all the morning as a delightful finish to his tramp.
The tormented world was again on his back--his mind was grappling with
the awful possibilities in the news. This was no ordinary casualty of
war--not a battle lost or won. This was not war, as war was understood.
It was a new factor in the awful problem. It was something quite
outside the code--a deliberate effort to scare the neutral world into
giving up the sea code it had been working out with such pain through
the ages--scaring them into admitting that atrocities it thought it had
done away with were legitimate if you invented an engine of destruction
which couldn't be used unless you abandoned the laws. It was a defiance
not only of all codes, but a most impudent defiance of the stern
warning of the United States. Dick's blood ran hot and furious as he
thought of it. "It can't be passed. It means action. They'll have to
retreat--or we'll have to fight--and they'll never retreat. It would be
giving up half of what they think their strength," he said, with the
conviction of one who knew his Germany--its confidence in itself, its
contempt for non-military peoples, its sneering at all laws or
practices that stood in the way of its will.

"But who, who in Sabinsport sees this as it is? How are they to be made
to see it? Half the town will treat the _Lusitania_ as a tragedy like
the _Titanic_. Captain Billy will rave and say, 'If we had
protested--if we hadn't a Democratic administration.' But that isn't
seeing the issue--his kind of fury against the Germans misses the
point--the inner meaning which the country must see if it ever goes
whole-heartedly in. Wanton piracy--as savage and unmerciful as the
Wotan they worship. God! if I could get into it. But here I stay. I
will go home--bathe--dress--read my mail--prepare for services
to-morrow--go through them. I'll sleep and eat and write and smile and
talk as if this fearful thing was not on the earth--as if I didn't know
that every day brought it closer to Sabinsport--and she doesn't know
it. Ralph's right--it's closing in on us. And what will Ralph say, I
wonder."

What Ralph said was in that evening's _Argus_. It was brief.

  "When men go to war the appeal is to violence, destruction, death.
  He who can destroy most, kill most, is the superior. You take what
  comes in your path. To talk of laws of war is nonsense. To talk of
  mercy in war is to talk hypocrisy. You're out to kill. You kill
  what's in your way. To debate your right to do what will injure an
  enemy is not the way of war. It is the way of peace. The
  destruction of the _Lusitania_ was an act of war--that hideous,
  senseless thing to which Europe has appealed. It is a tragedy that
  Americans should have been destroyed. It is a greater tragedy that
  they should have put themselves deliberately in the path of death.
  If they had as deliberately walked between the firing lines in
  battle, would we have condemned the combatants if they lost their
  lives?"

Dick bowed his head at the merciless logic of the paragraph, its
contempt for humanity as it is, its lofty and reckless egotism. He was
encouraged, however, when he learned afterwards that when Otto had
congratulated Ralph on the editorial, Ralph had said: "But you miss
_my_ point, Otto. I'm not defending your infernal country. It was
cowardly business, but it was logical. You Germans are in a fair way to
demonstrate the silliness of trying to insist on honor in war. Laws of
war are about as reasonable as laws against tornadoes. The only hope I
have is that you'll reduce the beastly business to its absurdity."

The effect of the _Lusitania_ on Sabinsport was much deeper and more
general than Dick had dared dream. For the first time since the war
began he sensed a feeling of personal responsibility abroad--in the
banks, at the grocery, on the street, around the dinner tables. There
was a growing consciousness that this was something which did concern
her, something that she must see through. There were a few, but only a
few in the town, who insisted that we should plunge in immediately and
avenge the outrage. Sabinsport was not ready to do that. The world was
full of wrongs calling for vengeance, was the _Lusitania_ the one out
of all these many where Sabinsport must act? The town reeked with
discussion. Dick found indignation, however, qualified strongly by the
suspicion that the _Lusitania_ was armed. The doubt was a hang-over
from her inherited mistrust of English ways and English dealings.
"Probably was carrying munitions," men would say. "Probably did have
guns."

Then, too, Sabinsport found it hard to believe that it was necessary,
and therefore right, for Americans to go to Europe during the war,
unless they went to enlist or on errands of mercy. You see,
Sabinsport's idea of business was limited, provincial. She had never
quite grasped the fact that men ran back and forth to London and Paris
and Berlin now-a-days on legitimate business quite as freely as a few
of her own citizens ran back and forth to New York. Going to Europe was
still an adventure. There had been a time when Sabinsport numbered so
few people that had been to Europe that she had formed a society, "The
Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe." It had not lasted long,
for she had a sense of humor which saved her from keeping alive that
which savored of snobbery, and the Social Club of Those Who Have Been
to Europe died a quiet and early death. Going abroad was now common
enough, but it had not yet assumed the proportions of legitimate
business.

In spite of all this, however, there was not from the first a doubt in
Sabinsport's mind, if you got down to the bottom of it, that whatever
laws there were must be observed; whatever rights we had must be
defended. Here she followed Captain Billy, who said, "By the Jumping
Jehosophat, we'll go where we have a right to." One would have thought,
to hear Captain Billy, that he made at least two trips across the ocean
a year, though, as a matter of fact, he had never laid his eyes on that
water.

"Do you suppose, if my business calls me to London," said he, "and that
the laws allow me, an American citizen, to travel on an English vessel
that I'm going to keep off that ship? It has a legal right to carry me.
Of course they can come aboard and see if that ship has contraband and
guns, and if they find them they can take me off; but they can't blow
her up until they have me safe. That's all they can do under the law,
and that they have got to do. I'm going to travel wherever the law says
I may."

Thus Captain Billy put it at the War Board, in his grocery, and even at
home, where Mrs. Captain Billy, who always took him literally, said,
with a flutter, "William, you must keep off those ships, even if you
have the right to go on them. You will only make trouble if you insist
on going to London now."

And in this insistence there were others in Sabinsport who agreed with
Mrs. Captain Billy. There was the Rev. Mr. Pepper, as I have already
explained. There was the dwindling Peace Party. There was a small
number of Socialists in the mills. But they made only a ripple on the
surface of that staid, settled conviction in Sabinsport's mind--"where
we have a right to go, we're going to go, and Germany shall not stop
us."

It was this conviction, so strong in Sabinsport, that made her pick out
of the President's diplomatic correspondence two words, and all through
the discussion cling to them. He had said "strict accountability" at
the start, Sabinsport agreed, and she was willing to wait and stand on
that. "Fine"--"Just right"--"Don't give 'em a loophole," was the
average opinion. Of course there were those in Sabinsport, though they
were very few, that were, like Mr. Kinney, the pillar in Dick's church,
who had found Belgium's resistance "impractical," and who now argued
that the trouble with the President's correspondence was that it did
not give us "a leg to run on." "We don't want war," said Vestryman
Kinney. "Diplomacy consists in so framing your notes that you have a
way out. Suppose Germany won't agree, we must back down. It looks bad
to me. He ought to have been more skillful."

In all this discussion, however, Dick saw that ingrained deeply in
Sabinsport was the idea that keeping peace was a preeminent national
duty. He found in the heart of the town a solemn conviction that a
country ought to have a machinery that would keep its people out of
war, that when things went wrong with other nations there ought to be a
way to settle them without fighting. Although he felt that anger over
the _Lusitania_--and perhaps something more serious for Germany than
anger, that was contempt for the act--stayed and increased in the town,
he knew that she clung to the conviction that there ought to be a
better way than force to settle it. Sabinsport felt and argued very
much as she felt and argued about the attempts in a neighboring State
where lynchings sometimes occurred--that the punishment should be left
to the law and not to a mob. To rush in now, as Captain Billy demanded,
seemed to Sabinsport a little bit like mob action. She wanted a
government that had a machinery to take care of such a task as this
without forcing her to leave her honest business of earning a living to
take up the abominable business of destroying men. She had an idea that
we had a machinery for just this purpose. The question was, Would it
work?

And so the town waited on events. She went about her business of
feeding and clothing herself, but her ears were open, and if her mouth
was shut her mind was at work, turning over the mighty and unaccustomed
problems. Sabinsport was learning new words, struggling with strange
ideas, trying to grasp their relation to herself. Did these things
concern her and her business? If so, all right; but if not, well, she'd
been trained not to interfere; and, above all, not to interfere in wars
across the seas.

Of all the 20,000 people in Sabinsport, only one was aroused to
immediate action by the _Lusitania_. A week from the morning that he
had heard the dire news at Jo's Mills, Dick came down to his breakfast
to find his husky, cheerful, Irish Katie with swollen eyes and tragic
mien.

"Why, Katie!" he exclaimed. "What's the matter? What's Mikey been doing
now?" He took it for granted it was Mikey. He had never known anything
else to reduce Katie to tears.

"Oh, my God!" wailed the woman, "he's gone--gone to the war--says he's
gone for _you_. You never sent him away from me, Mr. Dick, and never
said a word to me. You haven't a heart that hard. You couldn't do a
thing like that."

"I certainly wouldn't do such a thing, Katie. I haven't sent Mikey
away. I don't understand it. Tell me what's happened--that's a good
soul." But all that Katie could find words to say was: "Read that--and
that to me, his own mother."

Dick took the crumpled, tear-stained letter and read:

  "Dear Mother:

  "I'm going to war. They'll take me in Canada. You tell Mr. Dick to
  stop worrying because he can't fight. I'll do his fightin' and
  don't you go off your head. I can't stick around Sabinsport any
  longer with such things doin' in the world. The Dutchmen are off
  their bases--they've got to get back where they belong.

  "I'd said good-by but I knew you'd make a row.

                                                       "Your loving son,
                                                       "MIKEY FLAHERTY."

"I didn't know this, Katie. Mikey never had dropped a word to me that
would make me suspect he was thinking of this. I don't understand what
he means by going for me."

"I knew it, the spalpeen. I knew you'd never treat poor old Katie like
this. I understand it well enough, now. It's him spilin' for the fight.
It's my own fault. Didn't I tell him you was eatin' your heart out
because you can't go, and he has been talkin' a lot of late about what
you had been sayin' at the Club. Every night when he came home, it was
Mr. Dick said this, and Mr. Dick said that. Silly old fool, I am. And
him that would rather fight than eat and that sets the world by you,
Mr. Dick."

"But, Katie, what put that nonsense into your head?"

"Oh," said the woman, sagely, "I know. I know it like I wuz your
mother. You don't have to tell me things. I know you like I do the
weather. You ain't been the same since the dirty Germans did up poor
little Belgium. I know the only reason you don't go is that you
wouldn't live a day."

"Nonsense, Katie. Where'd you get that?"

"Mikey told me. He was that cut up because you couldn't go, but he
needn't have run away from his poor old mother like this. I'd let him
go for you. I'm no coward. It ain't his goin'; it's his thinkin' I
wouldn't let him. He's always beatin' up somebody--might as well be
Germans. God pity 'em when Mikey gets there. He'll wipe up the road
with 'em. And don't you be worryin', Mr. Dick. I'll stand it. He can
write me, can't he?"

"Katie, I won't allow this. Mikey must come back. I'll go to Canada and
have a search made for him. I have friends who'll find him."

"Indade and you won't do anything of the kind. Would you break the by's
heart--and me that proud of him? Where's the other by in Sabinsport
that had the right to get up and go? Let him fight. I'll live to see
him with the stripe on his sleeve--as grand as the grandest. You'll not
raise a finger. Drink your coffee now, and don't mind me, old fool that
I am to be makin' you worry for a little thing like that."

And so Dick, with one eye on Katie's furtive wiping of her eyes, drank
his coffee, wondering as he did it at the amazing intuition that
affection gives. Katie and Mikey had discerned--so he told
himself--what nobody in Sabinsport but Ralph knew, and he had said
enough to Ralph to explain his understanding. What was it that ran from
soul to soul and opened to the unlettered what was closed to the most
highly trained, he asked himself. But they are Irish, and the Irish
have a sixth sense--one that looks into hearts.

But it was not divination, it was simply the keen and affectionate eye
of Katie on him through all those terrible August and September days at
the beginning. She saw what Dick did not realize, the beaten stoop to
his shoulder, the despairing look in his eye when he came back from his
effort to enlist. Many was the night during the days of that first
approach to Paris that Katie had gone home to tell Mikey, "He's dyin'
of grief, he is. He looks at his paper in the morning and drops his
head in his hands and groans. He don't eat and he don't talk. The big
battle is killin' him. I peeps in now and then to his study and he is
sittin' lifeless like, thinkin' and thinkin'. Mikey, he's dyin' for
love of France, could you beat it?"

And Mikey, much perplexed, watched his hero and took excruciating pains
to keep the brakes on himself, not to do anything to worry Mr. Dick.
When the battle was over and the Germans turned back, Dick's joy was so
great that Katie herself began to rejoice. For Katie Flaherty, the war
dated from that first week of September, 1914. Also from then dated
what was to become the dominating passion of her life--her hatred of
Germany.

Mikey's sudden departure was quickly known in Sabinsport, and Katie did
not hesitate to make the most of the fact that he had gone for love of
Mr. Dick. It had its romantic value, that runaway. It made Katie a town
heroine. Certain well-to-do gentlemen in the banks, Cowder and Mulligan
among them, sent her a purse. There was much talking to her in the
streets as she did Dick's marketing, and nightly on the porch of the
little house on the south bank of the river where she lived a group of
friendly neighbors came in to cry or to exult according to Katie's
humor.

Dick was not long in sensing that Mikey's action was making opinion in
Sabinsport, much as Patsy's adventures in Belgium had done. The very
children caught it, and Richard Cowder stopped more than once in his
favorite South Side Alley to discuss with the "gang" what the runaway
was probably doing at the moment. In reporting his conversations, he
sometimes would shake his head, saying, "You know these youngsters are
getting a new idea about running away--that it may be a glorious deed."

The point at which the effect was most significant, in Dick's judgment,
was the wire mill. Practically all of the boys in the South Side Club
belonged there. They were friends and companions of Mikey. His going
away had sobered them and made them far and away more interested in the
war. The most significant effect was the way in which they cooled
toward a movement which had begun to make strong headway in the
factories and mills, a movement in which Ralph was taking keen interest
as he saw in it a possibility of reviving the opposition to munition
making which had been destroyed by Cowder's and Mulligan's appeal to
the mill. This movement was already beginning to crystallize into a new
party, made up of workmen and farmers. It was called Labor's National
Peace Council. Nobody could tell just who started it in the mill, but
Ralph had seized the idea and was working seriously for it.

"Where in hell did it come from?" Cowder asked Dick. "Not out of this
town, I tell you, Ingraham. I know this town like a book. There's no
Labor Peace Council in it when there's plenty of work. This scheme's
been sneaked in from outside, and it's being fed on the sly. What I
can't make out is, Who's doing it? It's the same crowd that kept up the
battle against munitions. I don't believe it's Otto. I'm watching him.
It's somebody in the plants."

Dick had his notions. They were connected with an investigation he had
been making on the quiet. His curiosity about where the boys in his
club got the arguments they presented against munition making and
selling had led him to look into the journals they read, particularly
the foreign journals--Slovak, Bohemian, Italian, Polish. He discovered
that they were all carrying a surprisingly similar series of articles,
protesting on the highest moral grounds against the dragging of the
workmen into such a business--making munition, forcing them to earn
their bread by preparing destruction for their fellows, or going
without it. He didn't like it and spoke to Ralph, translating to him
the selections that he had put his hands on.

"It's the same hand that does this, Ralph; what do you think?"

"Why," said Ralph, "I've had that stuff offered me. I know all about
it. There's a bunch of peacemakers in the East who are syndicating it,
in the domestic as well as the foreign press, paying all the expenses.
They say it's their contribution to the cause. The agent offered it to
me here. They would not give me the names of the philanthropists. I
told the agent that I didn't advertise justice, I advocated it. But,
Dick, it's all right. They're just silly, mistaken in their way of
getting at it. You cannot carry on advertising of this kind in this
country but people get onto the source of it very soon, just as you
have; and that puts an end to it. I told the man that offered me that
stuff that would be the way of it."

"Did Otto ever mention this to you, Ralph?"

Ralph studied. "I believe he did once--asked me if I had ever heard of
the scheme--if it had ever been offered to me. He said a newspaper
friend of his in New York spoke to him about it. I told him what I've
told you: that people who believed in these notions and wanted to get
them over should come into the open with them. I don't take any stock
in pacifists that don't work in the open."

Dick told Cowder all he knew.

"Proves nothing," he said, "but I don't like it."

"Nor I," said Dick.

When Labor's National Peace Council began to flourish, Dick couldn't
get it out of his head that there was a connection between the two,
that the humanitarian advertisers were the backers of the movement. He
went to Ralph with the suggestion. That young man had thrown himself
boldly into the campaign and he resented Dick's idea that there was
something suspicious behind it.

"I don't believe it," he declared hotly. "It's the natural thing for
people who work, and only want to do useful, honest work, to revolt
against this kind of thing. This is a spontaneous labor movement, I
tell you, Dick. Our working people and our farmers don't believe in
playing with fire--when the fire means war. They know this selling to
the Allies what the Allies wouldn't otherwise have is going to
exasperate Germany and may drag us in. I tell you it's perfectly
natural they should rise and protest and prepare to fight it out at the
elections."

"But, Ralph, who started this thing here? Where did it come from? The
shops?"

"Hanged if I know--started itself, I tell you. I don't care--it's the
ideas. They're sound. I'm for them."

"But if these ideas were being scattered and watered by the paid agents
of Germany, how would you feel about it? You must know by this time
that Germany has no sympathy for peace; that she believes in war. You
must realize that she has no objection to selling munitions herself.
Why, half the world gets its big guns from her. It's because she hopes
to trap us into being unneutral--refusing for an illogical sentiment to
sell her enemies munitions that she's working this thing up. It's part
of her war program. Can't you see it, Ralph?"

"I tell you there's nothing in your suspicion. Look at the men who've
been here to speak for the party--as good labor men as the Federation
has. You can't suspect them of pro-Germanism; they're for peace, I tell
you, and putting an end to this infernal shell and powder making."

Nor was it until Ralph had been in Washington to the famous August,
1915, meeting of the council and had himself heard the cynical reply of
the precious rascal that was managing affairs, to the demand of honest
working men for an explanation of the source of the funds that were
being so lavishly used, "What if it is German money?"--that he yielded.
"I've been a fool," he said to Dick quite frankly when he came back,
and quite as frankly he told the story of his own connection with the
party in the _Argus_.

  "The editor of this paper has never concealed his opinion of war.
  He considers it a senseless and brutal method of trying to settle
  human differences. He considers the present war in Europe an
  unnecessary crime in which all the nations concerned are partners.
  This war has nothing to do with the United States, and the efforts
  to involve us, whether they come from within or without, are works
  of the devil. Nobody who reads the _Argus_ can doubt that this has
  been our opinion from the start. Thinking this, we could only look
  on munition making in this country as deliberate trading with the
  devil. Big Business never stops to consider humanity when there's
  money to be made. The _Argus_ has consistently fought the making
  and the selling of munitions. When a party arose which had this
  end, the _Argus_ welcomed it, supported it. The _Argus_ was a fool
  in doing this. Closer contact with the leaders of the party proved
  to the editor that a bunch of grafting Americans had persuaded a
  thick-headed German agent that if he'd give them money enough
  they'd swing this country away from England, via peace and
  brotherly love. This came out last week in Washington. We shook the
  dust of the town from our feet, as did every self-respecting farmer
  and laborer there, when we discovered it. The _Argus_ is for peace,
  but it is not interested in pulling German chestnuts out of the
  fire. For whatever assistance it has given heretofore in that
  operation it apologizes to its readers and it assures them it was
  ignorance and not pro-Germanism which was behind its activities."

There was much discussion of the editorial over Sabinsport supper
tables that evening.

Dick was still in his study when the telephone rang: "Is it you, Dick?"
an excited voice called. "Have you seen Ralph's editorial? Isn't it
splendid? Isn't it just like him, the honestest thing in the world.
Just can't be dishonest--oh, Dick, do you think I might call him up and
tell him so? He despises me so. But to know he isn't pro-German makes
me so happy."

"Call him up, by all means, Patsy,"--for it was Patsy, though she
hadn't announced herself. "He'll be mighty pleased, I know."

And Patsy called, but Ralph was not to be found, and an hour later her
courage waned. "Maybe Dick will tell him," and Dick did two or three
days later, but Ralph only grumbled, "She evidently didn't think enough
of it to tell me so herself."

The editorial brought out an unusually full meeting of the War Board.
Ralph came in and told them all about it, and Brutus, who had "known it
all the time," hinted at revelations he'd soon be able to make.
According to Brutus, this was a very insignificant activity of the
German agents. He knew it to be a fact that they had vast stores of
arms in New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Omaha, and that
if the United States wasn't mighty careful what she did there would be
an army of thousands of Germans shutting us in our houses while German
fleets bombarded the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and Zeppelins rained
fire on our roofs. To which Captain Billy swore agreement.

While the discussion went on at the War Board, another went on in a
speeding car, driven by Otto Littman. Otto had gone out for a spin in
his little roadster--a thing he often did on hot summer nights. Across
the river on the hill at a dark corner he had slowed up a bit, just
enough for a man to step on the running board and into the car. Katie
Flaherty, going home from Dick's, said to herself: "The reckless
creature! How did he know he was wanted? It's a queer thing he didn't
stop. It's Otto Littman, I'm thinkin'."

It was indeed, and the lithe figure that had entered the running car
was Max Dalberg, the "wonder of the laboratory," whom Reuben Cowder had
mentioned to Dick in his first confidence of weeks before.

"Well, Littman," the newcomer said, with something like a sneer, "your
young man on the _Argus_ is mighty high in his tone to-night. What's
up? Didn't they divvy in Washington?"

"None of that, Max. Ralph Gardner's not that kind. I don't know where
you people get the idea that all Americans can be bought. They can't
be, and yet this whole business has been based on money. You know I
never believed in this. I have been willing to put your case whenever I
had the chance. I believe it's right. I'll work for Germany in any way
I think honest, but I won't lie and I won't bribe."

"You can't put Germany's case fully in this country, young man, and you
know it. The Americans are a set of sentimental fools. They're
hypocrites, too. Talk about neutrality! The whole bunch is like Cowder.
Pitch you out if you suggest selling munitions to even another neutral
country. There isn't a score of manufacturers in this country that
wouldn't rather close their plants than sell to us. Do you call that
neutrality?"

"I tell you, Max, it's the people. You don't see things as they are at
all--it's not the Government. The Government is not preventing the
munition makers from selling to Germany. The trouble is these munition
makers here won't sell to Germany."

"But what kind of a government is it that cannot control its people? Do
you suppose our Kaiser would tolerate that kind of weakness? For the
sake of the United States, Otto, you ought to help teach this people
what a strong nation really is. If this country expects to live she
must learn to obey--learn that masters are necessary. What's she doing
now?--taking the bit in her teeth--thinking and doing what she pleases.
She's elected a President to do her thinking and she won't follow
him--forces him to do what his judgment is against."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, those notes. Wilson would never have written them if he hadn't
been afraid of the people. He's too wise."

"You're wrong, Max. Wilson thinks just as Sabinsport does and he's
doing a thing the country will back up."

"They won't have a chance long. Germany's patience is failing. We'll
attend to that. If they insist, they'll get--Otto, you know as well as
I do that there won't be a plant left in this country soon to make
munitions if they insist, and there won't be a vessel on the seas to
carry them. We'll take care of that. You know we can do it. Why,
there's not a factory in the States that our people are not in, and
there's not a vessel out that we can't split. We're giving them a
chance--appealing to their own fool sentiments. 'Love peace?' Well,
take peace--don't love peace and talk hatred of Germany. 'Hate money
made from munitions?' Well, that's easy; don't make 'em. We're only
giving them their own dope, Otto, and they refuse to stand by their own
faith. Hypocrites! English! If they won't take a Labor's Peace Council,
you can be sure they'll get a first-class explosion party--and that
right soon."

"See here, Max, I can't follow anything like that. I'm willing to
educate my country, but I won't revenge her because she refuses my
teaching. Cut it out."

The ruddy blond face of Otto Littman's companion wore usually the
gentlest of smiles--the few who had ever met him in Sabinsport thought
him a harmless man, devoted to his laboratory--talking little, playing
his piano often late after a busy day's hard work, friendly to little
children, troubling nobody. "Never had a better man," said Cowder, who
almost daily visited the laboratory and listened to his explanations of
difficulties both physical and chemical and how they could be
overcome--watched his ingenious experiments, discussed long with him
future developments.

"German parentage--born here," he had told Cowder. He never talked of
the war more than to say sadly, "It's bad business."

Cowder and the children who ran to him on the street at night would not
have recognized him now as he leaned over Otto Littman--his blue eyes
glittering like steel points, his lips drawn back until two full rows
of white teeth showed--they would not have known the voice with its
hateful sneer.

"Too late, Otto. You're in. You can't get out. Do you suppose we are
going to let as good and prosperous an agent as you are, with a father
above all suspicion, go when we've got him? We've got you, Otto
Littman, and you'll do what the High Command orders. Come, come, boy,
don't be an ass. And remember where your interests are. This country is
doomed if she doesn't soon see where her advantage lies. You're made,
whatever happens, for His Majesty never forgets. Your name is on his
books."

Otto Littman made no reply, but, swinging his car around sharply, drove
rapidly back, only slowing up as he approached the dusky turn where his
passenger had stepped in. He stepped out now as skillfully, and the car
went on. One hearing it pass would have been quite willing to swear
that it had not stopped.

"Poor fool," Max said to himself. "Thought he could mix in great
affairs and pull out at will. That's your American education for
you--willing to blurt into anything that's new and promises excitement,
pulling out the instant it gets dangerous or pinches their cheap little
notions of morality. _Gott in Himmel!_ what does he expect?--that
Germany will tolerate such nonsense from any country on the globe? Our
time has come and they must learn to understand what valor and power
mean in the world."

He took out his pipe and lit it and strolled, softly humming, into
the rooms he occupied; they made up the second story at Katie
Flaherty's. It was a convenient arrangement for a single man who
liked to come and go according "to things at the plant." The little
frame house was built like many on the South Side, into the hill; its
first story opened on one level, its second on another a street
above. Max had this second floor to himself now that Mikey had flown.
He had said to Mrs. Flaherty that he'd be glad to take both rooms,
his books and papers having outgrown the one. He had made it very
pleasant and convenient--wonderfully convenient for a gentleman who
occasionally had late callers and preferred they should not be seen
coming or going.

Poor Otto reached home in a very different state of mind. The exciting
game he had been playing for months now with a proud conviction that he
was indeed on the inside, an actor in world affairs, a man trusted by
great diplomats and certain one day to be recognized as one of those
that had helped hold the United States when she was on the verge of
losing herself to England--the game had taken a new turn. It was out of
his hands. He was no longer the player--he was the puppet. What could
he do? Was it true they "had" him?

Otto Littman was one of not a few prosperous young German-Americans who
were caught in 1914, 1915, and 1916 in the coarse and rather clumsy web
that German intrigue spun over spots in this land. Otto's trapping had
begun at least half a dozen years before, when he had made his first
visit to Germany. He was then twenty-four, a handsome, rather arrogant,
excellently educated young man. Rupert Littman had done his best for
his only son. He himself was the best of men. He had come here in the
early fifties--a lad of ten or twelve, with his father, a refugee of
the revolution of 1848. They had found their way to Cincinnati and
finally to a farm near Sabinsport. The land had thrived under the elder
Littman's intelligent and friendly touch. He was a prosperous man when
the opening of the coal vein under his farm made him rich. He came into
Sabinsport and with others, made rich like himself, started a farmers'
bank. This bank Rupert had inherited, and it was to carry it on that he
had educated Otto, sending him to Germany to the family he had not seen
since childhood but with which he had always had a formal relation,
with the understanding that he was to spend at least two years in
studying German banking and commercial methods.

The two years had lengthened to six, for Otto had been well received by
his relatives. An opening had been found for him in Berlin where he had
been given the opportunities his father sought for him. He had been
cultivated by serious and older people, and always his relatives had
lost no opportunity of impressing upon him the honors that were done
him, of telling him that he was being taken in even as they were not.
Otto had been flattered, though not so deeply as his relatives felt
that he should have been. He had not taken the attentions and
opportunities with an especial seriousness. There was a considerable
percentage of inner conviction that they were his due, that there must
be qualities in him that the attentive had detected which were not in
others. Being an American meant something in Germany, he saw; also he
soon discovered that there were two classes of his compatriots that
Berlin cultivated--the millionaires and the professors. It is doubtful
if Otto realized how very cunning this was on the part of Berlin. She
had chosen the two classes of the United States most susceptible to
flattery, and best placed to serve her purpose. And, how our
millionaires and our professors had played her game!

It was not so much what was done for him and for other Americans in
Berlin that impressed Otto. It was the country itself--the brightness
and neatness of things captivated him. He liked its little gardens with
every inch under immaculate cultivation--its tidy forests where the
very twigs were saved--its people fitted into their particular niches
like so many well-arranged books on a shelf. He liked the sense of men
and women being looked after, kept in health, kept in employment, the
utmost made out of them--no more letting a bit of human material go to
waste than a bit of iron.

Their ways of doing things in business pleased him. There was always
somebody that knew everything to be known about a particular thing.
There were experts for every feature of the banking business. It was
not an inherited rule-of-thumb way of carrying on things, such as he
was familiar with at home; it was a thoroughly considered, scientific
practice. To be sure, it seemed ponderous to him, but he felt as if it
were sure. It had been thought out. Science--science in
everything--nothing left to chance--no reliance on luck. He began to
take the banking business very seriously indeed, to feel that he could
carry home something important and serve not only Sabinsport but the
country at large, which at that moment was wallowing in a terrible
banking muddle over which his German friends held up their hands in
shocked amazement.

As time went on, Otto began to take other things more seriously, and
gradually there crept over him a sense of something stupendous going on
in men's thoughts and souls. People were not living for the present in
Germany as at home; they were not accepting their place in the world as
something fixed; they seemed always to have before them the future, and
that future on which their eyes were fixed was something of magnificent
if dim proportions. It was something that he finally discovered stirred
them to the depths of their being.

"What ails them?" he asked himself, at first. "It is as if they saw
things. It isn't natural." Slowly he began to understand what they saw,
what they felt. It wasn't a dream; it was a faith that absorbed them--a
faith in their own greatness and a conviction that they were soon to be
called to prove it to the world, to take their proper place at the head
of nations. "They're crazy," he told himself at first, "or I am." But
later he began to see with them. Was it not the truth? What nation on
earth equaled them--in effective action, in restraint, in fidelity, in
valor, in bigness of vision? What other nation was worthy to rule the
earth? Certainly not England--she was soft, vain, selfish--her lands in
the hands of a few, her people neglected, her government rent by
dissensions, her colonies self-governing or ready for revolt. England
certainly had lost her sense and her genius for empire.

Not France. France had no dream of empire, no genius for empire; she
was content to stay at home. She preferred making things with her hands
to making them with machines. She let her people think what they would,
say what they would. France had every fault of that futile, impossible
thing men called democracy. Certainly not France.

He saw it clearly, finally, as a thing writ on the walls of heaven. The
destiny of Germany was to rule the earth. It was right and inevitable
that she should do it because she was superior. It was part of her
greatness that she saw her destiny, did not shrink from it, dared
openly to prepare for it, to educate her people for it.

Her daring thrilled Otto to the very soul. He read Treitschke finally.
Her text book. He saw in it a notice to the earth that her master was
here, to prepare to receive him. It was an open notice to England, to
France, to make way. The conqueror was coming. He did not come in the
night. He taught in the open of his approach--marshaled his armies in
the open--built his ships in the open.

Otto began to feel an overwhelming contempt for the rest of
Europe--that it should not understand what was writ so large before its
eyes, that it should touch shoulders with a nation that for years had
carried in its heart so wondrous and magnificent an ambition, that had
so consistently and frankly prepared to make it real. Time they were
put in their place--particularly the two, France and England, that
called themselves the best the world has done so far. They were at the
end of their string.

His conversion was no half-hearted affair. Like alien converts the
world over, he outdid the Germans in the ardor of his faith, in his
contempt of opposition, and he felt all this without an instant of
waning in loyalty to his own country. As a matter of fact the relations
of the United States never entered his mind. The United States had
nothing to do with this. Germany had no thought of her. Germany
admitted our claim to the Western Hemisphere so far as Otto's
experience went. Germany in South America, Germany in Mexico--of that
he saw and knew nothing. His whole mind was aflame with the discovery
he had made. It seemed to him like a return to the age of heroes, when
men walked grandly and rose to place by great deeds of valor alone.

He had come back to the United States in 1912, but two years were not
long enough even to dim the great conception he had caught. Indeed,
everything in the country threw into higher relief the superiority of
German methods and justified her faith in her destiny.

Sabinsport, after any one of the German towns of corresponding size,
seemed ugly, unfinished, disorderly. To their trim, solid, spotless
exterior was opposed a straggling, temporary, half-cleaned condition in
at least the greater part of the town. Instead of a careful business
management of town affairs, by men trained as they would have been for
bank or factory, was an absurd political system of choosing men for
offices. It was not the good of the town that was at issue, although
both sides loudly claimed that it alone considered Sabinsport; it was
always the party, with the result that clever men, like Mulligan and
Cowder, practically controlled affairs.

Otto might, six years before, have laughed at this ridiculous method of
running a town, but not now. Germany had taught him to be serious--oh,
very serious, particularly in public matters. It shamed him that his
home, the place where he must live and do business, should conduct
itself in this crude and wasteful fashion.

He found it difficult in the bank. His "reforms" were disliked--his
father, the directors, the men at the books and the windows, clung to
their ways, and their ways were not, in his judgment, "scientific." His
father laughed at his impatience. "You must go slow, Otto. What people
won't willingly do because they see it is the better, cannot succeed.
Perhaps we're not so bad as you think. Admit our results are good."

But Otto was convinced it was chance, the luck of the American, not any
sound practice that had brought the bank where it stood. Then
constantly there was an irritation in business, a resentment that they
would not see and admit the superiority of the practices he would
introduce.

The social life bored him, or rather the lack of it. There was no
provision for daily natural mixing with one's friends--no coffee hour,
no beer garden, no music. He resented the indifference to the friendly
side of life. He criticized resentfully the habit of regarding pleasure
as something to be bought with money--the inability to get it without
spending. Indeed, Otto felt a thorough and rather bitter disgust at the
place money held in Sabinsport. She regarded it, he felt, as an end.
Getting it was the chief thing with which men's minds were occupied.
They seemed never to think of public affairs except in terms of
business, and of very personal business, too.

But, in spite of this preoccupation with money-getting, they did not,
after all, respect money. They flung it about, toyed with it, used it
for uncertain schemes, wild ventures, took it for their costly and
reckless pleasures. Rarely would you find a German treating money
with such carelessness, such contempt. It would seem as if the thing
everybody sought was not worth keeping when won. Otto hated this. A
German knew the value of money--his countrymen did not. And the few
who did and hoarded it, refused to risk it--they seemed to receive no
such respect from the people as the open-handed. It was
incomprehensible--the American and his money.

But that which combined to make life in Sabinsport most barren and flat
to Otto was his feeling that there was no greatness, no sense of a
magnificent and mysterious future coming to the country. The people
were not working toward a definite national thing. Men and women seemed
to think of nothing more magnificent than to gather and spend wealth.
The idea of subordinating a personal aim for a national aim, the thing
which so dignified German earning, saving and spending, was unheard of
here. Here you lived for yourself, not for your nation.

"America is not a nation," he told his father; "it's a place where
great numbers of people, largely because of a happy chance which
probably can never happen again in the world's history, exercise just
enough control of themselves to enable them to live completely selfish
lives and they save themselves any slight remorse they might feel for
this selfishness by somehow convincing themselves that they are
demonstrating the superiority of individual liberty. And what you are
getting in America is an undisciplined, self-satisfied people, more and
more incapable of thinking itself wrong, more and more incapable of
wanting anything but to be let alone in smug comfort. It is not a
nation, I tell you, Father," Otto would say. "A nation must have a
single, glorious aim."

And the old man would wring his hands and say, "You don't understand,
Otto." And sometimes, walking up and down, would repeat the story of
the incident which had led Otto's grandfather to join the Revolution of
1848 and had brought the family finally to America.

It was not an unusual incident. He was a soldier in training, and one
morning in drilling his gun slipped and came down as they stood at
"Attention." The officer in charge sprang at him with a savage oath and
cut him with his sword across the face so that the blood ran in streams
over his uniform. Rupert Littman finished the drill and that evening
joined the party of young revolutionists, suffered with them defeat,
was imprisoned, escaped, and, as has been told, in 1850 came to this
country.

"You don't understand, Otto. You look only at the outside. It's empire
they think of over there; it's liberty here. An empire with an autocrat
at the head, even a half-way one, may be orderly. Liberty is apt to
look pretty untidy and mixed up in comparison, I know, Otto. But don't
make any mistake; a country that has set out like this one of ours to
show that all men that come to its shores are free, that never for a
moment has dreamed of ruling other peoples, asks nothing of newcomers
but that they don't interfere with other people's freedom. Oh, that
country may not look as trim on the outside as Germany, its people may
not spend their money as sensibly--probably they don't; and I know we
think a good deal more about our own affairs than about public affairs;
but don't you get it into your head that we're not a nation and have no
central enthusiasm. If it came to the test I imagine you would find
that the right of every man to mind his own business and of every
nation to do the same, would make a pretty strong tie in the United
States. You would see, if it came to a test, that we have a core over
here."

"Words, Father, words; you've talked this democratic patter so long you
think it means something. A nation must have a visible expression of
power to be great and feel great. She must have an army, a navy--that
is what makes a nation feel great."

But Rupert Littman shook his head. "You don't understand, Otto, you
don't understand." And Otto didn't understand, and Sabinsport continued
to irritate and humiliate him.

The war coming when he was still in this mood aroused his enthusiasm.
Now the world would have a demonstration of what greatness in a nation
meant. They would see again on earth a real empire rise. So filled was
Otto with this sense of the magnificence of German destiny, he felt no
criticism for anything that Germany could do, no doubt of anything she
said. If she invaded Belgium it was because France was already about to
do so, and she beat her to it. If she burned Louvain, it was for the
unanswerable reasons that the Emperor himself condescended to give to
the American people.

His exultation, naturally enough, made him resent the almost universal
sympathy for heroic little Belgium. He resented the something like
contempt for forcing the war--for all Sabinsport seemed to take it for
granted that Germany had started it. What right, he asked himself
hotly, have a lot of yokels like these--people who know
nothing--nothing of the aspirations of a great nation, a nation with a
genius for empire--people who can hardly name the countries of Europe
and couldn't, for the life of them, tell where the Balkans are--what
right have they to an opinion? He was outraged at the fact that
everybody had an opinion and had no hesitation in giving it. The very
barber and bootblack cursed at the Kaiser. Nothing better showed the
way Otto had gone than the impulse he felt to have them both arrested.
His only consolation in the town was Ralph, who did appreciate the
social efficiency of Germany though he flatly denied any comprehension
of what Otto meant when he talked of German destiny.

It was natural enough that Otto should have eagerly welcomed the
opportunity to help turn public opinion in America against England and
toward Germany, which came to him early in the fall of 1914. Germany
was unquestionably troubled by the judgment against her. She saw that
the United States held her responsible for starting the war and was
horrified by her first stroke. This would never do. Agents were at once
sent out to take advantage of every conceivable opportunity to make the
American think as he ought about these things--that is, to think as
Germany thought.

The country filled up with them. One who traveled much in the fall and
winter of 1914 and 1915 met them on the trains, in hotels--big, blond,
mustached persons with the air of the superman. One of their objects
was to enlist quietly the aid of German-American citizens of position
and education who had seen enough of Germany to understand and
sympathize with her aspirations. There were many of the second or third
generations who had had experiences similar to Otto's, who felt as he
did and who believed that in interpreting Germany to the United States
they were serving their country.

Otto was one of the first of these young men approached. His vanity was
deeply flattered. To be invited into great affairs, to be asked to help
with a campaign important to the Empire, to serve his own land at the
same time by helping to set her right--what an opening! He promised his
full and loyal service. He asked only to be used.

The first service asked of him was to secure full information about the
munition making in the district of which Sabinsport was an important
point, and to place in every plant as many of the men which would be
sent to him as he could without attracting attention. He easily and
naturally enough carried out the commission, and he did it without
compunction. It seemed plausible and proper enough to him that Germany
should inform herself about the chances of the Allies supplying
themselves with munitions, and he admired the care she took to get
accurate information. So far as Otto was concerned, this was all there
was in the matter.

The campaign against selling munitions, which was started in the winter
and spring of 1915, tickled him enormously. Clever--what could be more
clever than using this absurd obsession of a few pacifists to prevent
her enemy from getting shells and shrapnel! _Germany_ stirring up
sentiment against war-weapons to weaken her opponent! That was
humor--great humor. And Otto went into the campaign with gusto, working
quietly through the men he had placed in the plant at Sabinsport,
particularly Max Dalberg; working through unseeing Ralph, working in a
dozen towns where he had business and social relations. His attitude
was strictly correct. We were neutral. Why should we preach neutrality
and make for one antagonist what circumstances made it impossible to
make for another? We must treat all alike. The campaign took hold. The
workingmen favored it. Otto was greatly pleased. That much money was
being used in sending around speakers, in circulating documents, in
advertising, in establishing newspaper and periodical organs, he
vaguely knew. It was all right. You must get the ear of the public. Why
not?

The only serious rebuff Otto had in the early months of his propaganda
was when he attempted to contract with Cowder and with other
manufacturers for their output. He was amazed and incensed at their
attitude. They treated the suggestion that they sell to "Sweden" as an
insult. It was this attitude, so hostile to Germany, that had made him
completely lose his control with Cowder. It had been unbearable; this
contempt, this resentment at the suggestion. He had felt that he was
defending Germany when he raised his hand. His controlled and adroit
companion had criticized him severely, "You'll give the game away,
Littman, if you lose your temper like that."

But Otto had replied hotly, "Give it away! It's a fair game. I believe
in what I'm doing. It's war and fair enough. What I can't tolerate is
the hypocrisy of the American attitude. To pretend to be neutral and
act as if you were insulted when it is suggested to you that you sell
something so it will get to Germany as well as to England. To pretend
to be neutral and to be concerned only with their rights, and yet
tolerate with indifference England's violations and rage against
Germany's."

"Well, they mustn't complain if we use stronger arguments. If they
can't make good the neutrality they preach, we'll have to see what a
little force will do."

"What do you mean?" asked Otto, sharply. "You can't force the United
States."

"The hell we can't," was all his chief answered.

The reply had made no deep impression on Otto then. He remembered it
now. He remembered how this hint had recurred as he talked with the
German agents in the different places where he had met them. After the
Washington fiasco, bursting completely the party for which he had
labored so faithfully, this threat came back to him more often. It made
him anxious. It was in the back of his mind when he flared at Max and
brought upon his head the taunt that humiliated and alarmed him. What
if they carried it out--these explosions that they threatened--how
could he escape complicity? He could refuse to help, but what good
would that do if he was accused. It was a very unhappy young diplomat
that laid his head on the pillow that night--one thoroughly
disillusioned with great affairs.

The succeeding months made him more unhappy. Sabinsport mistrusted him,
and he was made to feel it. In the business life of the town where he
had been treated with deference there was a withdrawal, hard to define
but very real to Otto. Again and again when he entered an office or
room men stopped talking. There was a restraint at the War Board--the
one group in the town which had always listened with eagerness, whether
to outlandish theories and gossip or to sensible argument and
unquestioned fact. Why should the War Board harbor suspicions of him?
Did the War Board _care_?

Ralph, who had been his willing listener, was changed, it seemed to
him. After the downfall of Labor's National Peace Council, he put the
question bluntly to Otto: "Did you know that it was German money that
was backing up the munition and pacifist campaign?" Otto hesitated.
"Never mind," said Ralph, convinced, "but you must see that is a kind
of thing not done, Otto. Embroiling us with England when we're trying
to keep out of the scrap is the work of a sneak. You know why I threw
the _Argus_ to the party. It was because I believed it an honest
American effort to combat militarism in the United States, to stop the
making and selling of munitions. Do you suppose I would have taken any
stock in a German effort to stop munition making here? It's a
scream--Germany spending money in such a cause while she's using
Belgium's guns and running her factories night and day making
munitions! I'm with you in any frank effort to make people understand
Germany better. I begin to think, Otto, that this business makes me
understand Germany better than anything that has happened. You may be
sure I'll look twice hereafter at things made-in-Germany, particularly
ideas. I don't like this business, Otto, and I have to say so."

And Otto could find few words to defend the campaign--though he had
been able to do it so volubly and confidently to himself.

But it was with his father that the great strain came--his father who
was watching him with eyes in which love, agony and anger disputed
place, and neither of them could speak. He might try, as he did, to cut
off gradually all relations with the plotters, for now he called them
so to himself. He might, as he did, see more and more clearly that
Germany was trying to embroil the United States with Mexico. He might
feel that he could put his finger on the human cause of half the
explosions in the country, but he dared not speak, for to speak would,
he felt, throw him into the hands of the secret service with
documentary evidence enough at least to cause his imprisonment--these
letters of his, so full of admiration for the country which he realized
every day now was steadily marching into war with his own country.

The war had brought to no one in Sabinsport so far as great humiliation
and wretchedness as to this dabbler in world politics. No small part of
his misery was due to his fear that the suspicion abroad in Sabinsport
would find its way overseas to the one girl in the world for whom he
had ever really cared. Would the intangible thing which followed him in
the street find Nancy Cowder in Serbia and poison her loyal and honest
mind against him? He had many reasons for knowing how candidly she
weighed things. Would she be misled by gossip and the letters he'd been
sending her, so full of his own importance in the great work of making
America understand Germany? Would Nancy say, like Ralph, "All this does
make me understand Germany better, Otto"? He had an awful fear of it.
The only consolation was his certainty that she had no other Sabinsport
correspondent but her father, and it was unthinkable that her father
would write of their quarrel over the munitions contract.




                               CHAPTER V


Otto Littman was quite right in thinking that Reuben Cowder would not
write his daughter about their quarrel. People might say what they
would of Reuben Cowder's business methods, but he never hit below the
belt. Moreover, he was too wise to attempt to influence the likes or
dislikes of his spirited daughter. He had too great faith in the
soundness of her instincts. However deeply she might be interested in
Otto--and he feared it was deep indeed--he was confident that she would
instinctively know whether he was loyal; and, of course, while she was
in Serbia, there was no danger. He was quite right. Nancy was reading
between the lines of Otto Littman's letters, and sensing far better
than any one in Sabinsport the motives which had involved him in the
German intriguing. Besides, she was wholly occupied with her work.

Dick realized, better even than Reuben Cowder, how the sorrows that she
had undertaken to relieve absorbed her. He was getting better and
better acquainted with the young woman in these days, for it came to be
Reuben Cowder's habit, since his first talk with Dick, to bring him
regularly her letters. Sometimes he dropped into Dick's study at night,
sometimes he picked him up as he drove by in his car or stopped him as
he met him on the street; and always Dick found that his reason was the
need he had of talking about his girl. Evidently he talked to no one
else, for nobody in Sabinsport knew any of the details of the terrible
experiences these months had brought Nancy Cowder or anything of the
hell of torment her father had gone through. Dick himself never
mentioned her name, sensing that, at the first hint the hard old man
had that he had talked, his confidence would be silenced. Reuben Cowder
had a terrible resentment against Sabinsport society because it
misjudged his daughter. Sabinsport should never know of her from him,
should not have the stupid satisfaction of rolling over her splendid
service with idle tongue, and Sabinsport did not know more than that
the girl had been in Serbia throughout the bitter months after the
second invasion and repulse.

Dick knew the tragic story in spots, and, by his knowledge of the
country and his careful reading of every scrap of news the leading
journals of the world gave him, had pieced it into a whole. He saved
every item he read to talk over with Cowder, and every day that he
built up the story he unconsciously became more deeply involved. "The
courage of the creature," he said to himself; "the gentleness, the
gayety, the pity--why, she's a wonder woman. Who could have guessed it
from the gossip of this benighted town?"

And as a truth, Nancy Cowder deserved all Dick was attributing to her.
She was showing the qualities of a great, pitying, resourceful soul,
naturally and quietly giving its life to ease the boundless misery of a
brave and neglected little people.

She had first entered the country in 1914, stirred to the undertaking
by the reports of the plight of the sick and wounded after the
Austro-Hungarian invasions. Things in Serbia, indeed, were in a
frightful way. Exhausted by two recent wars, her hospitals, never many,
stripped of supplies, her few physicians and nurses worn out by the
long strain through which they had been going, the country could scarce
have been in a worse condition to stand a new shock. She, to be sure,
repulsed her enemy, but the repulse cost a frightful price of dead and
mutilated. Who shall ever have the courage to tell of the savage
cruelties that attended the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian army from
Serbia in the fall of 1914? Those who followed after found men hanging
in orchards, dead; women huddled in heaps where they'd been felled, the
hideous first step in that decision to exterminate the Serbian people,
which the Central Empires had taken.

It was a heart-breaking story that reached Nancy Cowder from an English
official summoned home by the war. Her decision was immediate: "I'll
go, there is need there. All the world will care for Belgium," and for
a month she worked with her English friend, Betty Barstow, to get
together a unit of a half-dozen women. The result was two physicians,
two nurses, one chauffeur and one "general utility man," as Nancy
called herself. They moved heaven and earth to raise money, collect
supplies and secure such recognition from the English and French
governments as would give their unofficial and volunteer caravan a
standing before the Serbian authorities. They had little need of
passports. A woman with surgical dressings in one hand and food in the
other was welcomed as an angel from heaven by Serbians in those
stricken days.

Nancy's party had gone into the country by Salonika, a city overflowing
with the excited travelers of half the world. From there they had made
their way to Valievo, a little town north of the center of Serbia, the
terminus of a narrow gauge railroad which runs eastward connecting with
the main line between Salonika and Belgrade. It was over this single
track, with its dwarf engine and cars, that the soldiery of all Central
Serbia was traveling--with their supplies, their wounded and their
sick. Since the terrific fighting along the Save and the Dwina, wounded
Serbs and Austrians had been pouring into Valievo. Refugees had
followed them. The little narrow-gauge railroad could not cope with
this mass of misery. It had carried away what it could but numbers had
been left behind.

Late in 1914 these six young and intrepid Samaritans arrived with bags,
boxes of bandages, cordials and medicines--and more to follow. They had
planned to find a little house on one of the green hillsides, to make
it a home, and from there to go day by day among the people; and thus
they started.

The little house was not hard to find. It looked out over the valley
with its red-tiled roof and its suggestion of a distant time when the
Turks were in the country as conquerors and built houses with
overhanging eaves and trellised windows. It was from this little house
that they started out for their work in what was then one of the most
pitiable spots of all the many--oh, so many--on an earth which lifts a
friendly face to man and begs of him to take of its fruits in peace and
in content.

Their first day's work had brought them back, white and anguished. What
were they in all this thing? It was sweeping back the waves of the sea
with a broom, dipping it dry with a teaspoon, as they told one another.
And so, indeed, it seemed at first sight. Valievo was one big
hospital--its schoolrooms, public halls, churches, cafes, had been
turned into wards--and such wards! The only beds were piles of straw on
the floor. The only utensils the helter-skelter articles the doctors
and nurses could pick up. And to meet this misery, there were just six
doctors! Everything that they could do they had done to bring something
like order and cleanliness into the situation, but it was a task
manifold beyond the most tremendous effort of which they were capable.
Hundreds of wounded men lay for days on their straw beds unattended
save for some rude first aid--and always lumbering ox-carts were
jolting over the cobbled streets bringing from the hills more and more
victims.

The condition was so shocking that Nancy and her friends cringed in
horror at the sights and in despair at their own inadequacy. Yet what
they could do they would. From daylight to dark they went from one
group to another, cleansing and dressing wounds, changing straw often
stiff with blood and filth, fumigating garments, letting in fresh air,
furnishing nourishing food, doing a thousand little things to improve
the conditions and to simplify the care of the stricken groups.

Regularly every week Nancy Cowder had written her father and she had
taken always the greatest care possible that the letters got out.
More than once she had sent a messenger with them to Nish or
Belgrade. Because of this precaution, he had received with fair
regularity news of her life and health for the past twelve
months--and such wonderful letters as she wrote; the first appalled
cry at the suffering--suffering so out of proportion to their puny
efforts--was never repeated. The girl had plunged into steady work,
and it was of what they did that she wrote--letters often actually
gay in their triumph over their difficulties. They had not, to begin
with, the commonest articles; basins, bed clothing, shirts. It took
the most determined and continued efforts to supply themselves, but
they never were discouraged, never downcast.

"Oh, Father, if you knew what we do without. Nothing matters, we know,
if we can keep them clean and warm and fed. Straw on the floor doesn't
matter--sheets don't matter, spoons and bowls don't matter. It takes so
little if the little is right. We wage one long campaign to get things.
I never knew how wonderful money is before. You mustn't mind if I spend
a great deal--if I overdraw--if I cut into my principal. There couldn't
be a better use for it. If it all goes I can work. Why, I could earn my
living as a hospital orderly now, Father. You ought to see what I can
do--what I do do. I sweep floors and change straw. I cook and clean and
drive nails. I've made what we call bedsteads with my own hands--and
proud of it! I never knew that work--work with one's hands--could be so
good. I feel as if I'd just begun to live. What a pity that it takes a
_war_ to teach idlers like me where the essence of life is found!

"Don't you worry, dear. I shall come back to you another person, and I
shall know when I get there how much of real life there is to be had in
Sabinsport."

"I don't understand," said Reuben Cowder.

"I do," said Dick.

"If she will only come back!" groaned Reuben Cowder.

"She will," said Dick.

"And be happy here! How can she be?"

"She's discovering Sabinsport in Serbia," said Dick.

"She can have all the money I have," said Reuben Cowder.

"You couldn't do better with it," said Dick.

Week by week the two men followed the work of the intrepid group. Nancy
was exultant over so many things! The redemption of a forsaken church
on a hillside turned into a perfectly good sanitarium for
convalescents. "It has no windows left, so we do have air. The only way
you get it in Serbia."

The wonderful help they were getting from the wounded who were able to
get about--Austrian and Serbian--who built them incinerators, mended
leaking roofs, brought wood for their fireplaces, scrubbed and cooked
and even sewed. "We have a class in mattress making--such a funny,
funny class. There's a poor one-legged Austrian with a cough which will
carry him off soon, once an upholsterer in Vienna. He has taught us all
here to make strong, comfortable mattresses. I went myself to Nish and
brought all the ticking and needles and thread I could find."

The feat over which Nancy crowed most, to which she was always coming
back, was the Water Works. She always capitalized the words: "You can
imagine, Father dear, how we've been handicapped for water. After our
first week we never gave our patients a drink that had not been boiled
at the house. We hired a stout peasant woman--there were no men to be
had--to carry it--two buckets full on an ox-yoke! She followed us from
place to place. We did our best to make the sick understand how
dangerous it was to drink the dreadful water used in Valievo. We didn't
succeed very well, though some of them would do almost anything to
please us. When we took over the old church we were put to it for water
at first. It had to be carried for nearly a mile. Then, oh, Happy Day,
Dr. Helen and I made up our minds there must be water above us
somewhere and we'd find it and pipe it down. We found a perfectly good,
bubbling spring, grown about with willows. We paid the owner of the
land his price for the water and I, Father, _I_, your spoiled, useless
daughter, stood over three crippled Serbians while they cleaned and
walled that spring and I, _I_ taught them how to make a trough of
boards to bring it to the house. At least I began by making myself a
joint of the wooden trough we used to see at home and when they
understood they made something far better. Now it flows, cold and sweet
and clear into the sanitarium. I'm just crazy over it."

Nothing stirred Dick or alarmed Reuben Cowder more than the long fight
with typhus, which began late in the year in Serbia--and lasted through
the winter. It was not at first realized that the peculiar form of the
disease which ravaged the country was carried by body lice, but where
it was known, the war on the pests which the unit had always waged took
on a fury and an ingenuity worthy of the enemy. It was war, war, war.
The girls shaved, sulphurized and burned from morning until night. They
isolated the incoming, they so frightened their patients by their
horror at a single beastie that it came to be a shame and a crime to be
caught with one. And they conquered. And with the conquest typhus
slowly retired from every spot in which they ruled. Nancy was jubilant.

"We've met the enemy and they are ours. We have a new National Anthem
and we sing it daily. Don't tell it to the Sabinsport Woman's Club. It
would swoon with shock--but, oh Father, if you'd seen what we have
seen--if you had known the cause and if you had labored and sweat day
and night for weeks to remove that cause, you would understand why we
sing what we do. The words came to us from the Berry unit over the
mountain where they, too, have fought and won--indeed from them we
learned the danger and the way to meet it. Now take our National Anthem
straight, Father:

                       "There are no lice on us,
                       There are no lice on us,
                         No lice on us.
                       There may be one or two
                       Great big fat lice on you,
                         NO LICE ON US."

Reuben Cowder read that to Dick with tears running down his cheeks.

"My little Nancy," he said.

"She's a brave lady," said Dick.

The spring and summer came and went. The letters were unfailingly
cheerful. They had settled down to work. With the end of the fighting
and the conquest of typhus their life was more like that of a normal
hospital. If primitive, it was sufficient. There was but one exciting
episode. It came in one of the spring letters.

"A curious thing has happened, Father; one of the strange meetings this
war is continually bringing about. A week ago an ox-cart drove in from
the north with a Serbian wounded months ago--his leg had been
amputated--sawed off. He had had no care in the winter. He had had
typhus somewhere back in the mountains. Friendly peasants had tried to
take care of him, but he was in a terrible shape--no flesh--just a
spark of life left. They brought him finally to us--and we did our best
of course. It's strange what a fury to save seizes you when a poor
shattered thing like this is put into your hands. You fight and
fight--and won't give in, and we won with this man, but I don't believe
we would if he had not been so determined to live. He whispered it to
one of the girls, speaking for the first time days after he came,
whispered in perfectly good English, 'I must live.' She almost turned
his broth over him she was so surprised. It was strange to us to find
one like that. Most of them are so done they don't help--just lie
staring, waiting to die, and only asking not to be touched. I have seen
my dogs look at me as they do when they were dying. Their eyes always
beg that you let them die in peace.

"Well, he grew stronger, and when he was able to keep his eyes open
they never left me when I was in the ward. I knew there was something
he wanted to say but was too weak, or perhaps his poor head was not yet
quite clear. It was as if he knew me. And that was it, Father. He did.

"One day when he was better he called me. 'America?' he said.

"'Yes,' I told him.

"'Sabinsport?'

"'What!' I cried, 'you know Sabinsport?'

"'Yes--my wife, children there, Miss Cowder?'

"'How do you know?'

"'I saw you once, at the Emma.'

"He has been _my_ patient from that hour, and if I never do another
thing in Siberia I mean to get him on his feet and take him back to
Sabinsport. As soon as you get this, cable if his family is there and
well. It will help so. His name is Nikola Petrovitch."

Reuben Cowder hurried the letter to Dick. "You know the man, what about
his family?"

"Living where he left them--well--and if they know he's alive, happy.
It's been months since they've had news. Stana had almost lost hope.
This will be wine to her. May I tell her Miss Cowder is nursing him?"

The old man gulped. "I suppose," he said, "it would give her more hope.
If you don't mind, I'll go out with you. If Nancy has adopted Nikola, I
guess I'll take the family." And so, for the first time in his life,
Reuben Cowder entered the house of a miner, bringing glad news and
honest sympathy.

The summer of 1915 came and passed slowly. News came regularly. Nikola
was gaining strength, was sitting up; they had made him crutches, he
was learning to walk; and then, in September, that which gladdened
Reuben Cowder's sore heart as he had not believed it ever again would
be gladdened--Nikola could take care of himself now. Nancy really
needed a rest, and they were all insisting she take it. They would
leave Serbia as early as possible in October, couldn't Reuben Cowder
meet then in London? They would cable when they reached Salonika, and
he would have ample time.

It was wonderful to Dick to see the change in the man with the coming
of the news. His silent tongue was loosened. For the first time in
their lives, his business friends heard him talk freely of his
daughter. For the first time Sabinsport learned in details of what
Nancy Cowder had been doing, for when the seal he had put on his lips
was broken by Reuben Cowder's change of heart, Dick told both Patsy and
Mary Sabins the story, omitting no heroic touch and cunningly enlarging
on two widely separated details--the romantic discovery, cure and
expected return of Nikola Petrovitch and the continued support of
Nancy's unit by Lady Barstow and her circle!

The story was quickly set loose, as Dick had expected it to be. The
Woman's Club, the War Board, all High Town seized it as one more
personal connection with the Great War. It is safe to say that the
location of Serbia on the map of Europe had never been known to the
tenth of one per cent, of Sabinsport up to the day that Dick confided
the adventures of Nancy Cowder in that land to Patsy McCullon and Mary
Sabins; but before a week had passed the library had it penciled in
blue on a fresh outline map, with Valievo marked probably within fifty
miles of the true location, but quite as exact as the maps which
amateur cartographers of the press were publishing; the Woman's Club
had engaged a lecturer to tell it what he knew of Serbia; a
subscription had been started, and in the alley on the South Side Jimmy
Flannigan's goat had been harnessed to Benny Katz' two-wheeled cart,
and Reuben Cowder, coming through as usual, found the gang in white
paper caps, marked with a crayon red cross, receiving Nick Brown who,
limp and groaning, was impersonating Nikola Petrovitch's first
appearance at the Valievo sanitarium. Here again it was Jimmy
Flannigan's big brother who, listening to Patsy at high school, had
inspired the play.

The keenest interest was taken in Reuben Cowder's trip--for of course
he was going. He was settling things for as long an absence as
necessary, doing it feverishly, joyfully--he who had always stuck night
and day at his post and grumbled at every business trip that he could
not escape. He would be ready to start as soon as the cablegram came;
Nancy had said early in October.

But October came. The first week passed--and no cablegram. The second
week, and none. And then there fell on Reuben Cowder with crushing
force the news of the second invasion of Serbia. From north and west
came the Austro-Hungarians--from the west the Bulgars--hordes of them.
This time there was to be no mistake. Serbia was not merely to be
conquered; she was to be crushed, and the remnants swept into the sea.

The suddenness, the mass, the extent of the attack, left no doubt in
Reuben Cowder's mind that whatever Serbia's fate might be--and that was
as nothing to him--Nancy had been trapped. Unless she had reached
Salonika before the advance, she'd have hardly a shadow of a chance.
And he told himself, too, that if she saw need, she would not leave.
His forebodings were so black that Dick urged him to go at once to
London, as he had planned, not waiting for a cablegram: "I will send it
when it comes. You'll be there to greet her when she does get out. If
she doesn't come, try to arrange to go to Serbia yourself."

And it was on this advice that late in the month Reuben Cowder acted.
Before sailing, he had in Washington used every official channel to get
information of his daughter, but to no avail. When it seemed certain
that for the time being--and he was everywhere assured it was only for
"the time being"--that he could not get news, he sailed, having first
made elaborate arrangements with Dick about informing him if anything
was heard.

By the time he reached London, the completeness of the disaster to
Serbia was known. Her armies had been defeated on every side--they, and
practically the entire population, were in retreat; had embarked for
Corfu. For the moment the little island held the only organized remnant
of the Serbian nation.

From time to time news came of this or that group of nurses or doctors
who had joined the retreat, had been taken prisoner, or on their own
had reached safety; but Reuben Cowder could get no clew to Nancy's
whereabouts, though he worked day and night, interviewing every
returning soldier or civilian of whom he heard, sending agents to
Salonika and to Corfu to search. It was not until the opening of the
year 1916 that news came to him that he trusted. This was when three of
his daughter's companions in the Serbian unit reached London. They
brought him the first trustworthy report of what had happened to Nancy
when the invasion began, and while they could give no assurance that
she was still living they at least left him the hope that this might be
true. How improbable the girls felt this to be, they took care not to
let the distracted man know.

Their story, so far as it interested Reuben Cowder, was soon told. The
approach of the Austro-Hungarians from the north and the Bulgars from
the west had begun the middle of October. The Serbians, who, through
the months since the first invasion, had been accumulating stores and
preparing for a second attack, welcomed the enemy, confident of their
ability to drive him back. Their confidence was quickly destroyed. The
mass thrown against them was overpowering. Nish was taken early in
November by the Bulgars, while by the middle of the month the army from
the north was sweeping Valievo. Nancy's unit, unable to believe that
they were in danger and unwilling to desert now that every day was
multiplying the wounded, remained at their posts until the population
was ordered out.

They quickly determined not to abandon the fleeing people. They would
go with them, a traveling unit. Two great ox carts were secured, and
their stores and a few of the most helpless patients loaded into them.
Two native women who had become particularly useful were taken, and
thus equipped these dauntless young women voluntarily threw themselves
into the great river of Serbs flowing southward.

Of the terrors and hardships of that journey the girls passed over
lightly. It was needless to torture Nancy Cowder's father, they felt.
They told him only that a week after they started Nancy had become
separated from them, that Nikola Petrovitch and one of their Serbian
women attendants were with her at the time, and that as they were in a
part of the country well known to both of them, they, in all
probability, finding it impossible to overtake their own party in the
rush and confusion of the fleeing mob, had sought to find a way out by
another route, or had taken refuge in some mountain farm or village
known to Nikola and unlikely to be reached by the enemy troops. This
was the most hopeful thing they could tell him, and they made the most
of the possibility, assuring him again and again that Nikola, although
on crutches, was now strong and so good a mountaineer and so devoted to
Nancy that he surely would find a place of safety for her. It was a
slim hope--but it was a hope.

If the girls had had the courage to tell Reuben Cowder the truth about
their parting with Nancy, he probably would have held the hope that she
had escaped as lightly as they did; but that they could not do. They
urged him, more for his own sake than for hers, to go himself to Corfu
or Salonika, and arrange for a search party of Serbians familiar with
the western mountains. This would at least occupy him. And so, early in
January, 1916, he left London.

Armed with every conceivable passport and credential that sympathetic
friends and officials could provide, he made straight for Durazzo,--the
Albanian port held then by the Italians--the port from which so many of
the refugees had been transferred to Corfu, to Corsica, and to Italy.
It seemed to him sometimes on his journey that he was following a call.
"Durazzo!--Durazzo!"--rang in his ears, whispered itself to him in his
sleep.

So impelling was his conviction that he must at once get there that all
contrary counsels, whatever their source, left him unmoved, and so to
Durazzo he went, arriving the third week of the month. The
Austro-Hungarians were already in Albania; they had taken ports to the
north. It looked very much as if Reuben Cowder had arrived only in time
to witness the Italian evacuation.

Searching for a lost one in that confusion was heart-breaking work.
What was one woman among the thousands lost and dead in that horrible
flight before the advancing army! The valleys, the hillsides, the
crannies of the mountain on the route that they had traveled, were
filled with hideous proofs of the anguish and death that marked the
escape of the Serbians. Fully half of the army and of the civilian
hordes that followed it were scattered or dead. Durazzo had been filled
for weeks with the laments of those who sought fathers, mothers,
husbands, wives, children--and never found them.

When he told the officials all he knew of Nancy since she left Valievo
in November, he was assured that there was not a chance in a
hundred--one despairing official said a thousand--that she was alive.

True, she might have gone through with some group which had reached
Corfu or Corsica or Italy, but the probabilities were that in that case
she would have cabled. It was not likely that she was alive if she had
fallen behind. True, she might be concealed in some mountain hamlet,
but no searching party was possible under any auspices now. "You would
have to bring over an American army to protect you, and I understand
you Americans are too proud to fight," one bitter, over-worked Italian
Red Cross official flung at him. In all his determined, well-ordered,
effective life, Reuben Cowder had never experienced before what he
acknowledged to be a hopeless situation. This was hopeless.

He had followed a call. It had led him to Durazzo, and now, as if to
mock his faith, he saw the enemy ready to sweep him into the sea as it
had the people his daughter had befriended, and for whom he was willing
to say now that she had died.

And then the impossible happened. Three days after his arrival, a Red
Cross official, who had been particularly interested in his case,
hastily summoned him to headquarters. A party of five men and two
women, disguised as Albanian peasants, had just reached Durazzo. Such
groups were common in those days. One of the men in this party--a man
on crutches, a Serbian, claimed that a woman whom they carried with
them in a rude hammock was an American. He had begged them to cable at
once to Reuben Cowder of Sabinsport, U. S. A., telling him his daughter
was alive. He had asked for a nurse, and one had been sent to their
lodgings. The Serbian had not been told that the man whom he sought was
in all probability at that moment in Durazzo.

The Red Cross official said he felt certain, from the passports and
papers that the man carried, there could be no doubt of the identity of
the woman, but he did not want to raise any false hopes. Mr. Cowder
must await the nurse's report before trying to see the girl. If she
were as weak as the Serbian claimed, the shock of seeing him might be
bad for her. A guide would conduct him to her lodgings. And this
arranged, the over-worked, horror-fed, shock-proof Red Cross unit
stopped for an instant to wonder and to rejoice over the amazing
incident, and then turned back again to snatch what human drift it
could from the flood of misery flowing through its hands, never again
even to remember the names of the father and daughter so miraculously
reunited.

Reuben Cowder never knew how he reached the wretched inn in which the
little party had found shelter. Seeing him reeling and running through
the street, one might have thought him demented, but dementia was too
familiar in Durazzo in those days to cause remark. Nikola Petrovitch,
meeting him at the door, shrank from his outstretched hands as if they
were those of a ghost. In all his imaginings of what might happen to
hasten the day when he could put his precious charge still alive into
her father's care, he had never dreamed of this. Reuben Cowder here!
Shaking his hands--begging for the truth--Was Nancy alive? Could he see
her?

Nikola Petrovitch had no squeamish notions about joy killing; also he
knew better than nurse or doctor the spirit and the courage of the
woman for whose life he had dared every danger that nature and man in
their most murderous moods devise. He took Reuben Cowder by the hand
and led him straight into the narrow stone-floored chamber where Nancy
Cowder lay, and he took the astonished nurse by the arm and led her
out. He was right, for a half hour later, when Reuben Cowder called
back the nurse, the first color that had tinged the girl's cheeks in
weeks was on them, and every day that followed, in spite of the
difficulties and dangers in getting away from Durazzo, and the
discomforts of the passage across the Adriatic on the crowded steamer,
Nancy Cowder grew stronger. She would get well, she told her father
confidently. These brave people who had brought her safe to Durazzo
should not have risked themselves for nothing. And as for her father,
never, never again would she leave him.

But getting well was to be a slow, slow process. They took her to a
nook in the French Mediterranean, and there for months she lay,
regaining little by little her all but exhausted vitality. Reuben
Cowder stayed at her side, and Nikola Petrovitch was sent back to
Sabinsport and to his family.

It was from Nikola that Sabinsport learned more of the heroism of Nancy
and the devotion of her Serbian rescuers than Reuben Cowder himself
ever knew. Her parting with her friends had not been an accident, as
they had led him to believe. It had been a chance deliberately taken by
Nikola when Nancy, worn out by her long year's work, had totally
collapsed after a few days of the terrible sights and hardships of the
retreat. They had found her one morning burning with fever and babbling
nonsense. It was then that Nikola had asserted himself. Give him a
bullock and a cart and the food they could spare, send one of the
Serbian women with him, and he would take her to a place he knew in the
mountains which the Austrians would never find. When she was fit to
move he would get her to a seaport or send her father word how to find
her. And the group of terrified girls, knowing that death was almost
certain in the rout in which they found themselves, believing this a
chance, consented, yet in their hearts they never thought to see her
again.

There was more hope of escape in Nikola's undertaking than they had
realized. Already the Serbian soldiers had begun to break into bands,
seeking hiding places little likely to be disturbed for months at
least, and it was one of these bands that, coming on Nikola and his
charges two days after they had started into the mountains, volunteered
to act as a guard.

No one ever will know with what tenderness and devotion these rough
soldiers, flying for their lives, cared for the delirious girl. The
cart had to be abandoned, but from the coarse blankets they carried
they rigged up a rough hammock, and for days took turns in carrying it.
The spot they sought, and finally reached, was a tiny hamlet, hidden in
a cleft of a mountain--a group of huts, a few women and children, a few
goats and bullocks and sheep--all huddled together for the winter. They
only too gladly welcomed the party, for if they brought tragic news,
the soldiers had stout hearts and willing hands, and put hope again
into the abandoned groups.

The guest house of the Zadruga, the one important family in the hamlet,
was set aside for Nancy, and into it went every comfort that the
community afforded--their homespun rugs, their homespun
"tchilms"--hangings, some of which would have done credit to a Persian
weaver--covered the walls. Homespun linen furnished her bed, native
embroideries were spread over every piece of furniture. She had been an
angel of mercy to their men; she had left her home to aid them--all
they had was here.

The Serbian woman had learned in the months at Valievo that in the
opinion of English and Americans at least, fresh air, warmth and
cleanliness were essential if the sick were to recover, and in spite of
the protestations of the inhabitants in regard to air she saw to it,
with almost religious zeal, that Nancy had all three. Great goat skins
made her a soft, warm bed; a roaring fire burned day and night in the
fireplace; and on the hearth there was always a big jar of hot water.

After many days of fever and delirium, the girl began to rally, to know
them, to understand where she was; and with consciousness came courage,
and she lent her help to theirs.

Reuben Cowder, spending his time and money and wits in inventing
devices to hasten Nancy's recovery, never could understand how anything
but a miracle had saved her life, cut off as she was from everything
that to him seemed essential. He little understood the power of
resistance to death in Nancy herself, and he gave nothing like their
due to the bracing mountain air the girl was breathing and the goat's
milk and venison broth on which she was feeding.

The real miracle had been their escape from the mountains to the shore.
Nikola Petrovitch had not waited for Nancy to rally to make his plans
for the hazardous journey. He was dominated by the fear that sooner or
later the Austrians might reach this hiding place, that he might be
killed. What, then, would become of Nancy? He must get her to the sea.

The project was not so wild as it would seem. The band of soldiers who
had accompanied him to the hamlet was one of numerous bands that,
breaking away from the main army in its flight, had taken refuge in
remote places in the mountains of western Serbia and in the Albanian
hills. Communications were soon established between these groups.
Secret routes for messages were opened. It was not long before they all
had learned of the rapid sweep of the enemy into Montenegro and
Albania, of the escape of their king and a portion of the people into
Corfu, of the setting up there of the Serbian Government, and of the
plans already afoot to rebuild the army.

Taking advantage of the opening connections, Nikola planned with the
soldiers for getting Nancy out as soon as she was able to be carried.
When, late in December, she began to sit up a little, he put his plan
before her, told her of the groups scattered from point to point, which
could be used as resting places, as refuges in case of need. These
groups would know the best routes to follow, would send guides with
them, would provide food. If she would risk it, he felt that they
should begin the journey at once.

Weak as Nancy was in body, she was indomitable in spirit and welcomed
the venture.

They wrapped her like a mummy in goat-skins, put her into a hammock of
the same warm covering, and with bundles on their back, started
out--two strong Serbian soldiers, the native woman who had never
wavered in her devotion from the beginning of the flight, and Nikola,
still on his crutches.

Nikola was never tired of telling his Sabinsport friends of the perils
and hardships of the journey. To him the marvel was not at all that he
and his fellows should have risked their lives, as surely they did; it
was that, whatever the danger, the exposure, the privation, the girl
they carried never lost heart, never complained, never failed to greet
them with smiles. They knew she grew daily weaker and weaker; but they
knew, too, she meant to live. Her courage was like a banner to them. It
was something they followed--something they must not shame by
discouragement or failure. They followed it to the end, reaching
Durazzo, as I have told.

To Sabinsport the tale took on the features of some great Odyssey, and
it was their Odyssey, for did not both the heroine and the hero to whom
she owed her life belong to them? Sabinsport had not yet realized that
at that hour every nook and corner of the European continent had its
Odyssey.

And it was the town's introduction to the Balkan question. Up to now,
Serbia had scarcely been included in the field of war. There was a
Western front and an Eastern for them, but that was all. Serbia's
tragic fate, brought home to them as it was by Nancy Cowder's escape,
set them to asking what it meant. Why should Austria set out to
annihilate a people? Why, even Belgium's fate, hard as it had been, did
not compare in cruelty with this. She meant to exterminate--nothing
else. How could such things be? Should such things be? And if not, what
should Sabinsport do about it?

The War Board was terribly stirred over the matter, and Captain Billy
did not hesitate to condemn the Allies bitterly for not having sent aid
in time to prevent the disaster. "If we'd gone into this war when we
ought to," he declared loudly, "this thing never would have happened.
Our boys would have gotten around there in time." And there was a
constantly increasing number of people who agreed with him.

Mr. John Commons, with his usual Shavian perversity, sneered at the
indignation of the body, and he spent an entire evening reviewing the
history of the Balkans, pointing out with real enjoyment the
inconsistencies, violated agreements, murders and cruelties with which
the states charge one another. He claimed he could match every Bulgar
atrocity with a Serbian, and quoted a well-known modern commission to
prove his point. They were a group of lawless states, born and brought
up to cut one another's throats--and that a peaceful group of American
citizens should lash themselves into fighting mood because one of the
cut-throats was getting the worst of it, was only another of the
unspeakable absurdities of this war. And why were they so stirred up?
They hadn't even remembered Serbia was in the war until this story
about Nancy Cowder came out. Fool thing for any woman to do--just
another example of the mania for notoriety that had seized women in
these times. He supposed Sabinsport would insist on making a lion of
her when she came back. He hoped she'd have sense enough to have
nothing to do with the people that had ignored her so long; that she'd
see their interest in Serbia was nothing in the world but vanity--their
desire to flatter themselves they knew somebody who had been in the
thick of things. Absurd, he called it--enough to make the gods laugh.

The members of the War Board went home much perturbed after this long
harangue, for they were considerably muddled in their minds. Was their
sudden interest and sympathy ridiculous? Dick was much interested to
find how the thoughtful ones figured it out. Of course Captain Billy
didn't need to figure it out. Captain Billy instinctively and promptly
took his position on any question which arrested his attention. He
never had to think--he knew. To him all this "back history" had nothing
to do with the case. Germany and Austria were the enemy. Serbia was on
the side of the Allies. That was all that was necessary for him to
know. Neither the War Board nor the town was so sure. In many a quarter
of the town Dick ran on efforts to understand what Europe herself has
so long and so fatally failed to understand. The boys in his club began
to ask for books on the Balkans. It was no uncommon thing to find the
butcher or the grocer catechizing Czech or Serb or Greek, getting their
point of view. And the stories they heard were repeated. Nikola
Petrovitch became one of the most popular men in town. The radical Rev.
Mr. Pepper gave a series of Sunday night talks on the submerged Balkan
States, boldly declaring for a United States of Europe, which, if not a
new idea to statesmen and journalists, certainly was new, and not very
intelligible to his congregation, most of whom thought he was going
rather far afield for something to talk about. And yet they listened,
tried to understand, and many of them discussed the idea--studied their
maps--looked up forgotten histories.

It was leaven--working leaven; and slowly there rose out of it the
conviction in Sabinsport that something was very wrong indeed in
Southwestern Europe, and that the powerful states of those parts,
instead of trying to right the wrongs by just agreements, faithfully
observed, were, and long had been, intent on keeping the hot-headed
little states in turmoil and in suspicion, watching their chance for a
plausible excuse to pounce on them one by one and absorb them.
Certainly this was as near the truth as you could get in regard to
Serbia and Austria; and it ought to be stopped. There were few, if any,
in Sabinsport yet, however, that felt that our responsibility reached
that part of the world. To rescue France and avenge Belgium might come
to be our business--_was_ our business, certain ones felt more and more
strongly. But the Balkans? No, that was not for us.




                               CHAPTER VI


Sabinsport took the fate of Serbia more to heart because just before
Nikola came home in March of 1916, with his thrilling personal tales,
Verdun had knocked her growing hardness and indifference toward the war
to splinters. That sudden fierce flood, breaking at a point in the long
line of which she had never heard, threatening as it did to engulf the
defenders and sweep over Paris, marked an epoch in Sabinsport's war
history. Not since the invasion of Belgium had feeling run as high as
now. There was a keen personal anxiety lest her chosen side should be
beaten, for the attack revealed to Sabinsport that she had a chosen
side, that she cared--cared for the Allies; and, above all, cared for
France.

Verdun broke a crust that had formed over the town; a curious crust
which had grown thicker and thicker through the winter of 1915-16,
justifying much of Ralph's bitterness and filling Dick with increasing
dread. Half of this was reluctance to going into war--not fear, mind
you, not at all. There was no fear in Sabinsport's heart of anything
that she made up her mind she must do, but there was a strong feeling
that she ought not to have to go into this war, that it was not her
business, that there ought to be a way out. It was clinging to this
reluctance through a growing consciousness that the things which she
stood for were being attacked, that hardened her. She did not see
clearly yet, it is true, that it was her ideas of life that were at
stake on the earth; but she every day more strongly suspected that was
the case, and she was reluctant to admit it.

An element in the crust, and a hard one, was her desire not to be
disturbed in her prosperity. She was making money. The whole face of
Sabinsport had been changed in the year and a half since the war began.
The great wire mill had trebled its plant and was running in three
shifts, day and night. The old linoleum factory around the Point had
never stopped growing. There were 2,000 girls there now, the pick of
Sabinsport and all the country round. When you can make twenty to forty
dollars a week, for eight hours' work, as these girls were doing, you
can get pretty nearly any wage-earning woman that you want, so
Sabinsport had discovered. Teachers had left the schools throughout the
county, stenographers had left their desks, clerks had left the
counters, and the farmers' daughters for miles around had flocked into
the factory. This meant business for Sabinsport. Months before her
housing capacity had outrun the demand. The onrush of strange men and
women had raised a score of difficult and delicate problems; but it all
meant money. Never had the shops of Sabinsport made so much, never had
they charged so much. And this prosperity had made a new class in
Sabinsport, a new kind of rich--the munition rich they called them.
They succeeded the class whose fortunes had been made in the factories,
as that class had succeeded one whose fortunes came from franchises;
immediately back of which lay those made rich by coal, the successors
of the original land rich. And, like each successive new rich class,
they brought into the town an element of vulgarity which their
predecessors had been gradually living down, the kind of hard and
reckless vulgarity which the sudden possession of money almost
invariably causes. There were not a few in Sabinsport whose families
had outlived all this unpleasant phase of wealth, who felt and talked
very hardly of this class. There was no question that they helped in
the forming of the crust over Sabinsport's soul.

There was still another element, which had much to do, I am convinced,
with a certain tenaciousness in the crust, and that was the conviction
that Germany was bound to win; and all they wanted, since this was so,
was to see it over--stopped--get the sound of it out of their ears, the
stench of it out of their nostrils.

No, Germany could not be beaten. She had driven back Russia. She had
won at Gallipoli, she had stripped Serbia from its people and driven
king and army to take refuge on an island of the sea. She had devised
unheard of weapons of terror and destruction in the air and under the
water. She stood surrounded by enemies, but enemies divided by seas,
divided in command, untrained and unfurnished; sure, and daily more
brutal and fearful because so sure. Sabinsport did not believe she
could be conquered. She had a great distaste for the conclusion, but a
fact was a fact, and what reason had you to suppose she could be held
when once she advanced? She would not make a second mistake on the
Marne.

And if this was the truth, what was the use of Sabinsport's going in?
Of course there were those who said, "It will be our turn next." But
Sabinsport was very far, at this point, from believing this.

This crust over Sabinsport's soul had more and more discouraged Dick
through the winter. Hard as it was, however, he held on, in face of the
town's settled conviction, to his belief in final victory. He simply
could not see either England or France giving up. It wasn't possible.
They weren't made that way. They would die and die and die but not
surrender; and it was this inner conviction that amounted to knowledge
that was both his support and his torture, for he did not fool himself
for a moment with any hopes of speedy victory. It would be long, long,
long years--and what years! Young men, boys, old men, steadily marching
to death, and always behind them others coming to fill their
places--the earth ravaged of its manhood. High hearts, great loves,
beautiful talents, beneficent powers, destroyed until the earth had
been stripped of its best. Women, steadfast and brave, giving lovers,
sons, friends--all that made life fruitful and lovely--giving them with
no waver in their heroic souls, the only outward sign their whitening
hair, their sinking cheeks, their anguished eyes. He saw the
destruction of the best work of men's hands, the stopping of kindly
industries, the making of things which brought comfort and health and
joy to men--all ended that every hand could be put to making that which
would best and quickest blow to pieces the largest number of human
beings or most certainly sink them to the secret bottom of the pitiless
ocean. He saw all this and still believed in victory.

We would go in. Dick never doubted it from the day that England's
ultimatum was given and refused. Our turn would come. It was the logic
of the struggle. Sabinsport would see its men march off to death and
mutilation, would see its women silently growing old, its works of
peace turned to works of war; all its healthy, daily life remolded to
serve the Great Necessity of conquering the Monster broken loose.

Most cruelly had he suffered through the days of Gallipoli, and in this
he was alone. It seemed to him sometimes that no one in Sabinsport ever
thought of what was going on in Gallipoli. The truth was the field of
the war had become too wide, too complicated, for Sabinsport to follow.
The war for her was the line from the Channel to Switzerland, and
particularly the part of it where the fighting of the moment was
liveliest, so she refused to consider Gallipoli.

Dick followed every detail of that cruel and valiant struggle. He had a
talent for the visualization of physical things which he had trained
until it was instinctive. Topography, contour, forests and fields,
towns, farms, churches, the turn of streets and the winding of rivers,
the look of shop fronts, the town square, its fountains and statues,
the town promenade, the costumes of men and women, the cattle they
prized, the horses they drove, the dogs at their heels--he saw them
all. It had been his play in travel to anticipate what he was to see,
and then to compare with what he found. With much travel, gaining
knowledge of things as they are and as the books say them to be, Dick
had grown amazingly clever in this play of construction.

But since the war this faculty had become a torture. It was so much a
part of him that he could no more prevent its operating than he could
prevent his mind from instinctively forming judgments. But never in the
war had he been so cruelly tormented as by the scenes which passed
before his eyes, as real as the streets of Sabinsport, every time that
he saw or heard the word "Gallipoli." True, his affections were deeply
touched. Some of the best friends of his Oxford days were there, and
one by one he learned they would never return. The sandy, burning,
treeless, waterless tongue of land, with its scanty footholds for the
English and its sheltered pits for the enemy that from over their heads
in the heights poured fire and death on them, to him seemed like some
hideous dragon--a dragon fifty-seven miles long, carrying on back and
in belly every weapon of destruction known to man and nature. He grew
sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through
spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and
sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the
burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or
hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly,
chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure.

Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack
on Verdun--and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone
now in his anxiety. Everybody _cared_. There was Patsy. Patsy was wild
with fury and with dread. The day and night she had spent in Verdun in
August, 1914--preceded and followed as it was by much looking at
fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends
and the officers who piloted them--had given Patsy a keen sense of what
Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and
heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnability of the place
when there--her sense of surprise that the French officers should look
serious, even anxious--had been shattered by the events of Belgium's
invasion. Did not Namur have encircling forts? Had she not seen their
guns and heard tales of their strength, and had not the Germans
_walked_ into Namur?

Oh, they would shatter Verdun and all its pleasant places. She would
never do what she had dreamed--go when she was old and sit again in the
garden of the little cafe by the Meuse, and reflect how here were
things that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she
had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had
seen--could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the
highest tower of the Verdun citadel and looked over the town and
country--and now, why now, those very buildings were many of them in
heaps--all that fair country torn open, its great trees down, its farms
desolate. The infamy of it!

Patsy lost no chance now to stir Sabinsport. In school, in her club,
with her friends, she talked Verdun, and she asked tragically and
constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or
others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium's relief, and that
was, "_When_ are we going in? Are we going to let this thing go on? If
Paris is to be ravished like Louvain, are we going to sit quiet?"

It was this unanswered question, stirring in Sabinsport's unsatisfied
soul, that made her take so to heart her first war casualty. It came at
the very start of the diversion by the English, the diversion on the
Somme, which gave the first real hope of relieving Verdun.--Mikey,
Katie's son, now Lieut. Michael Flaherty, if you please, went over the
top--and Mikey did not come back.

They left him in No Man's Land, with a bullet through his brain--a
clean, quick death, thank God--no writhing on live wires, no hours of
hideous, hopeless pain in the mire, uncared for, no slow dying--just
one quick stab when his blood was hot with the passion of war and his
heart was at the highest.

The news came straight to Dick, as Mikey had carefully planned it
should. Soon after he reached France he had written back, "If anything
should happen to me, Mr. Dick, I've fixed it so they'd tell you first,
and I know you'll make it as easy as you can for my mother. Not that
I'm worrying, but a fellow gets to looking out for things here."

Mikey's thoughtfulness was justified. As Dick held the message which
came to him at daybreak and tried to frame words which would be gentle
and merciful, he felt utterly helpless.

In the year that Mikey had been gone, Katie had become more and more
proud of him. She was confident he would return as a "gineral." And
Katie had a right to be proud. Mikey had done wonders. His strength,
his wit, his love of a fight, his proud conviction that he'd gone in
for Mr. Dick, all had made him a wonderful soldier. He had been
advanced, he was Lieutenant Flaherty by the spring of 1916, and Katie
had a picture of him in her pocket, familiar, indeed, to most of
Sabinsport because Ralph had printed it in the _Argus_. It had been
copied in a city Sunday supplement, much to the joy of Katie and the
pride of the Boys' Club and the War Board. At the latter place, in
fact, it had been given a place of honor on the wall opposite King
Albert and Papa Joffre, and underneath in big letters, printed
carefully by Captain Billy, were the words, "Lieut. Michael Flaherty,
Sabinsport, U.S.A."

And now he was dead. How, Dick asked himself, could he go to the woman
whose only son had given his life in doing his work? How could he
console poor Katie--he, the cause of her grief? An indirect and
unwilling cause, to be sure, but would Mikey have found his way to
France without him? he wondered now, as he sat miserably looking at the
yellow sheet in his hand. Katie had long ago worked it out that it was
the martial soul of the boy that had led him away. "He'd a gone without
you, Mr. Dick. He's a born soldier. He'd a gone wherever the war was in
the world if he'd never seen you." Would she still think so when he
told her?

He gathered himself up finally and went about his morning toilet. Katie
came at seven. His breakfast was always served at the stroke of eight.
He had only begun his dressing when he heard the distant click of her
door. He could hear her singing when, later, he gathered his resolution
and went to the kitchen. She was at the stove frying his bacon--she
turned a red and happy face to him.

"What's the matter, Mr. Dick, comin' in at this time of--" She
stopped--her frying pan high over the stove. "Is it Mikey you've news
of?" The dread anguish in the voice after the hearty cheer of a moment
before hurt Dick like a knife.

"Katie," he said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder--"my poor
Katie!" and the tears came.

"He's hurt! He's dead!"

"He's dead, Katie."

She stood stock still, and slowly a look of fierce hatred came into her
face. "God pity the Germans that fought him. It don't say how many he
killed?" Then, dropping frying pan and bacon, and throwing her apron
over her head, she fell into a chair and rocking back and forth, cried
in her sorrow:

"O Mikey, Mikey! What's the use of it all? What's the use of it all?"

As Dick recalled the miserable hour later, there was one strong and
uplifting thing in it--the woman's brave efforts to control her grief
and attend to his morning wants.

"The likes of me," she said, fighting back her tears, "forgettin' you
like this. Ye'll forgive me, Mr. Dick?" Dick begged her not to mind
him, to let him wait on himself--she wouldn't hear of it, but went
through the round. Never for an instant, Dick knew, did she have a
thought of holding him responsible. Never for a moment did she think of
neglecting him. Only once more did she completely break down.

It was when, in reply to her sudden question, "When will I be gettin'
my body, Mr. Dick!" he had been forced to tell her that even that poor
comfort was denied. Then again the apron went over her head, and again
that pitiful wail, "O Mikey boy! O Mikey boy! What's the use of it all?
What's the use of it all?"

Sabinsport took Mikey's death to heart. The boy had long been a town
character. From the time he had first appeared--freckled, red-headed,
round as a tub--on the seats of the Primary Department, his elders had
been forced to take account of him. The well of vitality in him bubbled
from morning until night. His pranks followed one another in a stream
no punishment could more than momentarily check. For originality and
unexpectedness, no mischief known to Sabinsport's School Board and
school teachers had ever touched Mikey's. It had a mirth-provoking
quality, too, which made it hard to be dealt with adequately. He did
"the last thing you'd think of"--the kind of thing which was passed
from mouth to mouth and set the men, particularly, to grinning. The
women took it more seriously--they had to deal with him. Katie "licked"
him, as she called it, faithfully and hard; and Mikey took it manfully
as part of the order of things. He had his philosophy: "If you don't
have no fun you don't git licked." He preferred fun, and hardened his
soul to punishment.

He had grown up decent as could be expected, and so merry that
everybody loved him. He was in the way of becoming a crack in the wire
mill when the _Lusitania_ outrage came, and he ran to join the avengers
as quickly as from childhood he had always jumped into any fight in
alley or street, in school or shipyard, when his queer sense of justice
was aroused. He was always a "grand fighter," Katie often said, when
townspeople congratulated her on the part he had taken with the
Canadians. There was no doubt but that Sabinsport followed more
carefully the famous fights of the English because Mikey Flaherty was
with them. The Boys' Club, the War Board, the _Argus_, Katie's friends,
Patsy at the High School and in the Women's Clubs--all watched for the
reports of what the Canadians were doing--talked them over, and
wondered first if Mikey, and later if the Lieutenant, was there. It was
the idea that somebody they had always known was living in the trenches
that gave an interest and a reality to mud and rats and cooties, which
grew with what they heard. Mikey's letters were read and re-read and
printed in the _Argus_ "by request."

Ralph grumbled at the abnormal curiosity, as he called it, for horrors,
and again quarreled with Patsy for cultivating the love of war among
her pupils, to which Patsy hotly replied that she'd never, as long as
she lived, cease to cultivate hatred of Germany and her kind of war.
And then for days there would be coldness between them. Patsy would cry
herself to sleep, and Ralph would go about glum and self-accusing, save
now and then when he would burst into cursing at war and all its
horrible effects. "If it wasn't for the war, I'd have friends in
Sabinsport," he told Dick.

If there was no one else in Sabinsport by the summer of 1916 to whom
the war had brought the same anguish as to Katie Flaherty, there was a
constantly larger number to whom it was bringing dread and pain. The
war--this war which did not concern them, continued to reach its long
and cruel tentacles across the sea and every now and then literally
lift a member from some apparently somnolent family. There was Young
Tom, as all Sabinsport called the eighteen-year-old son of Tom and Mary
Sabins. Young Tom had come home from school in the fall of 1915 and
announced that he had volunteered for ambulance service in France, and
that if they didn't do the square thing and let him go, he'd run away.
And they knew he would do it. Tom took it squarely and with inward
pride, but Mary Sabins' world toppled on its foundations when she heard
his ultimatum and realized that for some reason unknown to herself her
husband actually sympathized with the boy.

"But why? Why? It's not your country. You have no right to go. You're
my son. I will not consent."

"Mother," said Young Tom, with the cruel finality of youth that nothing
but its own wish moves, "I'm going. This is the biggest scrap the world
ever saw, and you needn't think I'm going to miss it."

"But wait--wait until you're twenty-one," she urged. "You must finish
college. You might be killed."

"Sure, I might--but I won't be. If I wait I'll miss it. It will be
over. Can't you understand, Mother, why a fellow wants to get into the
big things? And then, darn it, Mother, haven't you any feeling for
France? Why, France helped us when we were up against it, and we owe
her one."

But to Mary Sabins the appeal was empty. It reached neither her mind
nor her heart. Young Tom was part of _her_ world--her own private
affair. What right had the war to touch it? What could ail him that he
should do this mad thing? She had all her plans made for him--they had
money to carry them out. This spoiled everything.

Mary fought with all her strength, employed all the resources for
persuading she had developed. It was pitiful how few they were, how
defenseless she was. She who had always had what she wanted, she whom a
father first and then a husband had delighted to serve. She had no
weapons for fighting, she realized, because she had never needed them.
To ask had been all she had ever done, and here was their lad, her son,
failing her, defying her, unhearing when she cried, disobeying when she
ordered. She was horrified by the hopelessness of her resistance, and
shocked no less by the knowledge that Tom himself did not agree with
her; that he even rejoiced in the boy's daring.

There were women, too, who said, "How proud you must be, Mary." The boy
had gone early in 1916. She heard from him regularly, but she was
bitter in her heart, and for the first time in her life did not find
full satisfaction in her busy days of planning and buying for herself
and household, in keeping immaculate her luxurious home, in
entertaining and being entertained in the lively Sabinsport group in
High Town.

In her grief Mary had had but one real comforter--Katie Flaherty. It
was Katie's pride in her soldier that had persuaded Dick, soon after
Young Tom left, that she might at least help reconcile Mary Sabins to
the boy's adventure. And Katie asked nothing better than to talk.
"Don't you be worryin' about your by, Mrs. Sabins," she said. "Don't I
know all about it, and me a widder and him me only one? But I'm that
proud of him now I can't sleep o' nights sometimes. The pluck of
him--to get up in the night and go, fearin' I wouldn't let him. Sure,
and your by never did the likes o' that. He told you square and you
could say good-by and get his picture and go to the train and see him
off. What'd you done if you'd got up in the mornin' and found him gone
and nothin' but a letter left? God help me, Mrs. Sabins, it was the
first time since he was laid in me arms the hour after he was born,
that I hadn't waked him--and sometimes bate him to get him up to
breakfast. To call him, and call him and get no answer, to go scoldin'
in to shake him and find he'd niver been in the bed at all, and a
letter on his pillow--no, ma'am, you hadn't that. You saw him off. An'
he's doin' fine over there. Think of the good he'll be doin', haulin'
the boys that gets hurt to the doctor--that's what Mr. Dick says he
doin'. And fine work it is. Don't you think I'm easier in my mind for
knowin' there's ambulancers like him to pick up my Mikey if a dirty
German sticks him? Sure I am. You ought to be that proud not to be
mother to a coward." And so on and on Katie talked, and somehow Mary
Sabins always was for a time less bitter after hearing Katie.

And then news came of Mikey's death. It was the first time since Young
Tom had left that Mary had quite forgotten herself in sympathy for
somebody else. Dick telephoned her, and she had hurried to the rectory
where in Katie's kitchen the two women cried on each other's shoulders,
entirely unconscious of the difference in station that ordinarily kept
one standing while the other sat! It was the beginning of one of the
most wholesome and steadying friendships Mary Sabins had ever had.

But while Mikey and Young Tom were the two best known figures now "in
the war," they were by no means the only ones. There was John A.
Papalogos. He had called Dick in one morning soon after the first
revolutionary outbreak in Greece. His face was ablaze with joy. "It's
come," he said. "It's come--no more kings for Greece--we'll have our
Republic. I go to fight for Greece free. I go now, but what I do with
my place?" and he looked blankly at the full shelves of "fancy goods"
and the stock of fruits and candies.

"I'll look after it," said Dick, promptly. "Go as soon as you please,"
and John A. Papalogos, radiant with relief, had departed twenty-four
hours later, leaving a fruit store on Dick's hands--a fruit store with
a primitive set of accounts in the drawer and written instructions to
close it out and give the proceeds to the Boys' Club in case of his
known death.

"The war certainly is getting its hands on you, all right," said Ralph
when Dick told him of his new care. "You needn't worry about your bit."
But Dick only gulped.

There were others from Sabinsport gone overseas--men hardly known to
the town, and yet their going was swelling constantly the town's
interest, knowledge, sense of connection--these were men from mines,
factories, mills, men who picked up and left without even a notice in
the _Argus_--to join the Canadians--the English, the Foreign Legion.
They were of many nations--and months later--long after their going had
been forgotten save by a few, word sometimes came from them by more or
less accident to their friends--"Lost a leg at Vimy"; "Decorated at
Verdun"; "Killed at Messine Ridge." Their number was so considerable
that it finally led Ralph to investigate, and Sabinsport was deeply
stirred to read one night the names of fifty men whom the European war
had taken--twenty-five were foreigners, but twenty-five were Americans.

"It's getting us," Ralph said, again and again. "It's getting us." And
it was getting them. Dick, who at times watched almost breathless with
desire that Sabinsport should understand, and who again and again
groaned, "God! how slow she is to see it," began to take heart. So
deeply was the town engaged in thought and feeling that not even the
coming of a war of her own detached her interest. Indeed, it was a
little difficult for her to take the trouble with Mexico very
seriously, not being able to stretch her imagination to the point where
Mexico could be anything more serious to the United States than a
nuisance. Yet it did make a difference in things. When the call came in
June a hundred men and boys suddenly appeared in khaki on the streets,
making for the rendezvous. They came from the towns and surrounding
country, and passed through the town so quietly and swiftly that
Sabinsport gasped with amazement. She had not realized that she and the
neighborhood had soldiers.

It disturbed things some. A thriving little grocery closed its doors
because the young proprietor was among the called. His wife with her
baby went home to her father and mother. It was hard; but all she said
was, "It's war." Dick started when they repeated the incident to him.
"That was what returning Americans never ceased to marvel at in French
and Belgian women--their quiet answer to every hardship, every
sorrow--'_C'est la guerre_.'" That was what had amazed Patsy at Namur.
And here was a commonplace little woman in this land, which the
returning Americans always insisted was utterly lost in selfishness and
cowardice, giving up her home and all her dawning hopes, with the same
simple, "It's war."

Was war one of the universal facts accepted by simple people, to whom
life is all reality and almost nothing of speculation and theory? Was
it something they knew by instinct to be one of the inevitable
tragedies of human existence, like sickness and death, storms and
pests? Did all natural people take war this way, neither revolting nor
lamenting? Could it be that Americans, trained to despise and hate war
as a lower form of energy, an appeal only for those people who were
ruled by tyrants and forbidden to express their will, to use their
brains and self-control in finding peaceful conclusions for all
misunderstandings--could it be that they, too, accepted it with this
simple, "It is war"?

If the Great War came to the country, as Dick believed it must soon,
would Sabinsport take it as she was taking the Border Trouble--send her
men, readjust her affairs, go on with her daily duties? He wondered,
but he was comforted; and as he watched the way Sabinsport took the
successive steps of the Mexican difficulty, he gathered more and more
hope. She watched every day's events, discussed, criticized, condemned,
approved. She knew as much of the essentials as the metropolis, though,
as he realized, the metropolis was loudly proclaiming that Sabinsport
did not even know there was a war either with Mexico or in Europe; that
she was simply a sample of all of the United States outside of a
portion of the Atlantic Coast, lost in money-making and comfort-seeking.

Dick said little, but more and more he became convinced that Sabinsport
was taking the thing quite as seriously, if less noisily, than that
portion of the Atlantic Coast that felt that all loyalty and
understanding was centered in itself. She had her losses. The little
grocer never came back--shot in a riot. Two farmers' boys died of
fever, and Sabinsport buried them in pride and sorrow. "She takes it so
straight," he thought. "I wonder if it will be like this when the great
thing comes."

The great thing was coming, he felt, and he felt that Sabinsport
vaguely knew it--was only waiting to be sure. To him it all depended on
Sabinsport whether we went into the war--not on the Administration, not
on Congress, not on the angry, indignant voices that hurled cries of
scorn at her. We would go in when Sabinsport was sure! Sure of what?
When she was sure that we could no longer do business with Germany.




                              CHAPTER VII


This crescendo of interest was not lost on Ralph. He knew in his heart
it was sucking him in, had known since the day the news had come of the
attack on Verdun. He knew then that he, like Sabinsport, cared about
the result; but he kept his feeling carefully concealed, hardly
admitting it to himself.

He was still floundering. For some time after his frank repudiation in
August of 1915 of Labor's National Peace Council, he had fidgeted from
question to question in the _Argus_, trying to fix firmly on a campaign
which would advance his program for Sabinsport's regeneration and
either ignore or belittle the war. But nothing he attempted counted. It
was all trivial, temporary, beside the great stakes for which Europe
was struggling. The minds of his readers were there, not in Sabinsport.
It was so even in the mills and factories, where the men and women of a
dozen nationalities watched the contest and not his efforts to fight
what he insisted was their battle. What he did not sense was that these
grave laboring people were slowly realizing that _their_ battle was
being fought overseas. They could not have told you how or why,
perhaps, but feel it they did; and every letter from those of their
number in the war fed the idea. It grew amazingly in the mines after
Nikola came back with his tale of a nation driven into the sea. Such
things should not be. Were not the Allies fighting to put an end to
them, to punish those that dared attempt them? If so, was that not the
common man's battle?

The only discussion Ralph carried on in this period which really
stirred Sabinsport was his defense of the Federal Administration's
dealings with Germany. He was as violent in upholding its policy as his
own party was in abusing it. Not that he was any more willing to yield
the nation's rights under international law than his Progressive
leader, but he believed with all his obstinate, passionate soul that
these rights could be preserved without war. He upheld every successive
note, pointing exultantly to their skill in cornering Germany, in
forcing admissions and submission from her. "And not a gun fired," he
always cried.

Under his eloquent leadership, the town became familiar with every
point and every fact in the long-drawn-out controversy. The interest
was such that full sets of documents were to be found in more than one
unlikely place. Thus Sam Peets, the barber at the Paradise, had all
that mattered in the drawer under his big glass in front of his chair,
his repository for years for whatever interested him in public affairs.
And if anybody questioned or mis-stated either the position of Germany
or the United States, Sam would stop, whatever the condition of his
client's face, and pull out the document which settled the matter.
Captain Billy always carried, stuffed in disorder in his overcoat
pocket, most of the essential papers; and there was more than one man
in the wire mill that had them tucked away in some safe place in his
working clothes or some hidden corner of the great shop.

But the machinery which Ralph applauded, and in which Sabinsport
certainly wanted to trust, did not work smoothly. Again and again the
pledges on which we rested were violated; and then, in the spring of
1916, when the town's heart was still big with anxiety over the fate of
Paris, came the sinking of the _Sussex_, and the cynical declaration of
one of the German leaders in frightfulness that henceforth there should
be "unlimited, unchecked, indiscriminate torpedoing, directed against
every nationality and every kind of ship."

Germany yielded at the prompt threat of the United States to break with
her. She yielded, promised all we asked--reparation, right of search,
faithful attention to the laws of the sea as they had been at the
coming of war. But Dick had felt at the time that Sabinsport, as a
whole, would have been much better satisfied if the victory over
Germany in the matter of the _Sussex_ had been a victory of guns rather
than of notes. Certainly Uncle Billy and Patsy and those who followed
them felt so, and said so--Patsy with such insistence that Ralph who,
throughout the spring had been honestly trying to cultivate control in
her company, broke out hotly one day:

"You ought to be proud of our victory," he declared; "a victory of
civilized methods instead of barbarous ones, but to hear you talk one
wouldn't dream that you had ever heard of it. Why, Patsy, we're the
only nation that has won a victory over Germany since the war began.
We've made her give up the very weapons on which she counted most, and
we've done it without a soldier or a gun."

"A victory!" sniffed Patsy; "you'll see she's given in because the
English were getting ahead of her. She'll come back to it again. She
lies. Wasn't I in Belgium when--"

"Good Lord, Patsy, can't you ever for a moment forget Belgium? You
don't know yet, nor does any one, the real provocation the Germans had."

At which Patsy, white with rage, left the room, but only to talk more
and more vehemently, while Ralph the next day published an editorial in
the _Argus_ which was long remembered. He called it "The Unpopularity
of Civilization."

In the course of it he said:

"How small a place civilization has in the hearts and understandings of
vociferous America has been most vividly and interestingly demonstrated
in recent weeks. As an exhibit of its unpopularity, the reception the
settlement of our struggle with Germany has met surpasses anything that
I remember in our history. We were and had been for a year in a
critical case. We had undertaken to force a great power to admit that
she was violating international law, and to exact from her a promise to
obey it.

"There were two methods of attempting to secure a reinstatement of the
broken law. One was by arms. It was possible to say, 'Withdraw your
ambassador. We _fight_ for our right.' That way men have been trying
for more than a century to do away with. Civilization means doing away
with it--substituting reason for force, brains for fists, ballots for
bullets. Vociferous America subscribes to this ambition. Indeed she
says that it is for the sake of compelling this substitution--insuring
it--that she wants armies and navies. If this be so--if she does so
love civilization, why then, when she sees the complete success of
civilized machinery, is she so sore?

"Nobody denies that it has been a victory. It is doubtful if we have
ever had a victory of diplomacy that compared with it. England and
France say so. We know in our hearts it is a rousing victory.

"Suppose that instead of forcing an abandonment of the methods which we
contended were contrary to the laws of nations by arbitration as we
have done, we had forced it by the use of guns--is there any doubt that
vociferous America would have exulted--would have been thrilled?

"'It took so long,' they say. Several of the greatest nations in the
civilized world have been trying twice as long to settle a dispute by
war and no end is in sight. 'They may break their compact any day and
we have to fight.' Sure--but compacts settled by war do not always
hold. War means more war. Italy could not be held from the present
horror. She remembered earlier wars. This war settles nothing. When
exhaustion comes and arbitration begins--it will be by its wisdom that
the terms of peace will be measured, not by the sons slaughtered, the
villages in ruins, the debts only piled on future generations.

"'It shames us to be at peace.' Does it? Why? We have fought with our
brains for the rights not only of ourselves but for all nations. We
have won. The rights of all nations of the earth are firmer because of
our victory. But greater still in far-reaching importance is the
demonstration of what arbitration can do. It will make all civilized
methods easier to use in the future. We have set peaceful ways ahead on
the earth and done it at a time when all law, all humanity, all control
between nations was in danger of breaking down.

"Why is there so little pride in the achievement? There seems to be but
one explanation. We are civilized only in our skin--not clear through
that. We don't like civilization. We prefer to fight. We are afraid,
too, of what other peoples that do and are fighting will think of us.
They will think we are cowards. They and we _say_ that 'he who
conquereth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city,' but that's
for the gallery. We do not believe it.

"Civilization is unpopular with vociferous America."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Patsy was very personal about it. "That settles it," she told Dick. "I
shall never see Ralph Gardner again. He might just as well tell me to
my face that I'm uncivilized."

"She is uncivilized," Ralph shouted when Dick reported on his
questioning how personal Patsy was over his article. "Emotionalism has
made her harsh, cruel, unseeing. It is horrifying that any woman should
want war--contrary to their nature. There would be no wars if women
could have their way."

"You read that in a book, Ralph. Patsy is a perfectly normal
woman--that is, she cries to defend those that suffer. She has the
natural feminine anger towards those that caused the hurt, and she
wants to fight them, to hurt them in turn. There are as many women as
men in Sabinsport to-day eager to get into the war. There'll be more
and more of them, and when we do go in they will be as vindictive and
merciless as the men."

But Ralph hooted at the notion. "You are thinking of a cave woman,
Man--not of her of the twentieth century. Women never will support war.
I tell you, Patsy is not normal. Her whole nature is distorted by what
she saw in Belgium. Sometimes I think she is a bit crazy."

"Jealous," said Dick to himself. "Jealous of Belgium! Lord, was there
ever such a courtship!"

There were to be many of them before the war was over. Something
greater in meaning was sweeping through the hearts of men and women
than even their most precious personal desires. They could not have
told from whence it came or what it was--this fierce, overwhelming
necessity to sacrifice themselves; but they could not escape. That way
only was peace and safety and honor. The loves of men and women bent
before the flood. Patsy had been caught in the onrush. She could not
escape--would not, though her heart was breaking over Ralph's contempt
for her great, consuming passion. What she did not realize at all, and
what Dick could not make her see, was that Ralph himself had in these
last years been swept away by a splendid, unselfish ideal akin to her
own, that all his efforts in Sabinsport had been to realize his hopes,
that the war had stripped him of his cause, and that he had not as yet
found his way out of the ruins. It was all meaningless to Patsy. She
could not realize that he could no more abandon his great cause than
she hers, and, as he resented Belgium, she resented his absorption in
interests which had never stirred her soul.

Ralph had one refuge left at this moment. It was that the party, to
which four years before he had given an allegiance that was little
short of a dedication, would at its convention in June again sound the
high note it had struck four years before. He went to Chicago with a
despairing hope that he would there hear some hearty, strong expression
of faith in the things which were his passion, some definite plan for
rescuing them from the maw of the war. If he did not--"Well," he told
himself, "there's no place for me in the world."

"Don't count on there being anything there that you can follow, Ralph,"
Dick had told him. "The backbone of that program is military, all that
is modern in it is a reminiscence of 1912. Don't deceive yourself. Your
party at least is practical enough to admit that there is war on the
face of the earth, and that men everywhere must deal with it, which you
will not."

The convention was a cruel ordeal for Ralph. There he saw go down not
only an idol, but the group behind him, in whom he and so great a body
had had faith. There he saw shattered his hope of speedily building
into party gospel new and kindlier and more just practices between men,
greater protection for women and children, enlarged opportunities for
happy, satisfied living.

Ralph came back from Chicago sore and humble.

"It was a cowardly abandonment of something which had come to be for me
a religion, Dick. I think it was the greatest thing I ever felt--that
thing which happened in 1912. It was to make, what I thought it meant
come true, in Sabinsport that I've worked. It's all over. I've no
leader and no party. I don't know where I am in the world. I'm utterly
lost. What's the matter with me? Tell me square, as you see it. What's
the matter, that I can't get my fingers on this war, that I can't feel
it my affair? I believe I've got to do that, Dick, or give up the
_Argus_--for the war's getting Sabinsport. What ails me?"

It was a very humble Ralph that listened to the quiet voice of the man
whom he knew to be his best friend, the man who at least had never
wavered in affection in these long months when the two had been so
asunder in aim and in thought. Dick had taken their differences for
granted, he had never disputed, never been angry. It was always
possible to talk frankly to Dick without impassioned or angry
rejoinders. If that had only been possible with Patsy!

Now that Ralph had fairly put the question, "What's the matter with
me?" his friend did not spare him.

"Egotism is the matter with you, Ralph. You refuse to recognize that a
time has come when the world has different interests from those which
you think it ought to have. You have been going on the theory that the
one thing that is wrong in the world is the corrupt and stupid relation
between business and politics which has done so much mischief in this
country. So far you have been unwilling to admit that any other form of
evil existed on earth and the only way you were willing to fight this
was your own way. You had selected your enemy, you had laid out your
weapons. You would not consent to see other enemies or other weapons.
You have considered every other interest that occupied men and women as
an usurper, an intruder. The war called attention away from your fight
for righteousness--therefore it must not be tolerated. You refused even
to study the catastrophe. You took the easy, intellectual way of the
pacifist--war is wrong, therefore I won't try to understand this war.

"You've wanted Germany to be right because she had been right in
certain things you had at heart. You picked out those things and would
not see their place in her scheme. You rage at the use some of the
mills and mines make of welfare work; their efforts to turn attention
from a just distribution of profits, free discussion, full
representation, by improving conditions. I tell you, Ralph, that is
Germany's use for all her social and industrial machinery. It carries
with it no honest effort to appraise the value of the man's
contribution and see that he gets it; no determination to give him a
free voice and a free vote; no attempt to arouse him to exercise his
opinion, get from himself whatever he has in him that may contribute to
the whole. It fits him into a scheme; all of whose material profits and
privileges go to a selected few. Your industrial welfare jugglers are a
perfect type of German rule. But you were so obstinate in your
determination to have it as you wanted it that you would not see the
likeness. It has been your opinion, your propaganda, your desires, that
you clung to at a time when the very core of things just and decent in
the world was attacked.

"Why, why should as sensible a fellow as you settle back on your
particular interest in life as something permanent and essential,
something to be done before anything else, and rather than anything
else? How, in heaven's name, can you suppose your conclusions are the
final and supreme ones? How can you expect the world to give you right
of way? Why, boy, if you read your books, you must know that since the
beginning, men setting out to do one thing have had to do another. No
man has any assurance that the thing to which he has laid his hand,
however noble, however beneficent, may not be whisked out of the way
like a toy. What is your way or mine to the sweating world? It turns up
now one side and now another in its endless war for righteousness--it
asks for this method now, and now for that; to-day for war by words,
and to-morrow for war with fists. You can't choose either where you'll
fight for righteousness or how, Ralph; you can only say you will fight
for it--that much is in your power--but where? Insist on your place,
and before you know it you are alone without helper or enemy--the fight
has changed its field, its colors, its terms, its immediate object.
Insist on your method! You might as well insist the day shall be fair.
You fight in this world, Ralph, in the way the gods select for that
particular day. You say you won't countenance war, but what have you
waged but war? When you did your levelest to stir the wire mill to
strike two years ago, what was that but war--gaining a point by force?
What but war are those campaigns of yours in the _Argus_? There's many
a man would prefer to face a machine gun to facing you when you've
loaded the _Argus_.

"It's a hateful, barbarous thing--all war by violence is. To drive men
by hurting them is war, Ralph. Hunger, contempt, ostracism, do the work
as well as Mausers and Zeppelins and submarines. Don't be a fool any
longer--and by being a fool I mean insisting on things you know aren't
so, and on methods you know the world has temporarily flung on the
shelf. That's been your trouble--clinging to things left temporarily
behind. You say they're defeated--lost--that all the betterments you
and your friends had dreamed are ripped from the world. Nonsense!
What's going on in England and France? The recognition of the necessity
of accepting as government practices many a thing you've been turning
Sabinsport upside down to get. This war is righteous in aim, and all
righteousness will be shoved ahead as it goes on. That's what's
happening, Ralph. Governments and parties are admitting, without
contention, the need and the justice of measures they've fought for
years. After the war you'll find this problem of yours half solved, and
you will be forced to devise new ways of finishing the work, for
believe me, Ralph, you'll never fight again in Sabinsport in the old
way--you won't need to--Sabinsport is seeing new lights, dimly, but
seeing them."

"And what am I to do? I'm not the kind that climbs easily on a new band
wagon, you know."

"Ralph, I wish you'd try to forget the things you've been interested
in; forget the Progressive Party, for instance."

"Lord," said Ralph, "I don't have to do that--it's gone--dead."

"Well, wipe your slate clean, start afresh. Take the world as it is
to-day, try, without prejudice, to get at the things that brought about
this convulsion. I have no fear of where you will come out, if you will
but give up your idea of trying to reconstruct Sabinsport according to
the formula you have laid down. Incantations are useless now, Ralph.
You may cry 'Peace! Peace!' until you swoon, but you'll cry it to
unhearing ears. You can say your formulae backward and forward and wave
your divining rod as you will, but it won't work. There is no magic
wand that is going to end this thing. Realities are at work, and the
greatest of them is the reality of hope--the hope for greater freedom
to more people. When you once understand this, Ralph, you will find
that you have a religion far greater than that which the Progressive
Convention of 1912 gave you."

"Of course you're right, Parson. You always are. The war has won. I've
known it would some day. Don't expect much of me. It will be like
learning to walk, to accept the war."

Dick thought of the phrase often in the days to come, "to accept the
war," and he felt a profound pity for the ardent idealists of the land
that had been dragged from their dreams and their efforts and had been
forced by merciless, insistent, continuing facts to admit that war was
on the earth. Neither their denials nor their horror turned the Great
Invader. He came on as if they were not. They had no weapons of
eloquence, of reason, of beauty, that lessened his might, slowed his
step. He was Power and Life and things as they are, and they were
Denial and Fantasy and that which is not.

But Ralph's effort to "accept the war" did not engross his mind nearly
so much, Dick soon began to feel, as his effort to persuade Patsy to
accept him--as a friend, of course! He was too humble now to think of
more. Patsy's wrath at being classed with the uncivilized, as she
insisted she had been, had not cooled, and Ralph, so long as he was
engrossed with his hope of revival of progressive ideas, had not tried
to cool it. He had determined that they could not safely meet, and, as
he told Dick, he wasn't going to enliven everybody's parties any longer
by quarreling with Patsy.

"You certainly will take a good deal of ginger out of Sabinsport's
festivities if you do stop seeing her, but you know you will hurt
Patsy."

"Hurt Patsy! I can't conceive a girl holding a man who was once her
friend in greater contempt than she does me."

"Nothing of the kind. Patsy suffers over these childish breaks more
than you do. She really does, Ralph."

"But I don't believe it. And no matter if she did feel it, it's no use.
We've tried it out." And there he let it rest for many weeks, while he
set himself at a stiff course of reading of war documents. He had
resolved to read, he said, "without prejudice, and decide in cool blood
if the case justified war!" Again and again, however, as he was
attempting to follow the Prussian from his start, as Dick had advised,
he found himself beginning with his own advent in Sabinsport six years
before and his first meeting with Patsy McCullon soon after she had
taken the position of "Assistant to the Principal" in the high school.
He remembered exactly how she looked as she came briskly into Mary
Sabins' handsome living-room--a straight, slender figure, brimming with
life and curiosity--dark, clear eyes, dark waving hair, a nose with
just a suggestion of a tilt, and a mouth all smiles and good humor. He
remembered how full she was of her new work--to the practical exclusion
of everybody else's interests, he recalled--how she had kept them
laughing with tales of the terror of her first week; her suspicion that
her pupils knew more than she did about algebra and geometry and Latin
grammar. He had gone away without getting in more than a word on the
_Argus_ and the iniquities of Sabinsport and a discomforted feeling
that this young woman had made the most of her "social opportunities"
to which High Town referred with such respect.

He recalled, too--recalled it with the German White Book on his
knee--how, before the winter was over, his resentment at Patsy's aplomb
had passed. He had learned to match her lively reports of personal
adventures in her school with as lively ones of what was going on in
Sabinsport's streets and factories. If she talked school reform, he
talked labor reform; if she urged improved laboratories, he urged
social insurance. They often accused each other of not understanding
the importance of their respective tasks and they as often gibed at
each other for taking these tasks over-seriously.

He remembered that he missed her when she went away for the summer and
greeted her gladly when she came back. Patsy had been nice to him that
second winter. She had guests from the East in the fall--"real
swells"--people whose names appeared in the New York society column,
and he had said to himself, "She's certainly a corker," when he saw
with what genuine hospitality and with what entire absence of
pretension Patsy had entertained her friends in the ample farm house,
giving them all the gay country fall pleasures, quite to the horror of
High Town, who would have loved to have opened its really luxurious
houses and set out its really lovely china. Patsy had taken Dick and
himself as her major-domos in her festivities and had thanked him
warmly. "Nobody could have been nicer or more generous than you and
Dick were. I knew I could count on you. It isn't so easy, you know, to
keep people whose business in life is largely amusement--though they
don't know it--amused every moment in a simple establishment like ours.
But they really were happy, and it was largely due to you."

It had set him up wonderfully. But, after all, he hadn't seen much of
Patsy that second winter. There was the _Argus_ and the growing
printing business which he was determined should be strong enough to
support any fight he would make, no matter how costly in advertising
and circulation; there had been the perplexity about how and where to
attack next the duo of rascals, as he believed them, Mulligan and
Cowder, whom he had beaten once, but whom he feared it was not going to
be so easy to beat again. Patsy had not understood his zeal. She had
been frankly disapproving.

"Why set the town by the ears again, Ralph? It makes everybody unhappy,
and I don't see how your old reform victory has improved things. Of
course the franchises ought to be in the hands of the town, but you
must confess we get good service and not so costly. Wait awhile."

He had been very sore over that. He had made up his mind she was merely
an attractive, friendly, calculating young woman. That was the way he
felt about her when she went abroad in June of 1914, he told himself,
as he idly fingered Cramb's little volume, which he really should have
been seriously reading, if he was to understand Germany.

And now, after these two years of quarreling, how changed Patsy was
from the Patsy of Mary Sabins' dinner! What a transformation from the
calculating, self-sufficient Patsy he had known--this passionate,
self-forgetful champion of a sorrowing people! It had only needed
contact with sorrow to break down every hard strain in her, to drive
from her mind every thought of pleasure and profit. It was the weak and
broken men and women of that over-run land that filled her heart. And
how lovely she had grown under pity and labor for others. He had
stepped into a church one night, the first winter of the war, where she
was telling the story of Belgium. He had done it in spite of himself,
he recalled. And he could see her now, her face flushed, her eyes big
and dark with pity, her hands suddenly and unconsciously pressed to her
bosom as she rehearsed the story of a lost child--one she had found
wandering in the streets of Brussels--a refugee child of whom no one
knew the name--too little to know it himself, but not too little to
cry, "Mamma! Mamma!"

He remembered how it had gripped him and how he had resented his
emotion--how his pity had turned to rage that she should be giving her
strength to these distant orphans when, as he told himself in jealous
exaggeration, "America's full of them." Oh, he had been a fool.

It was as Dick said, he had no feeling for any orphans but those which
were included in his scheme, no sense of any wrongs but those which he
had set out to right. What a drop was all the misery in America to the
bottomless well of misery in Europe! And what a difference in trying to
do away with misery in a land of peace and in one of war! What was all
that he had been interested in beside the ghastly wrongs that Patsy
agonized over! Was he never to see her again? Did she mean her last
heated declaration? Could he make it up?

When a young man of Ralph Gardner's sure and lordly spirit eats his
rare humble pie, he usually leaves no crumbs. He humiliates himself to
the ground. Ralph was ready to do this now. He would write a letter,
exposing his egotism, his self-centered narrowness. He would tell her
why he was so unreasonable, so boorish. He wanted his own way in the
world and resented a war that blocked it. He wouldn't see a noble
reason for the war because the war interfered with his noble
reason--Ralph Gardner's scheme of social regeneration. He wouldn't
spare himself, he would outdo Dick's arraignment. He would lay all his
jealousy and resentment at her feet, and then ask if she could be his
friend again.

But his scheme of self-abasement--elaborated in the silence of his
restless nights--never found its way to paper, for Dick had determined
that the time had come for him to take a hand in the affairs of the
two. "They must find out that they are in love," he said quite
decidedly to himself, "and who's to help them to it but me? They'll
never discover it as long as this war lasts"--in which Dick was wrong,
not really being versed by experience in love-making.

He decided to give a party. Now, since the _Argus_ editorial on the
"Unpopularity of Civilization," Patsy had resolutely refused all
invitations where she thought Ralph might be, and as he was doing the
same, the two had had no meetings. That must be stopped. Dick called
Patsy up. "I'm giving a party at the Rectory, Patsy. I want you. Ralph
will be here and that's the chief reason I want you. He is very
unhappy. He has had a great blow--"

"What? What?--" stuttered Patsy. "Please tell me."

"You wouldn't understand, I'm afraid. It's a long story, and I don't
believe I have a right to tell you. Just believe me, Patsy, and help me
brace up a hard-hit man."

"But, Dick, you must tell me. I can't bear to have Ralph unhappy. Is
anybody dead?"

"No--no--Patsy--not that. I can't tell you--" and this amateur plotter,
to whom it had never occurred until that moment that arousing a woman's
curiosity and possibly suspicion over the sorrows of a man in whom she
was interested, was an effective means of kindling her passion, seized
the opening and put a world of mystery and meaning into his tone as he
repeated, "I cannot tell you."

"But I cannot meet him. You know how Ralph despises me?"

"But, Patsy, I know he does not. He comes close to adoring you."

"What nonsense! From you, too! What assurance can I have that he won't
fly into a rage and berate me for knitting--for I shall bring my
knitting?"

"Do--do--and I'll be responsible for Ralph. You'll come?"

"Ye-e-es."

"I wonder," said this intriguing parson, "if I'm interfering with the
work of the gods, and shall make the usual mess of it."

But he stuck to his plan, and that afternoon when he dropped into the
_Argus_ office casually suggested that he was giving a party and that
Ralph was to come. "And Patsy is to be there, and you are not to
quarrel with her."

"Does Patsy know I'm coming?" Ralph asked anxiously.

"She does, and she consents."

"I wonder why," reflected Ralph.

"How should I know the vagaries of Patsy's mind?" the parson replied.

It was funny, Dick told himself after it was over, the formal good
behavior of the two, the conscious restraint that said louder than
words throughout dinner, "I shall not be the one to offend." Patsy
skated away from the war in haste whenever there was even a possibility
of its getting into the conversation. She invented an interest in the
condition of the girls at the munition plant, and she was gentleness
itself in her questions and answers to Ralph. The girl was really
touched by the change in the looks and the manner of the young man. He
was paler than she had ever seen him. It was not unbecoming to the big
fellow, but it was a little pathetic--to Patsy. He was quieter, less
talkative, not at all assertive. "Something has gone out of him," Patsy
told herself. What was it? And it was not strange at all that she
should have said to herself, "There's been a girl somewhere, and he's
lost her." She wondered if it could be that the girl had like herself
believed in Belgium and France. Perhaps she was a nurse and had
insisted on going, and Ralph had broken with her. He'd do that, she
thought to herself, with a stiffening spine which she immediately
limbered, when she caught his eyes on her.

As for Ralph, he had come prepared to be very, very polite to Patsy. He
would not force her attention, he would talk only about the things he
knew she was interested in and he would agree with her if it choked
him. But somehow he found himself talking quite freely of things he was
interested in and which Patsy herself had led him to. He talked well
and reasonably of the munition plants, and he didn't take a single
fling at "welfare work." He was amazed how all these things seemed to
have fallen into relation to other things, or, rather, how there seemed
to be other things as well.

And Patsy's eyes--he softened and trembled under them. They were so
gentle and half-pitying. What in the world could it mean? He knew well
enough that back in that active little brain something was
revolving--something about him. But never in his life would he have
figured out that Patsy, as she sat quietly discussing Sabinsport
factories, was building a romance of which he was the broken-hearted
villain and a fair-haired nurse in France the broken-hearted heroine.

After dinner, when they had gathered in the parson's big library for a
talk, Patsy had another surprise, for now Ralph was almost ostentatious
in the interest he showed in Dick's war library--a collection which
would have been remarkable anywhere, but which was particularly
noticeable here, five hundred miles from the sea. It included files of
_Vorwaerts_, of _Le Temps_, _Le Matin_, London _Times_, of political
weeklies of many countries, besides scores and scores of pamphlets and
books. Again and again in the past two years, Dick had urged his friend
to use his library. "You have no right as a citizen of a country which
is getting deeper and deeper into this thing not to follow the
literature of the war," he stormed, but Ralph had hardened his
judgment--he "didn't believe in war."

Now, however, committed to an acceptance which carried with it the
obligation to know and to judge, he had turned resolutely to reading.
Patsy could scarcely credit her eyes and ears when she saw him pick up
book after book--criticize, ask Dick's opinion, borrow, say, "I've
finished this"--"I want to read that." Where was the pugnacious,
intolerant, scoffing Ralph she had fought with for two years? There
could be no fighting with this man. He was too meek a seeker after
knowledge, too hesitant, and apologetic in expressing opinions.
Certainly something had happened to him.

Two equally puzzled young people went home that night to dream and
wonder. For many weeks they continued to dream and wonder. Ralph's
reserve, tolerance, meekness, studiousness continued. He hadn't found
himself. He was so made that as long as his faith in himself wavered,
as he had no fighting objective, he could not press his interest in
Patsy. She seemed as inaccessible as a new faith. And Patsy, still
romancing over the girl he had cruelly driven from him because of her
noble devotion to the sufferers overseas, watched his changed attitude
with anxiety and hope.

And always, as the weeks went on, each was more gentle to the other.
Often their eyes met questioning and fell doubting, afraid; more
eagerly did they meet, more reluctantly part. Even Mary Sabins, who
before the war had harbored an idea that Patsy and Ralph were
"interested," but who, since Young Tom had gone, rarely noticed
anybody's relations--even Mary Sabins said to Tom:

"Do you know, I believe Patsy and Ralph are falling in love, and the
sillies don't know it."

Dick was satisfied with his interference. He watched them with almost a
paternal feeling. It was only now and then that a jealous pang seized
him, and he said, "Why, why is there no one for me? If Annie had lived."

But Annie, after all, was a dream, more and more shadowy. The Reverend
Richard Ingraham was not in love with a dream. He did not know it--he
who had so often commented privately on the stupidity of his friend
Ralph--but he was following Ralph's course, only he, less reasonable,
was falling in love with a woman he had never seen. It would not have
been so, I am convinced, if there had been in Sabinsport a single girl
known to Dick that had the mingling of charm and spirit that was needed
to win him. Surely he would have followed her as the needle the pole;
but she was not there. The girl that did draw him was a girl overseas,
a girl at whose name Sabinsport raised its eyebrows, a girl whose
father had described her as "slight and fine and free moving," and
whose life, as he had been learning it from her father since their
first talk, showed her brave and sweet and unselfish. If I know
anything of the ways of the heart, the Reverend Richard Ingraham was
falling in love with Nancy Cowder--the horse-racing daughter of
Sabinsport's chief pirate.




                              CHAPTER VIII


A real and sweet intimacy with Nancy Cowder had been going on in Dick's
heart almost unconsciously to himself. It was natural that this should
have been so. Curiosity over the girl had been awakened when Patsy
McCullon came back from Europe in 1914 and gave an account of her
charm, activity and associations--a picture very different from what
Sabinsport had quite unconsciously drawn for him. This curiosity had
become sympathetic interest when Reuben Cowder had first unburdened
himself about his daughter, and this interest had grown warmer and
warmer as week after week he read the letters that Nancy was writing
her father from Serbia. The nature which revealed itself so frankly in
these letters was, Dick realized, something rarely sweet and strong. He
grew as the weeks went on to watch for the coming of the letters with
scarcely less eagerness than Reuben Cowder himself, and he dreamed much
more over them. The girl was taking possession of him without his
knowing it. The thought of her was the most fragrant, penetrating and
beautiful that came to him.

When the great tragedy came, and she was driven with the host over the
mountains, Dick suffered keenly. Here again his old habit of creating a
picture of the physical surroundings tormented him. The pictures of
what was happening to the girl in that bleak and distracted land came
before his eyes as he went about his daily work, stinging him as an
unexpected shot might have done, or wakened him, shivering, from his
sleep by their horrible realism. His anxiety became so great in the
early part of the year that he had almost persuaded himself to join
Reuben Cowder in his distracted search, when the cablegram came that
Nancy was found. Dick had a vain hope that they might come home soon,
but the first letters destroyed that. It was only by long and careful
nursing that the exhausted vitality would be brought back, and the girl
probably would never again be able to support long strains. Reuben
Cowder was ready and glad, so he wrote, to give up everything else to
the care of his precious girl, even to never coming back again to
America if that were necessary.

Dick had a great sense of loss--one that he did not attempt to analyze
or justify--over these intimations that it might be possible that Nancy
would never again see Sabinsport. When Nikola came, however, a
different face was put on the matter, for he was all confidence that
Miss Nancy would never consent to live away from Sabinsport, that she
loved it above all places, and that the thing that was sustaining her
now was the thought of coming back with her father. They had many rare
talks, these two, and little by little Dick was able to piece together,
down to the last and commonest detail, the weeks of danger and hardship
that the little party had endured. It was a brave, brave tale, and the
more he talked it over with Nikola the prouder he became of Nancy
Cowder, and the quicker his heart beat at the thought of her.

Throughout the months when Sabinsport was full of anxiety over Verdun,
of sorrow over Mikey's death, of more or less irritated activity over
the Border troubles, Dick was daily going about her streets, sharing in
her sorrows and in her perplexities, always deep in his mind and in his
heart the thought of this girl over the seas.

And the girl herself--the last thing that Dick dreamed was that she was
beginning to establish an intimacy with him. It could hardly have been
otherwise. Reuben Cowder had a profound sense of obligation to the
young man. For the first time in many years he had had a confidant. Not
indeed since his wife died had Reuben Cowder talked freely to any
living being. He told this to his daughter. "He is a man," he said,
"that you open your heart to. I don't know why it is, but I knew that I
could go to him and say what I could say to no other man in Sabinsport,
however long I had known him. You get something from him--I don't know
what it is. I suppose it's sympathy and understanding. It is not what
he says, but it's a very real thing, and everybody gets it, everybody
in Sabinsport. When he dropped down there among us at the time of the
accident at the 'Emma,' it was to him that all those poor souls turned,
not to us. Jake Mulligan feels just as I do about it, and so does Tom
Sabins, and so does Nikola and so does John Starrett, and even the Rev.
Mr. Pepper. He's a man--a man that seems to touch everybody. I suppose
he is what you call human--I don't know, but I do know that Sabinsport
is a vastly better place to live in because of Dick Ingraham. Why,
Nancy," he said, "I could never have found you in the world if it had
not been for him. I would not have had the courage. My tongue would
have been tied in my search. I don't know but that's the greatest thing
that Dick Ingraham has done for me--he has loosened my tongue. Nobody
ever did that before for me but your mother."

And so, day after day, as they sat on their terrace overlooking the
blue Mediterranean, the man would talk of Sabinsport and of Dick
Ingraham, and his daughter realized that he was seeing the world
through new eyes--his town, his business, his future; and her heart
grew big with thankfulness to the man that had helped work this
transformation, and more and more eagerly did she look forward to the
time when she should see him, when she should know him and could thank
him.

It was not until late in the fall that definite assurance of a quick
return came to Dick. An exultant letter from Reuben Cowder told him
they were leaving their nook on the sea for London, and that as soon as
it could be arranged they would sail for home. The certainty that Nancy
was coming, that he should meet her, after all these long months of
intimacy with her, filled him with an unreasoning kind of dread. Might
it not be that he would discover that he must give up this lovely thing
that he had been treasuring in his heart? It was as if he had been
growing in some shady, secret corner of his garden a delicate and rare
plant, and that the time had come when he must take it into the full
sun, and he feared what the change might do--feared lest it was
something that could not endure the wide, roaring out of doors. There
was a real dread in his heart when, without warning, one night early in
December, he listened to a cheerful voice which he scarcely recognized,
calling to him over the telephone, "Hello, Ingraham!--this is
Cowder--how are you?" and as he accepted the hearty invitation to "come
out with me to-morrow afternoon and meet my girl."

Dick found his friend much changed. Reuben Cowder had been what
Sabinsport called a "sour" man, a "hard" man. He had never talked
except when it was necessary, and then so straight to the point, so
bluntly and finally, that those familiar with him feared his silence
less than his words. He had a smile which was so rare, so joyless, that
one would rather he frowned, for the smile made one sorry for him and
uneasy lest one's judgment of him as cruel, greedy and unfeeling might,
after all, need qualification. He had a way of walking with his eyes on
the ground. Ralph said it was so nothing would distract his attention
from his eternal scheming to "do" Sabinsport. This stoop in his walk,
his grizzled hair, his stern face, made him look old--a "hard old man"
he was frequently called.

No one would have described him now as old, and this in spite of the
fact that his hair was perfectly white--one of the results of his weeks
of torture over Nancy's fate. Nothing was more noticeable about him now
than that he walked erect with head well back and eyes that shone. If
he talked but little more, he smiled freely and indiscriminately at all
the world. The change in him was a nine days' wonder to the town. To
Dick, dining at his side out at the farm, it was a miracle. "It's a
resurrection of things all but dead in him," he thought to himself, "a
marvel that only love and joy could work."

"I've told Nancy," said Reuben Cowder, "that you are the best friend I
ever had, that if it hadn't been for you I don't believe I ever would
have found her--wouldn't have had the courage and faith. So, you see,
she is very anxious to see you, and I want you to like her. She's going
to stay here now, she says, with me, and I don't want her to be
lonesome."

"She'll never be lonesome here," was Dick's first thought at the sight
of her flying across the lawn to meet the car, a half dozen dogs at her
heels. And his second thought, as they stopped and she stood beside
them, was her father's description of the months before--"so slight and
fine and free-moving."

She was all that--and beautiful, too--a girl of twenty-four, dark hair
and eyes, a high-bred face of delicate features, its fine coloring
heightened by her romp with the dogs and set off by a sweater and tam
as nearly the shade of her cheeks as wool could imitate. She gave a
warm, firm hand to Dick, and looking him frankly in the eye, said:
"Father has told me about you. I am glad you have come to see us."

There was no question of being at home with her. She had so simply and
sweetly taken him in that it was as if he had always known her. It
seemed entirely natural to be walking up to the house with her, to stop
on the veranda and look over the valley, lying now brown and gray with
the broad river glittering through it; to go in to tea before the great
open fire; to talk of all sorts of things, the latest war news, Reuben
Cowder's day in town, the dogs, the telephone talks she had with Patsy,
who was coming out Sunday afternoon with her father and mother, her
meeting with Patsy in London two and a half years ago, the Boys' Club,
Nikola, whom she had run out to see in the morning--"her first morning,
too," thought Dick, with a glow of something like pride.

In the hour, which Dick was always to remember in its every detail,
there was but one alarm. It was when Nancy suddenly asked:

"But how about Otto, Father. Did you see him? Isn't he here? I thought
surely he would telephone me."

Dick thought she looked a little hurt, and he knew Reuben Cowder evaded
when he answered, with a quick and warning look at him, "He's in New
York probably. I didn't ask about him, I was so busy. I will telephone
if you wish," but Nancy said, "No, he must be away or he would have
been out."

It was quite as natural as everything else about it, but it raised a
cloud. "She did not know, then, that Reuben Cowder had quarreled with
Otto. She did not know there was a question in Sabinsport's mind about
his loyalty. And could it be that she cared for him? What more
probable?" If the Reverend Richard Ingraham went home, marveling at the
sweet and wonderful companionship so fully and naturally opened to him,
there was a decided uneasiness running through his exaltation. Did
Nancy Cowder care for Otto Littman? Would she understand the feeling
about him? Would she know, indeed, anything of the stratagem and plots
that the Germans had spun over the country, with what Dick felt was for
the most part decidedly amateurish and bungling skill? Would she
dismiss the suspicions which connected Otto Littman's name with the
intrigues as unfounded and unworthy? Did she care enough to defend him,
womanlike, even if it was finally proved that there was a serious,
nationwide, Germany-inspired conspiracy abroad and that he was
connected with the mischief-making?

It was many months before he was to have satisfactory answers to these
questions. And for the most part they lay at the bottom of his mind,
only working their way for brief, if troubling, moments to the top.
Life was too full, too insistent, too weighty, to give time for
questions that did not require immediate handling.

He saw much of Reuben Cowder and his daughter. The unquestioning,
affectionate acceptance of him as part of their life that had so
rejoiced and overwhelmed him that first day, continued. It was made the
more delightful by the entire naturalness of the Cowders' relations
with Sabinsport. Ralph and Dick discussed it again and again. The town
took them in, and they accepted the town as if there had been no long
black years when Sabinsport had openly scorned the man and his
daughter, while it secretly feared him and envied her; or when Reuben
Cowder hated them all with a Scotch hate because they so utterly
misjudged his beautiful girl.

All of this seemed forgotten now--something childish, not worth recall,
belonging to a day when men and women occupied themselves with lesser
things. The town's suspicions had been washed completely away by the
story of Nancy Cowder's noble sacrifice and brave endurance. They
plumed themselves no little on the fact that she belonged to them. The
change in Reuben Cowder, who, if he owned as much as ever of everything
and ran it with as high hand as ever, did it smilingly and generously,
wiped out fear and old enmities. And as for Nancy and her father, after
you've been where they had been, resentment for neglect and misjudgment
have no part in your soul.

And so the town came together in a way quite new to it. High Town and
the "Emma," Cowder's Point, Jo's Mills, the South Side and the War
Board began to connect up as they never had before. It was one of the
strange ways in which the Great War reached Sabinsport--stretching her
mind to take in facts never before known to her, softening her heart to
understand and sympathize where she had been ignorant and hard.

It was time that Sabinsport grew together, for the day was close at
hand when she was to be called upon to become more than a spectator in
the great tragedy. She watched with somber face but steady eye as day
after day the proofs piled up that she could no longer do business with
Germany. Dick, watching her with the eyes and the heart of a lover,
said to himself that when the day came, she could be counted on.

He was right. The day that the _Argus_ reported that Germany had again
torn up a pledge, that she had announced her return to the practices
she had so solemnly sworn to respect, he heard but one thing as he
stopped in the groceries, the barber shop, the lobby of the Paradise,
and that was, "Of course this means war."

Sabinsport took the breaking of diplomatic relations, four days later,
almost in silence, but with a growing hardness of eyes and a setting of
lips which meant to Dick that she could be relied upon for whatever she
might be called upon to do.

It was Ralph who at this moment stirred the town. For weeks now he had
shut himself away from his friends, even from Dick and Patsy. The
_Argus_ had been dull reading. Even those who highly disapproved of
Ralph's belligerent attacks on the established order missed his
outspoken talk. They had not before appreciated how much zest he had
given to life.

Ralph had been giving nights and days to the hardest studying and
thinking he had ever done. He had been saturating himself with the
history of Europe, the philosophies of the contending nations, their
ambitions and their procedures. He had succeeded in divesting himself
from all personal prejudices and feelings about the war. He had
achieved one of the most difficult of human tasks--a completely
impersonal, non-partisan attitude toward events which thrilled with
human emotion and which involved all of the deepest of human wants and
human dreams. He meant to see the thing right, and whatever labor or
pain was necessary to see it right he was giving. Gradually it unrolled
itself before his mind--the most terrific of human dramas.

Like Sabinsport, Ralph had come to hinge his final decision of what the
United States should do on whether or no Germany had still enough sense
of decency and righteousness in her to keep her given word, and, when
she proved she had not, his case was complete.

The day after the news came of her insolent announcement that she would
resume her submarine warfare, a full column of the _Argus_ was given to
a double-leaded, signed article. It was an article of vast importance
in Sabinsport, for it put into words the feelings that were within her.
It became her statement of the necessity that she should at last take
part in the Great War. And it gave her, too, some sense of an issue far
greater than the defense of rights.

The article was headed "A Confession and a Good-by," and it began with
a characteristically blunt statement: "As this is the last piece that
the editor will write for the _Argus_ for a long time, he is going to
drop the third person and use the first. That third person always was a
cramping for him as a dress suit." The piece followed.

  "I have always tried to say to you as nearly as I could what I
  thought about any matter which it seemed to me I should discuss in
  this newspaper. I have often failed to say what was in my
  mind--sometimes because I attempted to write of things of which I
  did not know enough, sometimes because I was determined to force
  your attention to things in which you were not interested, and
  again because I was more interested in converting you to my ideas
  than in attending to my business, which was the expression of those
  ideas. But, whether I have failed or succeeded in saying what I
  undertook to say, I have tried to be frank, especially since the
  war began.

  "I don't think there is anybody who reads the _Argus_ who does not
  know how the war has affected me. I have tried to believe, and to
  persuade others to believe, that Sabinsport need not concern
  herself with the war. I tried to talk and act as if we could go on
  with our daily lives here as if it were not loose on the earth. I
  thought that was our duty--at least, I wanted to think that was our
  duty. My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid
  out for myself for this town.

  "I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her
  regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting
  to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see
  now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force
  regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the
  size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport
  and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making
  what he thought would be a perfect world; I had a plan for making a
  perfect Sabinsport. And I have been in my way as narrow and as
  unreasonable as he.

  "You have been both tolerant and kind in your dealings with me. If
  this war had not come, I believe that gradually some of my ideas
  might have been adopted in Sabinsport; but the war came and, in
  spite of my fierce gestures and loud shouting, it swept over us. It
  threw me high and dry out of the current of human activities. As
  long as I refused, as I did, to go with my kind and take part in
  its agonies, it had no place for me. It took me two full years to
  discover this, to understand that my wishes and my ways were too
  puny for the times.

  "I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the
  few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual
  wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one
  man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind
  and strength to helping all men and women in this town to
  understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all
  know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader; but
  we all realize that it has been his wisdom and patience and
  suffering that has opened our eyes. There has been nobody in
  Sabinsport so humble, so ignorant, or, like myself, so selfish that
  he was not his friend and counselor. When I finally realized the
  hopelessness of my opposition, it was this man who showed me the
  vanity and the inhumanity of my position, and who urged me to use
  my little training and scholarship in trying to understand how this
  human tragedy came about and why there was to-day no finer or
  nobler thing than to take a man's part in it. For six months I have
  been following his advice.

  "I know now that this war came on the world because Germany willed
  it. It was necessary to her plans. It is no great trick to show
  from her own records why she wanted the war, why she believed she
  would win. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that while
  she has herself been telling us for forty years why she must have a
  war, we have not heeded. The few in France and in England that
  believed her were cried down as disturbers of the peace. As for us
  Americans, our stupidity has been beyond belief. There is scarcely
  a college or university in this country that has not its quota of
  men and women, educated in Germany, whose chief ambition has been
  to demonstrate the superiority of her scholarship and of her social
  system. It was her social machinery that captivated my imagination.
  Without ever having seen it in operation, without having any sense
  of its relation to her war machine, which she never hesitated to
  tell us was her main objective, I, like thousands of others in this
  country, accepted and lauded her. I swallowed her whole, because
  she insured her sick, her old, and her unemployed. All I knew about
  that I gathered from statistics and from observers who had seen in
  Germany only what they wanted to see.

  "It has taken me all these months to realize what Germany's
  invasion of Belgium meant, the abysmal depravity of it. It has
  taken me all this time to understand that her attacks on treaties
  and laws were attacks on personal freedom.

  "I have only to look around in Sabinsport among our own people to
  see this. There is Nikola Petrovitch--a sober, honest, industrious
  man, who twenty years ago was forced, in order to earn bread for
  his wife and children, to leave a country that he loved as well as
  any man in Sabinsport loves America. Why should he have been forced
  to do this? For no other reason than that Germany and her kind
  wanted this land which belonged to Nikola. He loved it so well that
  two and a half years ago he went back, and we know what he has been
  through since. He and his people were literally swept into the sea
  by those who wanted Serbia, wanted her wealth--the things that
  belonged to Nikola and Marta and Stana.

  "And there are many men and women in Sabinsport from many different
  lands, who have been forced to leave these lands. Now it is time
  that this kind of thing stopped, and the only way to stop it is for
  us to take a hand, and to take a hand at once. All the documents
  are in. It is for the President of the United States to declare war
  to-day.

  "The case is closed for me. This is the last article that I shall
  write for the _Argus_ until Germany is conquered. This afternoon I
  enlisted in the United States Army, and I hope soon to be doing my
  part toward staying the evil which I have so long denied to be
  loose on the earth."

It is safe to say that there was nobody in Sabinsport who took the
_Argus_ that did not read that article from start to finish. It is also
safe to say that the one person to whom it meant a thousandfold more
than to anybody else was Patsy McCullon. She read it with exultant
heart and wet eyes, and laid it down only to call the editorial rooms
of the _Argus_. It was Ralph who answered the telephone.

"Ralph," she began, "I--" and her voice broke in sobs.

"Why, Patsy," he said, "what's the matter?"

And then he had a great light, and for the first time in eight months,
the old dominant voice of Ralph Gardner rang out:

"Patsy, I'm coming right out. Will you see me?"

And Patsy uttered a faint and broken, "Ye--s."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Ralph flung himself into his car, and started toward the McCullon farm
at a pace which made those who saw him racing by say: "Something must
have happened. Wonder if there's been an accident." His lips were set,
his eyes flaming, his color high, the great hour of his life was at
hand. He could go to Patsy with a clear, clean purpose--the one to
which she herself was pledged. However long he had been in darkness, he
had reached the light. He need not hang his head before her. Was it too
late? The hot heart chilled at the thought, and the firm hand on the
wheel trembled so that the car swerved almost into the ditch.

It took twenty minutes to make the run for which they all counted
thirty short. It was nearly supper time when he sprang up the steps.
Patsy herself opened the door; cool, serene, her guards all up. Who
would have thought the cheerful, welcoming voice was the same that so
lately had vibrated and broken over the 'phone? Her pose was lost on
Ralph. It was not this but the voice of twenty minutes ago that rang in
his ears. She might fence if she would. He must know--she should not
put him away. He noticed she took him into the more private parlor of
the house, not the family room where at this time Father and Mother
McCullon were almost sure to be. She sensed something then, in spite of
that infernal calm.

Ralph closed the door and disdaining the chair Patsy offered him in
front of the fire, roughly seized her arm.

"Patsy, don't pretend. You know why I'm here. I love you. I want you to
marry me, marry me now. I've enlisted. I leave next week. I want you,
Patsy; want you before I go. Tell me, tell me, quick, Sweet--I must
know, I must know now."

And Patsy, her armor broken and fallen at his first sentence, listened
with thirsty heart. She drank the words like one whose lips are parched
from long desert dryness, and answered by putting her head on his
shoulder and breaking into happy sobs.

A half hour later a tea bell which had sounded twice before was rung
close to the door and Mother McCullon's voice called, "Patsy, your
father's getting impatient."

Patsy put aside Ralph's arms. "We must go, Ralph, and tell them."

"But you haven't said yes, Patsy."

"Why, Ralph Gardner, what do you mean?"

"But I asked you to marry me now--before I go--next week--will you?"

And Patsy sighing happily said, "Yes, Ralph; I don't think I could bear
it unless I were your wife."

They went out arm in arm to break the great news, and were not a little
amazed to see how much as a matter of course the elder people took it.

"It's time you two sillies settled it, I think," said Mother McCullon,
tears and smiles disputing for her eyes.

"I suppose," said Father McCullon, mischievously, "we may call this the
first victory of the war, Ralph. You would never have got her if you
hadn't changed your tune."

But Patsy and Ralph, looking at each other wisely, knew better. The
war--why, what had the war to do with their love? Already the world-old
conviction of true lovers submerged all history. Since time began they
were destined for one another, and neither war nor pestilence could
have kept them apart.

As Ralph demanded, so it was. Four days later there was a wedding at
the farm--a wedding so simple that Mother McCullon was shocked. Both
Ralph and Patsy would have it so. "We have no time for fussing,
Mother," the autocratic young man had declared, and Patsy was as little
concerned. She was going with him. She would find a home as near his
camp as practical. She would stay there as long as practical. To make
this possible without too great inconvenience to those with whom she
worked in school and town, seemed vastly more important than a wedding.
Were not these war times?

But a sweeter wedding never was, so Dick and Nancy and Mary and Tom
Sabins and the half dozen other friends invited said. Everybody was so
happy, everybody so proud, everybody so sure.

"It isn't often that I marry two people," so Dick said to Nancy as they
drove back from the station where they said good-by to the pair,
"without some inward doubts. I haven't a shadow about Patsy and Ralph.
They will work it out."

And Nancy said confidently, "I am sure of it."

Glad as he was for his friends, their marriage and Ralph's enlistment
threw Dick back again into a black and hopeless mood. If he could ease
the pain of his longing for Nancy by getting into the war! If he could
ease his despair from the sentence to inaction by possessing Nancy! He
felt that he was one condemned to eternal loneliness and eternal rust.
More powerfully than ever, as in the distant day when he had sought
Annie and found her dead--or when in August of 1914 he had sought to
make his way into the British Army and had been thrust back, he was
flooded with the conviction that he was doomed never to know the great
realities of life. Not a little of his ache came from the stir that
Ralph's almost primitive attitude toward the war had given him. Ralph,
once convinced that the future of the world was at stake, that it was
at bottom a struggle between men's freedom and slavery, that the event
could only be settled by war, had undergone a startling change in
feeling. He was seized with a passion for the struggle. He wanted to
fight--fight with weapons--with his hands--get at the very throat of
this enemy of men who had so long masqueraded in his mind as their
friend.

It was his thirst for battle that had made him enlist in the ranks.
When Dick had first heard of this decision he had questioned its
wisdom. "Why, Ralph," he said, "you ought to go into an officers' camp.
You'll be needed there."

"No," answered Ralph, "I want the trenches. I'm after the real thing. I
don't want to order--I want to obey. I want the essence of battle, and
I don't believe anybody but the man in the line ever gets it. Then,
too, I've hung back all these months, stupid ass that I was. I want to
begin at the bottom. All right if I can work up, but I want to work up
by doing the thing."

Dick understood. Thus he had felt in those first days before the hope
of a part in the war had been destroyed. He recalled how there had been
hours when he felt that nothing but the sight of his own red blood
flowing would still the passion within him. Ralph was to have a chance
to grapple with death and laugh in her face--the highest thing that
came to men, he somehow felt; and he would never know it.

That he had any more chance of winning Nancy than of being admitted
into the army, he did not believe. She was bound somehow to Otto, of
that he was sure. In the few months she had been at home he had seen
scores of little things that made him think it. He always remembered
with a pang the disappointment he thought he detected at their first
meeting when she had asked for Otto, and her father had told her he was
not in town. He recalled, too, how a few days later, when he was alone
with her, she had told him of seeing Otto the day he returned; how he
seemed depressed, how sorry she was, for he was her oldest, indeed
almost her only, friend in Sabinsport. Dick felt as if she were
sounding him. He gave no sign, only remarking that the war was sad
business for those who had lived in Germany as Otto had and who had
many friends there.

She had never pursued it, but she spoke freely of his visits. He never
felt sure that she sensed that hers was practically the only house in
Sabinsport into which Otto now went. What could make her so interested
but--caring? What could make Reuben Cowder look so grim when Otto was
present or when his name was mentioned but his belief that she did
care? Of one thing he was sure, he must give no sign and he gave none,
though as the spring days went on and the question of our going into
the war was settled and Sabinsport began to prepare to take up her
part, the two were thrown more and more together. It would have been
harder if there had not been so much to do, and if the town had not
taken it so much for granted that whatever the question, it was Dick
who must explain and counsel.




                               CHAPTER IX


It was this having so much to do that not only saved Dick, but it had
saved Sabinsport, for Sabinsport had gone into the war without
enthusiasm. She had accepted it fully as a thing she was obliged in
honor to carry through, but Dick felt more and more that neither her
heart was touched nor her spirit fired. He could not get over the chill
that her reception of the news that war had been declared had given
him--not a bell rang, not a whistle blew, not a man stopped work.
"Well, we are in it," they said as they met him on the street. "It's
all right."--"Nothing else to do."--"I'm for it." That would be all,
and the speaker would walk away with bent head.

How, Dick asked himself, a great wave of doubt coming over him, could a
town so unmoved, even if so determined, ever carry out the prodigious
piece of work which the Government asked of it, at the time the
declaration was made? They were to put everything in--their sons, their
money, their industries, were to be conscripted. They were to be asked
to change all their ways of living, and to do it at once. How could it
be that a town, seemingly so unstirred, would so completely strip
itself as Sabinsport was asked to do? Could this determination, which
he believed was in her, carry her through the period of sacrifice and
effort? Was she to have none of the help of pride, the consciousness of
a great cause? How far would Sabinsport go?

The first test came when the Government announced that we were to have
an army of two million men, chosen on the principle of universal
liability to service. "Never," declared the Rev. Mr. Pepper, "would
Sabinsport stand for that." And there were not a few in mills and
mines, not a few representatives of various peace parties, that
gathered about him. They loudly declared in the _Pro Bono Publico_
column of the _Argus_ that we had been plunged into war against our
will, that it was still possible to negotiate, that the American people
wanted to negotiate, that the President was playing a hypocrite's part,
that he was a puppet of Wall Street, whose only interest was to protect
foreign loans and to carry on munition making. The Rev. Mr. Pepper,
encouraged by the swift gathering of pacifists around him, engaged the
Opera House and called for a great mass meeting of protest. Sabinsport
should have a right to vote on our going into the war, if it had been
denied to the rest of the country.

What would Sabinsport do? Dick asked himself the question a little
anxiously. Would she foregather at the Opera House?

She would not. At eight o'clock on the evening that the meeting was
called that great forum contained, not the whole town and the mines and
mills, as the Rev. Mr. Pepper had been declaring all day that it would
be, but, by actual count, just two hundred people, of whom the Rev.
Richard Ingraham was one, for ever since the beginning of his life in
Sabinsport, he had made it a practice not only to attend but to take
part in all discussions, whether held in opera houses or on street
corners.

But, as it turned out, the two hundred were not to be allowed to take
their vote on peace or war in the orderly, quiet way which Dick himself
insisted they should have, for, before nine o'clock, a great tramping
was heard outside, and into the hall burst all of the active youth of
Sabinsport and at least half of its middle aged. They carried banners
on which were written in bold letters, "Right is more precious than
peace," "The world must be made safe for democracy," "Germany is a
menace to mankind," "Germany wars against peace, we war against
Germany." They not only carried their banners, but they brought their
orators, who, stationed in the galleries and on the floor, submerged
the protests of the Rev. Mr. Pepper and friends and turned the
gathering into a rousing declaration that, so far as Sabinsport was
concerned, she was in the war to a finish.

Each successive task the Government set provoked a similar wave of
protest. For days currents of unrest would run through the town, but
when the moment of decision came always Sabinsport answered
overwhelmingly in favor of the Government. There was the draft. As the
day of registration approached, the Rev. Mr. Pepper and his friends
prophesied riots; and, if not riots, at least a very general refusal to
register--but every man appeared. They came from the shops and mines
and banks and schools--a full quota. It was unbelievable. Why were
there such alarms of revolt before, if in the end there was to be
complete acceptance? Reuben Cowder had his theory.

"I tell you, Dick, the same gang are at work in this town that stirred
up the feeling against munition-making, that brought that Peace Council
here and so nearly put it over. I expect Pepper and his friends to
protest. That's all right, they belong here. That's the way they feel.
We can gauge what they say, answer back. I rather think they're good
for us, but it's not Pepper that is making the stir now. There's
somebody spreading rumors of discontent that do not exist. Who printed
those handbills that rained all over town the morning of Registration
Day, denouncing the draft as a form of slavery? Pepper didn't. He was
as surprised as the police. Why can't we get our fingers on them?"

But clever as he was, he did not get his fingers on them. Waves of
discontent, threats of riots and strikes, protests against liberty
loans and food laws, continued to agitate the town, filling it with
anxiety and irritation. They kept her distrustful of herself, unhappy
in her undertaking, but never did they turn her from her resolve to do
her full part. Indeed, it seemed to Dick sometimes as if the direct
result was to drive those of the town who felt the deepest foreboding,
the gravest doubt, to work the harder, thus really increasing the
amount accomplished. It was this that explained why, in this admixture
of irritation, Sabinsport almost always did more than her part. The
rumors and prophecies that she would not respond this time nerved her
to fuller efforts.

Just how things would have worked out in Sabinsport, just when and how
the war would have found its way to her heart and she would have come
to have the supporting uplift of realizing the greatness of the
enterprise to which she was pledged, Dick never quite decided, for what
did happen was so largely shaped by the news that came to them in the
end of June that, in the country twenty-five miles away, the Government
had decided to place one of the sixteen great cantonments in which the
boys that had been drafted were to be trained into an army.

Sabinsport herself had had nothing to do with securing the cantonment.
It was the only thing that had happened in that part of the State in
the last two or three decades in which neither Cowder nor Mulligan had
had a hand. It was certain shrewd and powerful gentlemen of the City
that had persuaded the authorities that this was the most perfect spot
in the Union in which to place 50,000 men.

Luckily, it was a very good spot, though probably if it had been very
bad, it would have been selected, given the power that was behind its
support. The land was rolling, naturally drained, the river which
flowed close by gave, by filtering, a splendid water supply. An
important trunk line ran within five miles of the camp, making almost
ideal transportation conditions possible, and this same trunk line ran
through Sabinsport.

It was announced that the camp was to be ready in twelve weeks for
40,000 men. The town, accustomed to building in a fairly large scale,
gasped in amazement. Some jeered, others protested. It couldn't be
done. It would take twelve months, not weeks, to make the place
habitable.

All through the summer the town watched the growing cantonment to see
how things were going. The highway which ran within a short distance of
the selected land was worn smooth with the cars which went back and
forth. The Sunday trains were often crowded with workmen and their
wives and sweethearts, and all they saw increased their skepticism. So
far as they could make out, it was only a great confusion of lumber,
ditches, turned-up earth, scattered skeletons of buildings; no evidence
of planning. More than one observer came back to say, sagely, "They
don't know what they are about. It will never be a place in which men
can live. And as to being ready in September, that is nonsense."

But ready or not, they found that the cantonment was to be occupied at
the time set, and to their anxiety over the incompleteness of the camp,
there now was added a new concern--a doubt which was hardly voiced but
which gave the keenest anxiety. It was the doubt of the recruits that
began to appear. "How could you ever make soldiers of such material?"
It was her own first contingent that had awakened this alarm. The town
had made an effort to do the proper thing when the boys went off. They
were to leave on an afternoon train, and there was a luncheon given
them and a little parade through the streets. But the pathetic thing
was that these lads, who so often shambled, so many of whom were poorly
dressed, all of whom were a little shamefaced at this effort to do them
honor, did not look like soldiers. Sabinsport had had so little
experience with armies that she could not visualize these country lads,
these stooped clerks, these slouching workmen, as soldiers. She went
back home not a little unhappy. How were we ever going to make an army
from such stuff in time to do anything? That was becoming her
engrossing thought. How are we ever going to do anything in time? Her
pride was touched. And there was a real but unspoken fear in
Sabinsport's heart lest we were not going to come up to the mark before
the world.

There were just two people in Sabinsport--that is, two who talked and
were listened to, that were not worried about the camp or the making of
an army--Captain Billy and Nancy Cowder. To Uncle Billy, all these boys
were the boys of '61, and every train load side-tracked on the numerous
switches that the main line had provided on the edge of Sabinsport in
preparation for the handling of men and materials for the camp--every
train load filled him with more and more confidence. "You'll see," he
said. "We were like that--just you wait."

As for Nancy, she was amazing to Dick. She was one of those rare beings
of unquenchable faith. With it went an almost universal sympathy. Dick
had expected to find her as obsessed with the cause of Serbia as Patsy
had always been with that of Belgium, as deaf to other calls, as
impatient with Sabinsport's diffused interest as Patsy was. But he
discovered at once that her heart was open to every cry, and that her
hand instinctively reached out to aid any human being that needed help.

She had not been at home a fortnight before she was busy planning with
Ralph and Dick and her father for better housing for the girls in the
factory around the Point; with Jack Mulligan for better schools at the
mines. When war came she was as sensitive as Dick to what the town was
going through. She realized, even better than he, how utterly
Sabinsport was cut off from all outward manifestation of war, how she
saw and heard none of its martial sights and noise. She was obliged to
re-create without the help of outward things. It made the girl
extraordinarily sympathetic. Indeed, in all Sabinsport at this period
of uncertainty and alarms there was no one who kept so confident and
serene an attitude or who treated with more humor and commonsense the
rumors and fears that ran the streets or saw with more practical eye
the things to be done.

It was Nancy who first realized what a camp twenty-five miles from
Sabinsport might mean to the town--the opportunity and the threat that
were in it. Nancy, it will be remembered, had been in London when the
war broke out. She had seen Kitchener's army grow. She had lived with
soldiers, too, in hospitals and in camps, and she quickly realized that
Sabinsport had a part to play. It was to Dick that she swiftly went for
consultation.

"They will be twenty-five miles away," said Dick.

"Oh, yes," said Nancy, "but what is twenty-five miles with our
factories full of girls, and the town wide open? With all their
homesickness and their need of friends and life, we must get ready for
them."

"But how?" said Dick. "What shall we do?"

"Well," said Nancy, practically, "we women must have our canteen ready
for their passing through."

But all that Nancy could say at the start had no effect upon
Sabinsport. Nothing in her experience could give her an inkling of what
it would mean to have a camp of 50,000 men twenty-five miles away. The
distance was prohibitive. What would they have to do with Sabinsport,
with the City within five miles? It was the City's business to take
care of the camp, not hers.

It was November before Sabinsport began to feel any responsibility
about the camp. By that time, the boys had discovered the town.
Naturally, it was the City so near them that had drawn them first, and
that continued to draw them in the largest numbers. And it was the City
which from the start had accepted the responsibility of guarding the
boys who came to her. The City had formed great committees of men and
women. She had passed ordinances, she had opened canteens. Hundreds of
her homes were open to the boys, her clubs and churches and halls
regularly on the Wednesdays and Saturdays when they were off. The City
did wonderfully well from the start, and the commanding officer had
applauded the cooperation that she gave him.

In all this activity, Sabinsport, twenty-five miles away, had not been
asked to help. It was natural enough. The City always had ignored
Sabinsport. To be sure, she was a nice little country town and had a
quaint hotel, with a wonderful cook; the best place in the country
round to motor out for supper. Sabinsport had always resented this
attitude. She was the older, she had never quite gotten over feeling
that she should have been the City; she who was there so many years
before, and who was responsible for the discovery and first development
of this wealth which now the City handled and from which she so
wonderfully profited. That is, Sabinsport was jealous of the City, her
patronage, the fact that she was never taken in. It was partly this
that made her unresponsive to all the pressure that Dick and Nancy
brought upon her in the early days of the camp, to organize, to look
after the soldiery that they felt inevitably would seek the town.
Always the same answer came back: "Let the City look after them. She
has not asked us to help. It's her business."

But, little by little, she discovered that, although she might make no
overtures to the camp, the camp had found her out and was making good
use of all she had to offer in the way of pleasure and freedom. The
boys had discovered two things in Sabinsport, the two that Nancy had
predicted: that she had factories full of attractive girls and that her
saloons were wide open. The better sort had discovered the Paradise and
High Town.

The consequence of Sabinsport's blindness and her refusal to accept
responsibility heaped up every day--the girl question, as they called
it. There were sudden marriages which shocked and distressed her. There
were no marriages, that horrified her even more. A new type of women
began to appear in the streets. And again and again on Saturday
afternoons soldiers were taken back to camp, but not to barracks--to
the guard house. Irritation and disgust with the camp grew in the town,
and then, late in November, sickness began. It ran rampant through the
camp, still insufficiently equipped with hospitals and doctors and
nurses to handle anything like an epidemic. Heartbreaking tales of
deaths, from lack of care, it was charged, filled the town. Nancy who,
from the opening of the camp, had given practically all of her time to
whatever service she could put her hands to, and who by her common
sense, her skill, her sweetness, had won completely officers, doctors,
and nurses, now gave herself up to regular nursing, coming back only
once a week for a half-day's rest--on Monday afternoon always, though
nobody at the time thought about that.

Dick practically spent his days and nights in service. He, too, had
from the start been received by officers and doctors as one of those
rare civilians who can be allowed the freedom of a camp and really
help, not hinder, its work.

But Sabinsport was not rallying to the efforts of Nancy and Dick. The
town was horrified at the things that she saw going on. She bitterly
blamed the commanding officer, the War Department, the Government. She
resented the intimations that she had had from both the authorities in
the City and in the camp that her failure to deal resolutely with her
saloons and with the strange women who were finding shelter within her
limits, was a menace to the boys. Matters were not at all helped by the
kind of agitation which had begun in the town, with the hope of
controlling the situation. The center of this agitation was Mrs. Susan
Katcham, president of an old-time temperance organization--a good,
aggressive, tactless woman, whose main effect upon Sabinsport had
always been to steel even the sober to the support of the saloon.

Mrs. Katcham now had no need to argue about the disastrous effects of
the open saloon. Every day was demonstrating it, to the disgust and
shame of the town. There was just one man everybody knew that could put
a stop to this thing, and that was Jake Mulligan, for Jake controlled
the police, and Jake owned half or two-thirds of the property in
Sabinsport on which liquor was sold. Mrs. Katcham went for him openly
and viciously, hammer and tongs; and all she did was to make him take a
terrible oath that he would not budge an inch in the matter; that it
was the business of the camp to keep its soldiers at home, and not his
to run Sunday schools for the protection of grown men.

The tragic thing to Dick was that he saw growing in Sabinsport out of
this clash, an increasing distaste for a soldier.

"Never, never," he said, "would the heart of Sabinsport be reached
until this was blotted out." But what was to be done. He took it to the
commanding officer himself, and between them they laid out a plan for
capturing Sabinsport's heart.

"It's melodrama," said Dick.

"It will do the work," said the General.

But that was to be done.

The execution of the plan, which the General and Dick had agreed upon
for the siege and capture of Sabinsport's heart, was not easy, in the
pressure and anxiety which the epidemic in the camp had brought, and
its probable effect seemed to both men more and more doubtful as the
friction between the town and camp grew.

It was on Christmas night that it was to be carried out. The Sunday
night before Dick came home, white with weariness and despondency. He
had had a day too hard for him, that he knew; one which his physician
would have called dangerous. But how could it be helped? At daybreak a
doctor at the camp had telephoned that Peter Tompkins couldn't live,
that he had asked for the "minister." Would he go down? "Be there in an
hour," Dick had answered--and he was. The poor lad was almost gone.
Dick sat with him to the end, took his last message--winced, wondered,
and bowed his head at the sheer, cheerful bravery with which the boy
took what he called faintly his "medicine." "Didn't take care like they
told me," he said. "Tell Mother they've done the best they could." But
Dick knew that while the loyal fellow might take upon himself the cause
of his own death, blundering orders and unthinking friends were
responsible. The boys had been told to bring as little as possible to
camp--only a suit case which could be sent back with the clothes they
wore. Peter, like hundreds of others in that cruel month of December
had started from his home in his oldest, thinnest clothes, without an
overcoat. He was going to throw everything away, he said, and not
trouble to send anything back; and there had been nobody in the town
with sufficient forethought and authority to prevent the risk he took.
He had reached camp chilled to the bone. The supply of clothing was
short. He had to go about for days in his thin, old garments. He could
not get warm, exercise as he would, hug the fire as he would.

In the tremendous pressure of preparation and organization, it was
impossible that the physical condition of each boy should be known to
his officers. Peter had to shift for himself in those first days. He
was shy and homesick. It was Dick, who was making a specialty of the
homesick, who had discovered how serious his condition was and who had
seen to it that he was sent to the hospital; and it was Dick who had
given him the care which the one doctor and one nurse in a ward where
there were two hundred very sick boys could not possibly give.

It was too late. Peter was dead, and, two hours before, Dick had seen
his rough pine coffin on the platform, ready for the journey home. A
clumsy wreath had been laid upon it by some sorrowing "buddy," at its
foot stood a cheap suitcase, containing all the boy's few belongings.
At the head a soldier kept guard. Dick's heart ached for the mother who
must receive the pitiful box. And he groaned as he thought of the many,
very many, he feared, that would follow it.

Sabinsport's temper at the moment weighed even more heavily upon Dick
that night than the sickness at the camp. The inevitable scandal, that
both he and the General had feared, had come the night before. Twenty
boys, off for their Saturday holiday, had slipped into Sabinsport for
what they called a "blow out." They had gone to Beefsteak John's, one
of the cheap workmen's hotels, had taken rooms, laid off their
uniforms, put on pajamas and called up the barkeeper. Of course he
could give them what they wanted, for they were not in uniform! And he
had done it.

The scandal had been made worse by the introduction of a half dozen of
the strange women who had taken up their dwelling in Sabinsport. Before
morning the crowd was on the streets, rioting madly. The boys had been
arrested and were in jail. The whole story was in the City's Sunday
morning paper. Sabinsport was disgraced before the world.

The General and Dick had talked the matter over in the hour after he
had closed poor Peter's eyes, and both had agreed that this probably
put an end to their Christmas celebration. "You can see," the General
had said, "how impossible it will be for me to do my part unless I know
that every saloon in Sabinsport is absolutely closed. That's my
ultimatum. They tell me that there's a man by the name of Mulligan that
controls the town. Could you get at him?"

"I could," said Dick, "but I don't know whether it would do any good.
Mulligan is obstinate. I am sure I could have persuaded him long ago to
close every house he owns in Sabinsport and willingly have stood his
losses if it had not been for Mrs. Katcham. So long as she continues in
the field, he will keep everything open to spite her."

"I don't wonder," said the General, sympathetically. "Same here. She's
been trying to force me to appoint a mother for every fifty boys. Let
'em live in the camp. Thinks I'm in league with the liquor interests
because I refuse--told me so to my face. You can't do anything with
such women. But you must stop the liquor selling there some way unless
you want me to appeal to Washington."

Dick had come back to town anxious and disheartened. "It's a nice
situation, and Christmas only two days away." He was sitting perplexed
and weary before his fire, when who should come in but Mulligan himself.

"Can you give me a few minutes, Reverend?" he called, in his hearty
voice.

Dick stared in amazement. "Of course," he said. "Come in." He helped
him with his coat, stirred the fire, offered him a cigar, and sat down.

"See here, Dick," Mulligan began. "I wouldn't come telling anybody in
this town I'm ashamed of myself but you--I am. That thing last night
was my fault. If I'd ever given the boys round town a hint that they
weren't to sell booze to soldiers, they'd never done it, uniform or no
uniform; but I never batted an eye at 'em. I've known all along they
got stuff whenever they wanted it. I never tipped the police not to see
things, but I never tipped 'em to see 'em, and that's what they was
waitin' for. If it hadn't been for that Katcham woman, I'd 'a' done it.
I'm that mean I couldn't stand it to see her get her way. Now, she's
gettin' up a mass meetin' for Christmas--think of that, a mass meetin'
on Christmas. Well, I'm goin' to beat her to it.

"I control ten saloons in this town--all except the pikers--I'm closing
every blamed one of them to-day--canceled the leases. I'll turn out
every doggone man that don't shut down. And I'm warnin' the little
fellows that they've got to follow suit. They're howling, but let 'em.
I have told them I'd treat them square, pay them for six months. They
know me. Let them sue if they want to. They know that I can prove that
they've been selling to the boys. There's not a jury in the State that
would give them damages. The bar at Beefsteak Jim's is closed now. I'm
going to make this town clean, so clean that the boys can play dominoes
without being laughed at.

"And I've seen the Chief. I've told him if his men so much as wink at a
glass of beer sold to a soldier, I'll fire him. I've told him he's to
run out any shady woman that shows her bleached head in this burg, and
put the camp onto any boy that tries to sneak into any mischief. I'm
goin' to make this town clean, Dick, so clean all these doggone camp
towns around the country that are rolling up their eyes at Sabinsport's
wickedness and calling attention to how good they are and rejoicing
that we've got it in the neck, will sing another song. I'll show them.
And what tickles me most is getting ahead of the Katcham woman. She's
not going to spoil our Christmas by her mass meetin'. When the town
gets up to-morrow morning, they will find that things are shut down. I
have seen to it that it gets out. Everybody will know without waiting
for the _Argus_, and you ought to see what's going in the _Argus_
to-morrow night. I'm letting it be known that the landlords in this
town made a voluntary agreement--note that, Reverend, voluntary
agreement, for the good of the army and the good of Sabinsport, not to
sell another glass of beer as long as this war lasts. Don't that sound
noble? Won't that shut up those neighborhoods in the State that are
taking pains to say how depraved this burg is?

"I don't want you to tell anybody I had a hand in this, Reverend. Just
tellin' you because I care about what _you_ think, and because I want
you to know the straight goods. It's goin' to be done, and so you can
stop worryin'. That's got me more than once--see you lookin' so
anxious. And then there's Jack. I hate to have him know over there in
France what happened Saturday night. I'm sending him the paper and
along with it a copy of the agreement. That's all. I'm not going to
have _his_ town disgraced again. So long, Reverend, and get some sleep.
You need it."

There were tears in Dick's eyes as he wrung Mulligan's hand. "You
better believe I'll sleep," he said. "Now, we'll have our festival, and
I'm counting on your being there. The General and his staff are coming,
and we'll have a surprise which couldn't have been sprung if it hadn't
been for what you've done. You've saved Sabinsport more than once,
Mulligan, but you never did it so good a turn as to-day."

"Nothing in that, Reverend. Thank the Katcham woman. I had to beat her
to it."

Dick went back to his pipe. He was too happy to sleep. He remembered a
remark of Katie's, made months ago, and he repeated it aloud, "The Lord
sure is a wonder!"

                  *       *       *       *       *

For several years now Sabinsport had had a Christmas tree on the square
at five P. M. of Christmas eve, with carols and prayers and the free
distribution to all the children of large and enticing stockings filled
with candies. At six, almost every house in town had lighted candles in
its windows. This year they were to have their Christmas tree as usual,
but, in deference to Mr. Hoover, the candies and candles were to be
saved. At nine o'clock on Christmas night, there was to be a community
celebration, the details of which nobody seemed to know, but the
program had been hinted at in every quarter of the town in such a
mysterious way that the anticipation was high.

Dick and Nancy had been responsible for drawing everybody in. The mines
and mills, as well as High Town, had representatives. Every quarter
knew that somebody from its ranks was to do something, though what that
something was was an entire secret.

Sabinsport had a wonderful place for a great community celebration--the
Opera House. When Mulligan and Cowder planned the Opera House they had
been in their most optimistic mood. They wanted it big--big enough for
conventions and expositions--"a stage on which you could have a
circus," was Jake's idea. The result was a great, gaudy barn with a
stage which would have done for a hippodrome. Financially, the size of
the thing had defeated its purpose, but for a great town celebration it
was magnificent. It was none too big for the affair in which Dick was
interested.

By seven o'clock of Christmas night, the Opera House was packed. At
seven-thirty the program began--songs and tableaux and speeches and
impersonations. It went without a hitch--swift, compelling, and, oh, so
merry. In an hour after it began the house was a happy, cheering crowd,
helped not a little in their joyfulness by the presence of scores upon
scores of soldiers, guests from the camp, and by the aid which the
applause was getting from two boxes filled with officers, the General
among them.

The program was almost finished--all but a single number which appeared
simply as Music and Tableaux. If the audience had not been so
interested, it would have noticed that up to this point there had been
but the scantiest of reference to army or navy, to war or country. The
very absence of these topics hushed them to silence when suddenly the
orchestra broke into "Over There."

It was like a call, penetrating, stirring. It hushed and thrilled them
beyond applause. The hush deepened when suddenly, across the long drop
curtain there flashed the words:--

SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE

The orchestra played on, every brain fitting the words to the notes:

          "Over there, over there,
          Send the word over there,
          That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
          The drums rum-tumming ev'rywhere.
          So prepare, say a pray'r,
          Send the word, send the word to beware,
          We'll be over, we're coming over,
          And we won't come back till it's over, over there."

Slowly the curtain rose on a scene that much looking in the last few
months at photographs and picture papers had made familiar to them--a
French town, the kind they knew the boys were billeted in, with its
long row of gray-faced houses, its red-tiled roofs, its quaint church
with its simple, very simple statue of Joan of Arc; and behind, rising
perpetually, mountains, along which ran a highway, climbing up and up.
A company of boys in khaki swarmed over the place. They were resting on
their arms, waiting orders. They hung out of the windows, sat in the
doorways, grouped carelessly in the roadway, swarmed over the pedestal
up to the very feet of the figure of Joan.

The house watched the scene with swelling heart. Then from an upper
window, there suddenly came a clear baritone. A boy, leaning out, his
eyes on the little statue, began to sing a song new to Sabinsport.
Alone he sang through the first verse, then the wonderful refrain was
taken up,

            "Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
            Do your eyes
            From the skies
            See the foe?
            Don't you see the drooping fleur-de-lis?
            Can't you hear the tears of Normandy?
              Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
            Let your spirit guide us through,
            Come, lead your France to victory.
            Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you."

It was but the beginning. It had put the waiting boys in the mood for
song, and the appealing refrain had scarcely died away when the tension
was broken by a merry voice starting, "Where do we go from here, Boys?
Where do we go from here?" From gay they swung to grave, and then back
to gay. "The Star Spangled Banner" brought everybody to their feet. "I
don't want to get well, I don't want to get well," set everybody to
laughing. Then came "Christmas Night" and then--"Home, Sweet Home." It
was almost too much for the singers themselves, for more than one lad
on the stage dropped his head, unable to go on. As the song rose, so
sweet, and familiar, so ladened with memories, the audience sat with
quivering faces and eyes grown wet. If it had not been for the emotion
which had seized it, it would have been sooner conscious that there was
an unusual accompaniment to the words, a rhythmical beating, which grew
louder and louder until it became a steady tramp. It had grown so near
that it would have broken the spell which held the house, if suddenly a
bugle had not sent every man on the stage to his feet.

They fell in line, and just as the outside tramp came too distinct to
be mistaken, an order, "Forward, March," came quick and sharp. They
filed out and behind them came others, an interminable stream, across
the stage, only to reappear, mounting upward along the road in the
background. And as they started upward, at the right and top of the
height, a great luminous American flag was suddenly flung out. It waved
and waved as if in salute to the mounting men. They went up, up. Their
young faces, turned to their banner, wore looks of such resolve, such
exultation, that the hearts of the men and women watching, breathless
below, swelled with pride and hope.

The host came on, wave after wave; the orchestra played on the wrought
up audience as on a viol. They broke into cheers, dropped into silence,
sobbed, then cheered and cheered and cheered; and when the light
gradually faded, the curtain slowly dropped, the music little by little
subsided; they sat unstrung, listening to the tramping grow dimmer and
dimmer until it was lost in the sounds of the town.

It was a new Sabinsport that went home that night. Whatever might
happen, never again would she doubt, or close her heart to the soldier.
She was his. The General, waiting in his box for Dick, said as he
grasped his hand, "That's settled, Ingraham. We'll have no more trouble
with this town."

But if Sabinsport had been chastened and her heart opened, she still
had to grope her way into the organized service that alone could
restore her hurt pride and give her some realizing sense of being a
part of the great undertaking; and it was a hard moment for that.

In all the war there was not a month more difficult than January of
1918. The camp and the town were in the clutch of the most cruel
weather that part of the world had ever seen. Again and again in these
weeks, the miles of switches and sidings in the valley were blocked
with long trains of cars filled with coal, with every conceivable kind
of freight for the camp, as well as with materials needed for the
shipyards and overseas. Although every effort was made to keep tracks
clear for troop trains, every now and then, one filled with tired and
shivering men would be held up. They sang--oh, yes, they always sang;
but you could not go among them and not know that the singing often hid
frightened and homesick hearts.

The town itself, surrounded as she was by mines underlaid with coal,
was suffering. Sabinsport was startled to find some of her own families
in actual danger of death by freezing. In a town which all its life had
been accustomed to wait until the last minute and then call up and ask
that a load of coal be delivered at once, and to get it as it would get
its roast from the butcher's, it was natural that many prosperous
families were low in fuel supplies.

It was hard for the man of influence then not to throw aside all sense
of responsibility for anybody but his family. Queer stories of the
tricks that men played in order to get coal, headed for their
neighbors, were told. And as for the poor, they waited in long lines,
with pails and scuttles, to get their little lot, and many a time went
home without it.

Unreasonably enough, storm and snow classed themselves in Sabinsport's
mind as part of the war, and her uneasiness grew. Was it all to be like
this--failure, sorrow, shame, suffering? Was she never to see anything
orderly, sufficient, successful? Was there nothing in war that was
brave, glorious and stirring? Sabinsport was seeing only the fringe of
the great undertaking, and it looked ragged enough in the early part of
1918.

In all this, Dick was going from depth to depth of discouragement.
Inveterate believer that he was in this town, which he had come so to
love, in the country in whose institutions he so believed, doubt and
despair of the outcome of the great undertaking grew upon him. We were
not going to be able to handle even the physical side of it. It was not
alone what he saw at home; it was what he heard from his friends in
Washington. Their letters, once hopeful, became despairing. "It looks
to me to-day," one of them wrote him along in the middle of January,
"as if the whole war machine had broken down. I have believed and
believed, but the fact is we are not getting men over. It's all
nonsense about our having 400,000 on the other side; there are not over
100,000. It's all nonsense about our building ships--the whole business
is simply tangled up. It's an awful, humiliating failure, I am afraid,
Dick. The men at the top are camouflaging the whole situation. I cannot
endure it that we men back here should fail the fine fellows who gave
themselves so utterly, so fearlessly."

This letter was the last straw to Dick's despair. He was overwhelmed
with the futility of all the gigantic effort, sickened by the inability
of Sabinsport properly to even take care of its own in a stress of
weather, sickened by what he saw in the camp. Sabinsport was failing,
the camp was failing, the country was failing. And why should he expect
anything else? What was the human race, after all, but a set of
selfish, limited bunglers?

And so, night after night, he tossed and groaned, and slept fitfully.
Things grinned at him. He wakened feverish and worn. In the day things
said, "What's the use? Why talk about democracy? Why talk about
ideals?" And he? Why, he was an utter failure. To get into it, to have
a turn in the trenches, to be soaked with filth, to be broken with
fatigue, to struggle to his feet, to feel a blessed death wound--that,
that was the only thing that would count.

He worked, of course; wore every day his mask of courage and good
cheer; but day by day it was growing harder to keep it on. Day by day
his strength was failing, for Dick, for the first time in his life, was
recklessly disobeying the boundaries which had been set for his
physical existence. The over-fatigue which he had always
conscientiously avoided he not only sought but coveted; the strains
which he had been told might at any time be fatal to him, he took
almost gladly. Finally his friends among the physicians at the camp
warned him, "You will break down, Ingraham, as sure as the world if you
don't take things easier." His friends grew worried. Nancy came to him
and begged him to stop, to go away for a while; but he laughed at them
all. In the bitterness of his soul he had come to feel that here was
his way out; he could give himself here.

The break came suddenly in the hospital at the camp; one day he
collapsed utterly and was taken home unconscious. An almost superhuman
effort of doctors and nurses brought him around, and a month later,
very white and humble, he was taken from Sabinsport to the South by
Reuben Cowder himself.

His desire to die had left him. He was his normal self, save for his
physical weakness. He meant to get well and come back to
Sabinsport--Sabinsport, whose grief and anxiety over his illness had
touched him to the heart? And he did his part. Three months later he
came back--a little thinner, a little quieter, but quite himself again
and capable of steady effort.




                               CHAPTER X


Dick's impression, as he made his first rounds of Sabinsport after his
return, was, Why, here is a new town! What had come over her? He had
never pictured any such realization of the war as he sensed at every
turn. It seemed to him that it was the one occupation, the one interest
of everybody; and it was an orderly, systematized interest. The town
seemed not only to have mobilized, but to have trained herself. She was
doing her work with a vim and a freshness that he had not thought
possible. The women, for instance, the women who had held off, said the
City is taking care of the camp; who, as a whole, had never gone beyond
the knitting stage, had been marshaled into organized groups and were
working with the steadiness of so many factory hands. Since his
departure a Red Cross house had gone up, and there, from eight to five
every day, regular detachments served under a direction which he found
was almost military in its severity. And it was a democratic house.
Thursday afternoon was the afternoon "out" of cooks and maids in
Sabinsport, and many a one gave her three or four hours at the tables
on an equal footing with the greatest ladies of High Town.

Nancy's canteen, which had met so poor a response when suggested, could
be counted on now, night or day. It was no unusual thing for 2000 tired
boys to be served at four A. M. with coffee and food at the
headquarters by the track.

It was amazing the women that could be called on for this severe duty.
There was a little manicurist at the Paradise--a saucy, competent,
flirtatious person, that went into the canteen organization for night
work. Three nights a week, from nine at night until six in the morning,
she was ready for call, and again and again she would serve her full
time, and, after two hours' sleep, go back to her table, a little pale
perhaps, but never any less skillful, any less flirtatious. And there
were the greatest ladies of High Town that enlisted like the little
manicurist for night work and did it as faithfully.

Dick found that not only the women were working but that the war spirit
among them was hot, even fierce. He dropped in one afternoon to the
Woman's Club to hear the story that an Eastern journalist, lately
returned from a trip along the front, had to tell. As he watched the
audience, a large proportion of whom were knitting--for Sabinsport's
Woman's Club had come to the point where it was stipulated, when
bringing on a lecturer, that he should not object to knitting--he
recalled the discussion he had had a couple of years before with Ralph.

Ralph had insisted loudly that it was nonsense to talk in America about
war, that the women would not stand for it, that they would riot first.
Dick had answered, "Ralph, that is something you read in a book. If you
knew women and knew history, you would know that when the test comes,
they not only will 'stand for' war, but they will be violent supporters
of war." Ralph had accused him of being out of touch with the modern
world, of not knowing anything of the "New Woman." This conversation
ran through his mind now as the speaker told the story of the first gas
attack by the Germans, of the deadly effect it had had on the
unprepared English, and then remarked that the English now had a more
deadly gas invention than anything that had come out of Germany. He was
almost startled by the applause which rang through the room.
Practically every woman took part in it; the knitters dropping their
work to clap.

The speaker went on with stories of how our troops made their first
attack. "Nineteen dead Germans," he said, "to six dead Americans."
Again the room rang with long clapping and cries of, "Good boys! Good
boys!" Not a tear, not a bowed head; but pride--fierce pride, and
vengeance.

"I was right," thought Dick. "Ralph read it in a book, not out of life."

Again and again Dick noted profound changes in individuals in the three
months in which he had been gone. None of them moved him so deeply or
gave him so much joy as that in Mary Sabins, who was now regularly
installed as a nurse's aide in the hospital at camp. Her face wore the
look of one who had struggled to a high mountain and from the top was
looking into a new and glorious world.

Mary had been a very unhappy woman in the months since Young Tom had
left her for France. It was not only the shock of his going, but it was
the still greater shock that her husband had refused to use his
authority at her request and forbid the boy's going away. For the first
time in their married life of some twenty-five years, a strain had come
between them. Tom Sabins could not understand why Mary did not feel his
pride in the boy's courageous and adventurous spirit. She should not
understand why he did not resent the invasion of their snug and
comfortable world.

When the war came she was still further bewildered by the change that
came over Tom. Every business and social occupation that had engrossed
him, the pleasures to which he had been so devoted, he threw them aside
as completely as the boy had thrown over college and home. It was Tom
Sabins that had been asked to head the draft board of the community,
and Mary had never seen him so engrossed or so interested in anything.
"Why, why should he give his days to men of whom she had never heard?
Why should he be so eager, so enthusiastic, so indefatigable, in this
work?" Mary watched him with resentful eyes.

Dick had talked frequently with Nancy about their friend, and the two
had tried their best to interest her in some form of camp work; but she
had refused peremptorily to be enlisted. And here she was now, going
regularly day by day to the hospitals.

"Tell me about Mary Sabins," he asked Nancy, the first Monday afternoon
after his return that he was able to go to the farm.

"You know, of course," Nancy said, "that just after you left Young Tom
was invalided home. He went into the Foreign Legion when our forces
took over the ambulance service, and got a nasty wound in the cheek and
shoulder almost at once. It was nothing dangerous, however, but it was
very hard for Tom to make Mary believe this, and she raved at her
inability to go to him. He got on famously and soon was allowed to come
back. You never saw any one so exultant as Mary was when Tom first
came. It seemed to her, I think, that her old world, at least part of
it, was restored; but it was pitiful to see how soon she discovered
that Young Tom's notions of life were utterly changed, that the
interests which had absorbed them in the old days had no meaning now;
that his one thought was of the war, and his one hope was to return to
it.

"I saw her get two or three staggering blows, utterly unconscious, of
course, on the boy's part. One night I was there, and he was talking
about American girls, the nurses and canteen workers. 'Why,' he said,
'I didn't know women could be so wonderful. You haven't any idea of it
until you see them working over there. They are not afraid of anything.
You cannot tire them out. Maybe they will drop, but they won't give in.
Afraid? Why, the Germans bombed the front line hospital I was in, just
after I got mine, and those girls never turned a hair, never looked up,
never hustled, just went about laughing and cheering us up. They killed
two of them--the murderers! And there wasn't a woman there that did not
stick. It's great. It's great to know that women can be like that.'

"You should have seen Mary's face. It was tragic, and Tom was so
unconscious. Then, her second blow came when she knew that he was going
back. You see, she hadn't an idea but what this would mean that that
was the end of it. I think she had some notion that he would not want
to go back; that getting hurt would kill this strange, unfamiliar thing
that possessed him. Mary is like so many of us American women.
Certainly I used to be so--afraid somebody will get hurt--afraid of
suffering. Why, I cannot see that you can know much about life unless
you suffer, and see suffering. Mary could not understand it. When Young
Tom really was all right, which was very soon, he went out and
enlisted--enlisted in the Marines.

"Mary went all to pieces. Of course Tom stood by the boy. A week after
he was gone, she came out here one afternoon. 'Nancy Cowder,' she said,
'do you think I could be used at the camp?'

"'Oh, Mary,' I told her, 'if you only would go to the camp, we need you
so.' She looked at me in such a curious way.--'Need me? What for?' 'The
boys need you,' I said. 'We cannot do for them the hundredth part of
what we ought. Boys like Young Tom need you. You should be doing here,
Mary,' I said, 'just what other American women will be doing for Young
Tom.'

"'I think I must try,' she said. 'I have discovered I have lost my
husband and I have lost my son. I don't understand what they are
talking about. I don't understand what they feel. They have no interest
in me and no interest in what I do. I don't know that I can ever get
them back. But I must have something to do.'

"Well, I sent her into the city for a course as a nurse's orderly. She
made a great discovery there. And, oh, the things she has learned since
she has been working in camp. You can see from her face that it's a new
Mary. And Tom--Tom is the happiest man in the world, though Mary, I
think, doesn't know it, yet. The clouds have not all cleared off her
mountain top, but she is there. War is a dreadful thing, a hideous,
wicked thing, but there are some of us that have discovered the
greatness of life through it."

A new attitude toward the conduct of the War had come in Sabinsport,
too, Dick remarked. When he had left, the town had been alive with
disheartening rumors of failure, graft, inefficiency. The meetings of
the War Board were given over to them. Captain Billy, than whom nobody
in all of Sabinsport was more desirous that the country should make a
record for itself in the war, was doing his utmost to prevent that end
by decrying loudly everything that was attempted. Mr. John Commons was
having the time of his life. Never had he been able to reduce so many
people for so long a time to despairing doubt of all human institutions
as at present. He could scoff, and not be contradicted, at the
absurdity of an untrained, democratic body raising a great army. He
could sneer, without answer, at the notion of the United States--soiled
as its hands were with stealing from the Red Man, from lynching the
negro, from gobbling up innocent Panama--setting out on a crusade "to
make the world safe for democracy." Mr. John Commons was certainly
having a wonderful time, when Dick went away.

But all this had changed. To his amazement, he found that criticism of
the Government, any doubt of a war enterprise, any reluctance to accept
at full face value any request of the Government, was met in Sabinsport
with a fierce declaration that it was all German propaganda.

"What has happened?" he asked Reuben Cowder. "What turned the town in
this direction? When I went away, the easiest thing in the world was to
get a hearing for a criticism, sympathy for a sneer. What has done it?"

"Well," said Cowder, "Sabinsport discovered that it was being 'worked.'
You know I have always suspected that that was true. You remember how
we talked, back in 1915 at the time of Labor's National Peace Council,
how I told you that no such organization could thrive in Sabinsport
when there was plenty of work without outside feeding. And you know how
for a year or so after that went to pieces, pro-German talk was not
very popular. After we went into the War it revived. The town was alive
with distrust, and I was sure, just as I was about Labor's Peace Party,
that there was somebody feeding it. You take the negroes; why, they
almost came to the point of revolt here against the war. Nancy had a
cook out at the farm that came home from one Sunday afternoon meeting
to tell her that she 'wan't goin' to save food any more; that all the
United States wanted it for was to make slaves of the negroes again,
that if Germany came over here, she would keep them free.' There was a
regular campaign here against the Liberty Loan and thrift stamps. And
when the women took their registration for service, the idea was spread
around among all the more ignorant people that the women were being
registered in order to be taken to France to cook and work for the
soldiers.

"Now, things like that don't start out of the air, and I set out to
find out where it came from. I got a clever fellow here that I have had
before when trouble was brewing in the wire mill, to sort of sound out
things, you know. Well, he had not been here long before he came to me
and said, 'Mr. Cowder, Uncle Sam has told me to get off this job,
wanted me to tell you that you need not worry, that they were looking
after it.' They must have been confounded smart, these Secret Service
people, for I've never yet been able to find out who they were, except
one, nor what they did. But this is what happened.

"Along the first of March, a fine looking chap came into my office one
day, and asked to see me alone. As I shut the door, he showed me his
badge--Secret Service. 'Mr. Cowder,' he said, 'I want to notify you
that about a half a dozen men in your munition plant, one of whom you
have trusted greatly--Mr. Max Dalberg--will disappear from this town,
day after to-morrow; or, if not, the next day. I would like to tell you
the facts, but I am under orders to divulge nothing, even to you. I
think you and your plant will be safer if you know nothing of it. We
would like to have you make no comments, but carry on your work as if
nothing had happened. That's what the Government asks of you.'

"Well, Ingraham, you know how I felt about Max. I would have trusted
him as soon as any man in this town, much further than I would Otto
Littman. As a matter of fact, it has been Otto that I suspected all the
time, as you know. But Otto is here. Moreover, the same young man that
warned me about Max came back a week later and said to me that he
thought that it would be an act of justice and humanity to support Otto
Littman in the town, not to let suspicion drive him away. I cannot make
head or tail of it, Ingraham. Only this I know, that Max did disappear,
along with half a dozen of the best workmen we had; that Otto is still
here. Moreover, the rumors, the criticisms that filled the air, have
stopped. That fellow told me they would. He told me that it was out of
my own factory that these things had been coming. The town somehow got
wind that something had been going on, that the suspicion and
criticisms which ran through the streets were spread by German agents,
and to-day a criticism which is perfectly well founded has no chance at
all. You cannot even joke about the conduct of the war without running
the danger of arrest. Why, the funniest thing happened here the other
day to John Commons. You know Katie Flaherty, of course--takes care of
you, doesn't she? Well, Katie overhead John Commons criticizing a
report that the Government was going to forbid the use of starch in
collars, make us all wear soft collars. 'Ha, ha,' Commons said, 'I
suppose they want the starch to stiffen up the backbone of the
soldiers.' Katie was so incensed that she promptly went to the Chief of
Police and reported Commons. He was waited on, and it took some real
explanation and expostulation on his part to keep out of jail. It
tickled the town to death, and John has not been nearly so voluble
since.

"Yes, there's a great change come over our spirit, and I would give a
good deal to know just what was done, what became of Max, what he was
planning, and how they got him."

What became of Max, what he had planned, how they got him, was known to
only one person in Sabinsport. Offhand you would have said that that
was the last person to keep a secret, for it was Katie Flaherty.

Since Mikey's death, the real occupation of Katie Flaherty's life had
been hate of the race that she now considered her personal enemy. Dick
had sometimes chided her for this bitterness. "God forgive us all, Mr.
Dick," she would say, "I have been saying we ought to love everybody.
Take the Jews, now. See how they have gone into the war, how loyal they
are to the United States. I tell the boys we ought not to lay it up
against them any longer that they are Jews. But a German, Mr. Dick,
that's different. He won't salute the flag. And look at the things they
do--sinking the ships like they did. Think of all our grand, lovely
young men drowned in the sea--the dirty Germans--sticking a ship in the
ribs in the night. I can't stand it to think of 'em dead. I'm that
foolish about the boys, I can't see one in the streets I don't cry, old
fool I am. I won't never go to another parade, Mr. Dick. You'd been
that ashamed of me if you'd seen me at camp when they came marching up
the field, the thousands of 'em, the grandest boys you ever seen. I
couldn't see for cryin' and it wasn't still cryin' I did. I did it out
loud--but nobody laughed, only a strange man patted me on the back and
a woman went white and said, 'Stop it!' fierce like, 'Stop it!' so I
came home. I'll never go to another parade.

"And to think the Germans have the heart to kill 'em--boys like ours.
I'm fer drivin' 'em out of the country. They're all spies. There's the
butcher over on the South Side, Johann he calls himself. Think of that
Johann in the United States--a regular old German, talkin' about the
'faterland'--can't say it in English."

"Come, now," Dick said to her once. "Johann has been in this country
for forty years."

"What's that, Mr. Dick? They're all the same; you can't make Americans
out of 'em."

She developed a suspicion of strangers that was almost a mania, and was
forever watching for evidence of intrigue. One morning she came in to
serve Dick's coffee, with a big envelope in her hand. She was handling
it gingerly as if it was something that might explode. With great
solemnity she opened it. "Look here, Mr. Dick. It's a spy I found. I'm
sure of it." Out of her envelope, she pulled a big red valentine, and
dramatically turned the back to him. On it was written in bold black
letters the words, "Don't buy a Liberty Bond. The Kaiser says so."

"Why, Katie," Dick said, "that's no spy's work, that's a joke."	But it
took much explanation for Katie to see it. "Don't buy a bond"--that to
her was treason. "The Kaiser says so," more treason. Finally she gave
in to Dick's persuasion, and she went off saying, "It's a fool I am,"
but Dick always had a feeling that he had not quite convinced her.

Katie's watchfulness and her self-imposed task of bringing every
suspicious person to justice was known to everybody in Sabinsport. It
had long been known particularly well to the strange young man who had
appeared in Reuben Cowder's office early in March and warned him of
approaching changes in the force at his munition factory. Other things
concerning Katie were known to this same young man, and one of them was
that she had a room to rent on her first floor.

The floor opening onto the upper level, ever since Mikey went away, had
been rented by Mr. Max Dalberg. Downstairs, opening onto the lower
level by a little side door, was an extra room which Katie had said
recently for the first time to herself she would rent if she had a
chance. She had not put out a shingle but she had told her neighbors,
so it was not surprising that one morning when she was busy in the
rectory that there should have been a knock at the door, a call for
Mrs. Flaherty, an inquiry about a room to rent, and a bargain promptly
made.

Katie took to the applicant--a jolly, clean, keen-eyed American boy,
older than Mikey but with something about him that suggested Mikey.
Himself a grand fighter, too, Katie had said to herself. Her new tenant
was John Barker, by name.

"I'm only at home through the daytime, Mrs. Flaherty," he said. "I'm in
the mines, an engineer, running night shifts. I won't be in before
eight or half-past in the morning for I get my breakfast over there. I
want a quiet place to sleep through the day, and I will be off by five
in the afternoon. If you want any references I can give them, and
here's a week's rent in advance."

And Katie, to whom paper references meant little, and the look in a
man's eye everything, had said, "It's all right, Mr. Barker, I will
have the room ready to-night and you can come in in the morning. You
will find the key with Mary O'Sullivan next door."

And Katie that night, when she went home, made the little room clean
and tidy, put the key to the outside door with Mary O'Sullivan,
describing her new tenant with enthusiasm.

He proved a good tenant, none better. He came as regularly as the
morning and went as regularly. His presence in the house was quite
unknown to the gentleman who occupied the top floor, and who had long
congratulated himself on his luck in having a lodging over which he had
such absolute control. As a matter of fact there was only one entrance
to his upper floor, save that on the street. A rude little staircase
ran up from the kitchen into a tiny square hall, and a door opened into
the room which had been Mikey's. It was by this door that every
afternoon, when Katie came home from Dick's, she went upstairs to make
the rooms. Max's habits were very regular--exemplary person that he
was. He was at the munition works at seven and never left until five.
His doors were carefully locked behind him. He had no need to concern
himself about anything in Katie Flaherty's house.

But in this secure dwelling, strange things were going on in those
hours when Max was at his laboratory and Katie at the rectory. Every
morning, promptly at 8:30, a quiet, tired looking young engineer
unlocked the side door of Katie Flaherty's house, and drew his curtains.

But once the curtains were drawn, an extraordinary transformation took
place. The fatigued face became relaxed, the heavy, dirty boots were
replaced by the softest of slippers; two very dangerous looking weapons
were slipped into his belt; and in the big pockets of his soft sack
coat something that looked like a pair of handcuffs. And then, with
keys in hand, he quietly slipped up the back stairs, opened this door
and began an investigation of the belongings of Mr. Max Dalberg, Reuben
Cowder's "wonder of the laboratory."

And the things that he found! You could tell that by the glint of
victory in his eye, by the moments when he would straighten himself and
address the air in a whisper, "Could you beat it?" When he would
noiselessly tap his thigh and say, "It's the completest thing I ever
heard of." The young man was making out a pretty case in Max's secure
chamber, little by little, from the papers and photographs which he
examined with such scrupulous care day by day, always leaving them
exactly as he found them, taking infinite pains not to leave behind him
any trace which might make Max suspicious that his privacy had been
invaded, and he gathered the proofs of as fine a piece of
destructiveness as any planned within the borders of the United States
by the band of plotters that Germany had sent out.

What young Mr. Barker found was simply this--a carefully laid scheme,
every detail worked out with German efficiency, to blow up
simultaneously every munition plant in that great district around
Sabinsport, where now literally millions of dollars' worth of shells
and shrapnel and wires and guns were being made for the Allies.

Max had been very ambitious. He had not been simply content with doing
away with his own plant. He had placed in every one of the neighboring
towns agents that he could depend upon. By months of the most careful
plotting and arrangement, he had coached them in their part. Oh, it was
to be a dramatic piece of frightfulness. The very day was fixed. Two
weeks from the time that young Mr. Barker finished photographing the
last piece, at ten o'clock at night, there was to be one grand
explosion, running along the river for miles, back into the hills north
and south--a piece of destruction that would not only rip every wheel
apart but shake the valley, tumble down its buildings, set fire upon
fire, drive men and women from their homes, murder, destroy. It was the
monstrous German imagination for destruction at its highest--a great
conception. Again and again young Mr. Barker had to stop in wondering
admiration at the perfection of the scheme. "God!" he said, "and to
think we have got him!"

But now the time had come when he had to have help--the help of Katie
Flaherty. He knew he could count on her. He realized nothing would ever
quiet the pain in Katie's heart but to get her German, to give blow for
blow. And so one day, after records and photographs were complete,
after they had been spread before certain high authorities in a near-by
city, Katie had another call from her roomer. It was the first time she
had seen him in weeks.

"And what is it, Mr. Barker? Is something going wrong? Did I forget
your towels?" she had greeted him.

"Not at all, Mrs. Flaherty," he said cheerfully. "You never forget
anything. You are the best landlady I ever had. But there's something
on my mind, and I want your help. May I have a talk with you?"

And, seated in the kitchen of the rectory, he laid before her the
outline of what he had discovered. He showed her the big silver badge
that he wore beneath his coat, and told her what he wanted. Briefly, it
was her cooperation in arresting Max. She had listened, amazed,
unbelieving, and then, as the truth dawned upon her, horrified. And
when her help was asked, her whole bitter hatred blazed up in a passion
of desire. Here was her chance! She'd get her German. But how were they
going to do it?

"Do you ever go up to his door of an evening?" he asked her.

"Every night at nine o'clock, I rap and give him his pitcher of fresh
water, and sometimes, when I have it, a bit of fruit. He has always
been such a quiet, gentle soul, playing his piano and singing his
songs--I can't believe it's true."

"It's true, Mrs. Flaherty," said young Mr. Barker.

"What is it you want?"

"Simply this. I will not leave as usual to-morrow afternoon. I will be
in my room. At nine o'clock, there will be a knock at your door, and
you will let in two men, with a hearty, 'How do you do, I am glad to
see you.' Then I will ask you, Mrs. Flaherty, to go ahead of us up to
the door, knock and give Mr. Max his pitcher of water. And then, Mrs.
Flaherty, we will take care of him. Can you put it through?"

She looked him in the eye, and young Mr. Barker had not the shadow of a
doubt but that he could count on her.

It is doubtful if Mrs. Flaherty could have ever told you what she did
in the thirty-three or thirty-four hours between the time that Mr.
Barker closed the door of the rectory kitchen and the hour when she
admitted two stalwart strangers, with an Irish laugh and greeting that,
if the windows above had been open, could certainly have been heard.

The windows were not open. If they had been, Katie might have heard an
angry altercation going on. When she and the three men, fifteen minutes
later, slipped up the stairs as noiselessly as so many cats, they heard
it; and Katie knew the voice that was raised to meet the lower, cruel
tones of Max. It was Otto Littman's.

How well she knew it! For thirty years Katie had given her services at
every dinner that the older Mrs. Littman gave. She had helped at every
birthday party. She had known Otto from the time he was put in his
mother's arms. And her heart almost stood still. The hand that held the
tray almost trembled as she realized that this was Otto--the son of her
good friends, the only Germans in all Sabinsport she had never
suspected--who was talking. She did not know what he said, but young
Mr. Barker knew. He knew from what he heard that Otto had gotten some
inkling of the horror devised, that he was protesting, threatening,
declaring that whatever it cost him, even if it were his life, he would
reveal the horrible thing. Either Max must call it off, or he, Otto,
would stop it. And the even, calm tones of Max had said, "Too late,
Otto. It's you that will be silenced, not--"

At that moment young Mr. Barker gave a nod to Katie, who, knocking
loudly, called out in the most natural and cheerful of tones--so
natural and cheerful that he said to himself, "Isn't she a
wonder?"--"Here's your water, Mr. Dalberg, and an apple."

And Max Dalberg, intent only on keeping up an appearance, opened his
door, and, as she stretched out her tray, there appeared in his face
over her shoulders the muzzles of two vicious looking guns. At the same
instant the door was thrown open and two powerful individuals had him
by the arms, and cuffs on his hands and cuffs on his feet.

It had all been done so quickly and so quietly that neither Max nor
Otto had uttered a sound. Nor did any one for a moment. Katie slipped
down stairs. Young Mr. Barker in his level voice said, "Mr. Littman, I
have heard your conversation, so have these gentlemen. We all
understand German. It lets you out. You may go."

Otto, looking him in the eye, said, "I am willing to take my
punishment. You will find me at home when you want me. I have some
letters which may help you; they are all at your disposal."

The exit of Mr. Max Dalberg from Sabinsport was very quiet. An
automobile drove up to his door on the upper level, as it often did in
the evening, and three gentlemen came out of the house. If there had
been anybody to watch, they would have noticed that the one in the
middle was being supported. They might have thought him ill. He was
helped into the car, and thus departed from Sabinsport the "wonder of
the laboratory" of the munition plant. And thus ended his magnificent
dream of frightfulness, for at the same hour that he was being quietly
conveyed in a comfortable car out of Sabinsport, various other
gentlemen in various other towns belonging to this grandiloquent scheme
were undergoing the same experience.

Katie slipped back to her kitchen, and her face was wonderful to see.
It was the face of the righteous warrior with his enemy's head in his
hands. It was the look that all the Celtic Flahertys and O'Flahertys
from the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, through the days of the
Caesars, through all of the centuries of England's injustice to Ireland,
had worn. It was the greatest moment of Katie Flaherty's life.

There was only one fly in her ointment--she could not talk about it.
She could not tell Mary O'Sullivan or Mr. Dick. The hardest thing that
could ever come to her was the seal upon her lips. It was not that
Katie wanted to talk about her part in this thing, that had nothing to
do with it. But it was to tell of the battle, to tell of the defeated
enemy; it was to tell of the revenge! It was a wonderful story, and all
her Irish imagination cried out to depict it to her neighbors. But she
had given her promise to young Mr. Barker, and, clever man that he was,
he had put a flea in her bonnet which he knew would ensure absolutely
closed lips. "You will not, Mrs. Flaherty, give one hint of what has
happened. Your roomer upstairs is not the only German connected with
this business. The capture of others depends upon absolute secrecy
about what has happened to Mr. Dalberg."

So Katie, in this cruel trial of silence, was sustained by the hope
that she might get another German scalp.

This was the reason that, when Dick came home, no hint of what had
happened was given him, though there were mornings when Katie Flaherty
would gladly have given her good right arm to have been able to have
opened her lips and pictured the whole magnificent scene.

Now, it is not to be supposed that interested and heartened as the Rev.
Richard Ingraham really was in all these changes that had come over
Sabinsport, that they either satisfied his heart or filled his mind.
Night and day, one thought absorbed him, stronger than all others, one
feeling mounted higher and higher. He thought he had put behind in the
weeks of rest in the South--his love for Nancy Cowder. He thought he
had had it out with himself. He believed he had made his renunciation,
that he could come back, work with her in camp and town, go out as
usual to the farm on Monday afternoons, meet her easily and naturally
everywhere, even see outwardly unmoved the day come which he believed
thoroughly would come, when she would marry Otto Littman. And, though
it is improbable that he could have gone through the ordeal with
anything like the control and certainty that he had persuaded himself
was possible, yet such is my confidence in the man that I believe he
would have put it through if, when he returned, he had not divined,
rather than learned, that there had been a great change in the
relations of Otto and Nancy.

It was not a change, so far as he could judge, from which he had a
right to draw hope. He told himself again and again that, on the
contrary, the change probably only meant that later, when the war was
over perhaps, when suspicion of Otto had passed and Nancy was released
from her labors in the camp, that again they would seek each other; yet
the fact that at this moment they were not seeking each other, that so
far as he could make out, they were not seeing each other, gave Dick an
unreasoning encouragement. In spite of himself, his dreams came back.
In spite of himself he saw more and more of Nancy Cowder.

What had happened with Otto, he could not make out. Otto still remained
in town. It was certain that Reuben Cowder, as well as other leading
men who once had shunned him, were taking pains to support him. It was
evident that a great burden had been raised from Rupert Littman's
heart. Never had he been so affectionate, so proud of Otto as now. That
is, at the very head of Sabinsport business, where suspicion of Otto
had first begun, there had been a great change. These men, if you asked
them, would tell you that they knew it to be a fact, from the very
highest authority, that Otto Littman had rendered the Secret Service of
the United States a tremendous service; they knew it to be a fact that
he had run the danger of losing his own life in order to save the lives
of others. That was as far as they would go--as a matter of fact, that
was as far as they could go. But the authority on which these facts
were stated was so unimpeachable that there was not a man of them that
doubted, and there was not a man of them that was not doing his best
for Otto.

But this had not won him Nancy Cowder, Dick found. A change had come
over the girl. She was much quieter. But that might be because of her
continuous work at the camp; work which she never left, which, whatever
the effort and the strain called for, she always gave. Reuben Cowder
was anxious about his daughter, with good reason, and one of his first
requests of Dick on his return was to try to bring her to her senses.

And yet Dick in his foolish heart argued that it was not the work at
all, that her pallor came from pain over a break with Otto; and though
many a night he had wild fancies that this was not so, he always told
himself in the morning that he was wrong, that it was only a matter of
time when the breech between them would be healed, that it was his
business to keep away from her.

And so, through weeks of labor, Nancy and Dick steadily went their
ways, each unconscious of what was in the heart of the other, each
valiantly resolved that they would make no sign that would hurt the
other, and yet daily each growing closer to the other.




                               CHAPTER XI


It is only when one loves a town as Richard Ingraham loved Sabinsport
that one is conscious of the currents of unrest, of groping, of joy and
of grief that fluctuate through it as truly as they fluctuate through
the soul of man or woman. Love makes one sensitive--sensitive to
fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that
others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to
understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan,
hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still
was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its
loftiest aims and hopes.

Something more in experience must come to Sabinsport, thought Dick; and
he sometimes wondered if it would have to be a baptism of blood. She
would stick--stick to the end, he felt. Indeed, he did not believe that
all the nations of the earth combined could pry Sabinsport now from the
task to which she had put her hand. But he wanted more from her in
carrying out this task--a fuller sense of the bigness of the thing in
which she was engaged. Where was it all to come from?

As the spring drive of the Germans pounded back farther and farther the
English and French lines, the anxiety in Sabinsport grew, intensified.
Out of it Dick saw coming one emotion that greatly rejoiced him.
Sabinsport, through all the war, had never any very strong feeling for
England. To Belgium and France she had given her heart, a little of it
had gone to Serbia, England never had won more than a slightly grudging
recognition; but now, when that amazing army stood with its back to the
sea, and the world realized that though every man might fall, no man
would surrender, something broke in Sabinsport.

For the first time she realized something of the fullness and the
nobility of the English sacrifice--how with characteristic English
quiet, the nation had put everything in and called it a "bit." To Dick,
whose love of English hearts and English ways and whose faith in the
unconquerable English soul was second only to his love and faith in
America, this belated understanding of England by Sabinsport gave both
joy and hope. She was beginning to see things. They were getting down
into her soul.

As the days went on and the Germans drew nearer and nearer to Paris, as
the city was actually shelled, and as rumors came of preparations for a
siege, with all the doubts they brought of its being possible for her
to long withstand it, something like panic seized Sabinsport--an almost
angry panic. Where, where were the Americans? For what had she been
making all her great effort? Why, but to stay the invading hordes? Were
we too late? Were these hundred thousands of men that we boasted now of
having landed in so short a time, to come in only in time to see the
destruction of France and the certain invasion and destruction of
England, which Sabinsport believed that would mean? Doubt and anger and
horror possessed her.

And then suddenly the American army did appear. There was Cantigny,
and then, in the very nick of time, the last moment, when the wearied
and overwhelmed French were actually in retreat, our boys
came--Sabinsport's boys; and, careless of the long journeys which had
brought them to the spot--the sleepless hours, they broke over the
foe, beat him down, beat him back, followed, defied, laughed at his
boasted formations, his impregnable trenches, his deadly nests of
guns. It was true, as the most experienced and hardened French cried,
_Rien les arreste_--Nothing stops them! Nothing stops them!

When the story of Chateau-Thierry came back to Sabinsport, men shook
one another's hands, clapped one another on the back, told over and
over every item they could gather. Captain Billy walked up and down the
street, not ashamed of tears, crying, "I knew they would do it. Just
like the boys of '61." They treasured every story of reckless exploit,
of daredeviltry. "That's our boys. Just like them!" And they were even
prouder of the fact that, reckless and unafraid as they showed
themselves, they had known how to take discipline, to play the game
according to rules, that the wisest of English and French generals were
saying, "They are good soldiers."

Chateau-Thierry and the weeks of struggle that drove back the Hun from
the lovely Marne country, back through Soissons, back to the
Aisne--those were great days for Sabinsport; and particularly they were
great days for the War Board.

The War Board, said Dick to himself, has settled down to enjoy the war.

It spent its nightly sessions in recounting tales of heroism. Every
list of citations for bravery was gone over item by item, under the
leadership of Captain Billy. At first they set out to remember the
names, those wonderful names, not only American, but Russian, Greek,
Rumanian, Pole, Italian, Serb, Chinese and--yes, German--even German.
"By the Jumping Jehoshaphat," Captain Billy would say, "we've got them
all--every blamed nation on earth--and every one Americans. They have
all got it--good American grit. It don't make any difference where
their names come from, there isn't one of them but dies with his face
to the Hun." Over and over they recounted the gallant stories--of men
going out from shelters into which they had been ordered, to carry in
wounded, and sometimes receiving their own death bullet as they laid
their man in a place of safety--of their quick strategy in surrounding
machine gun nests and their fearless hand to hand fights with the
crews. And then those tales of the way they ran in their prisoners.
Captain Billy was never tired relating the historic tale of the
sergeant from the New York East Side who came back with 159 prisoners
and complained to his superior officer that "one had died on him."

And nothing so delighted Captain Billy as the tales that came over of
the doughboy's directness and common sense in an emergency. "Just like
them. Don't phase them a bit. Just as much at home over there as here.
I guess they're teaching them down-trodden European countries the kind
of men a free country makes. Read about the doughboy and his mules?
Harness broke--mules ran away--turned them into a tree--smashed
one--jumped out, looked at him, saw he was done up, shot him, rigged up
and went ahead,--never said a word, never asked anybody anything, just
did what was necessary. They say those French poilus haven't stopped
talking about it yet. They would have held an inquest, sent in a
report, and probably stopped the work of that train for a week. That's
the difference."

Dick was deeply touched to notice how every now and then in the
rejoicings somebody in the War Board would nod up at Lieutenant Mikey,
looking down on them from the wall, and say, "What a pity he couldn't
have been in it now; couldn't have fought with his own men. But he was
our first one, we must never forget that." Nor did they forget their
other heroes. Often and often they would nod up to Albert on the wall,
and say, "Hold on, old fellow, your time is coming." Or to Joffre,
"Feeling pretty good to-night, ain't you, Papa Joffre?" Oh, the War
Board was certainly enjoying the war--now that it was going their way.

While the War Board regaled itself with stories of doughboy exploits at
Cantigny and Chateau-Thierry, the saving of Rheims, the capture of
Soissons; while it speculated over the big gun--where it was, how it
operated--quarreled over the merits of arms, and exhausted itself in
devising methods of destroying Germany--the town outside, the busy,
working town, seemed sometimes to Dick almost to be living in France
with the boys. Quite wonderfully and naturally they had built up from
what came to them in letters and news the life of their boys over
there. Of course they were proud of their exploits, but they did not
want to dwell too much on them; they meant ghastly wounds or
death--what they wanted to know was just how the boys lived, and where,
the kind of beds they slept on, the kind of food they ate, whether it
was really true that when they fell ill they had the care that they
ought to have; and all of this, this eagerness to know where the boys
were and how they were getting on in detail, made every letter that
came almost a matter of town importance.

It was quite amazing how the contents of these letters circulated. The
very arrival of one was known, sometimes, in advance of its delivery,
for the post office force took notice when a letter from anybody in the
A. E. F. arrived, and I have known it more than once to happen that if
a letter came in Saturday night--there was no Sunday delivery--one of
the postal clerks would run immediately to the telephone and call up,
"Hello, Mrs. B., here's a letter for you from Tom, if you want to come
down and get it. None of us can get away much before midnight." You can
imagine how quickly Mrs. B. went or sent.

The great interest and excitement of the postmen's life in those days
was delivering the letters from the A. E. F. It was the practice of
these functionaries in Sabinsport to put the mail in the box outside,
if you had one; to throw it on the steps if you had not; or sometimes,
if it rained, to try your door and throw it in the hall; but whenever
there was a letter from a soldier none of these things were sufficient.
Your bell rang with an eager, insistent cry which said, "There's a
letter from Tom." And the next morning, the probabilities are that the
postman lingered a bit to see if you didn't come out and tell him
personally something of what was in the letter. And you did it. Oh, how
you loved to tell what was in the letter! And how it went up and down
the town and everybody telephoned and compared it with what was in
Frank's letter, or Will's letter.

After the letters, Sabinsport's great interest was _The Stars and
Stripes_. There was no paper published on the globe so popular in the
town. A half dozen of the boys had been inspired to send it home by the
clever appeal of the paper itself. "Do the home folks a good turn by
having us send them _The Stars and Stripes_ every week," the editor
said at the head of his page, in an appealing display type. "There are
not many things you can do from this side of the water," he said, "for
your folks or your old pal or that girl back home. _The Stars and
Stripes_ would come to them like another letter every week or another
little present."

The doughboys had not passed it up, as he advised, and the paper came
to be to the home folks all that he had prophesied. Intimate, natural,
humorous, eloquent, the best bit of editing the war had inspired, _The
Stars and Stripes_ brought to Sabinsport such a sense of how the boys
were thinking and feeling and acting, the whole town was comforted and
helped. One supreme consolation it brought--the certainty that whatever
the war might be doing to their boys, it was not changing their tastes.
_The Stars and Stripes_ proved that. It was "just like them."

Although it was known that many of their men were with the divisions
fighting along the Marne, and although every night when the _Argus_
came, the first thing that the town turned to was the casualty list,
they went a long time untouched--so long that Sabinsport came to have a
curious kind of jealousy. The City, twenty-five miles away, had lost
heavily. She rejoiced, and yet she somehow wanted to pay her price.

But when it came--poor little Sabinsport! It came like a stroke of
lightning. One evening Dick was called up by Ralph's successor in the
_Argus_ office. "Parson," he said, in a broken voice, "I wish you would
come down. It's dreadful! The casualty list has just come in--there are
twelve of our men dead, Parson--twelve of Sabinsport's boys. Ralph's
name is among them. How are we going to get it to the people? There is
no notice to any family yet, as I know, and I cannot call them up.
Won't you come down and help me?"

It was not long before Dick was bending over the list; and the two men
were asking themselves who would better go here, who there, who's the
friend of this family, who the friend of that? They called up the
priest for the three of his own boys; the Rev. Mr. Pepper, who, in
spite of his pacifism, still had kept a gentle heart, for one of his
flock. They called up Jake Mulligan, and between them the sad duty was
performed.

The news flew. All Sabinsport wept that night. The next morning there
was laid at every door in town--subscribers or not--a little extra
sheet of the _Argus_--Sabinsport's Honor Roll. And first in the list
was the name of Lieut. Michael Sullivan, killed at Delville Wood, July
15, 1916.

It fell to Dick to go to Patsy. It was nearly midnight when he called
up Father McCullon and told him. "Wait until morning," the old man
said, "and come yourself, Dick. Mother and I could never do it."

Patsy had been back in Sabinsport since the beginning of the year.
After her marriage she lived near Ralph's camp until he had sailed in
January. By a fortune which seemed to both of them miraculous, he had
been promoted until he was a lieutenant in the Rainbow Division. He had
sailed, believing that he would soon be in the trenches. To Patsy, as
to him, this had been a matter of glad rejoicing. She had come back so
proudly to Sabinsport that Mary Sabins had been shocked. "To think
anybody," she had said to Patsy, "could rejoice when her husband was in
danger of his life. I cannot understand it, Patsy, and you in your
condition, too,"--for Patsy was scarcely less proud or less open about
the fact that Ralph was in France in the trenches than that she soon
would be a mother--the mother of a little Ralph, she proudly announced,
for she seemed to have no doubt in the world that she would bear a son.
"Ralph wanted a son."

The boy had come in the spring. Never in her capable, vivid life had
Patsy been so proud and so joyous.

And Ralph was dead, and Dick was on his way to the farm-house to tell
her. It was early when he came up the walk--and Patsy, radiant and
beautiful--oh, far more beautiful than she had ever been--met him at
the door, for she had seen him coming. She needed no telling. With that
divination of womankind whose loved ones are at the front, Patsy sensed
that Dick brought her sorrowful news of Ralph. She did not even lose
her color, but, taking him by the hand, led him into the cheerful
sitting room where, before the fire, little Ralph was cooing in his
crib. She took the baby up, and standing straight and proud, said,
"Tell me, Dick."

"Ralph's name is on the casualty list, Patsy--among the dead. But do
not lose hope," he pled, "it may be a mistake."

"It is not a mistake, Dick. He knew it. I knew it. We fought it out
together. I promised to live to raise our son. Take him, Dick--take
him," and she held out the child, crumpling to the floor as Dick sprang
to her side.

Stricken as she was--so stricken that in the coming days life itself
seemed to ooze from her veins and she lay for hours in long white
swoons, the spirit of her remained undaunted. She had made her
sacrifice when she said good-by to her husband. As Ralph had had to
fight like every man of passionate heart and living imagination to
conquer his natural fear of death in battle, so Patsy had fought to
conquer her fear of his loss. Both had won, for when the test came both
were victorious.

Ralph, so they learned one day, had lost his life in the full tide of
battle. His company had been ordered to secure a foothold on the high
northern bank of a river to which the army had fought its way. They had
been led with extraordinary skill and courage, but in crossing one
after another of the officers had been killed until Ralph was left
alone in command. He took his men through the last cruel shelling to
the desired objective, but in the final push he was fatally wounded.
Even then he had refused to give up and for hours continued to direct
his men as they literally clawed their way into the side of the bluff.
"He would not die," wrote home one grieving young soldier, "until he
knew we were safe."

And Patsy made her fight as bravely. She held her head high. Had she
not little Ralph, who, so they had both agreed, was one day to carry on
his father's work for justice and peace among men? If there were times
when it seemed as if her brave heart must break with pain, no one ever
saw her shed a tear or say other than, "I would not have held him back,
no, not even to have him here to-day."

It was to the honor and the sanctification of Sabinsport that the
bereaved took their sorrow as they did. It was more. Out of their loss
there seemed to come to the town a mysterious illumination, the
enlarged sense of what it was all about, which Dick had so desired for
her, which he had felt so keenly she should have, to sustain her.
Wounded and hurt as she was, the town had to find a reason, a great
reason, to justify it all. Defending laws on sea or land that had grown
out of past struggles between nations was not enough; vengeance was not
enough, not even avenging wrongs as great as Belgium and the
_Lusitania_. Sabinsport needed to feel that out of this sacrifice there
should come some new conception of life, some greater guarantee of more
joy and freedom to more people, some pledge that in future times there
was hope of less sorrow, less hunger, less pain everywhere on the
earth. This, she finally saw, was what it was all about; and in groping
toward this realization there came to Sabinsport something that was
akin to a new faith, and with this she was for the first time fully and
unalterably reconciled to the Great War.

It was no longer grim determination, no longer hatred of an enemy that
she despised, that held her to the undertaking. It was a large and
luminous faith that out of it all a long step had been taken toward
realizing that new world to which, since the beginning of time, men
have lifted their eyes.

It was amazing how the town softened under the touch of its sorrow, how
many old feuds sank out of sight, how much warmer grew everybody's
heart. "It's doing something to us, Dick," Reuben Cowder said to him
one day. "Why, I even heard Captain Billy speak approvingly of Wilson
to-day."

It did something to Dick. It made easier his renunciation of Nancy
which he still believed was his duty. That was his part, his sacrifice,
he told himself. He must give himself now to keeping alive, feeding
this new sense that had come to the town; and he threw himself with
enthusiasm into the work of explaining to Sabinsport the national
aspirations and hopes that began to take form in the unfamiliar
countries of Europe. At the camp, at the Boys' Club, in his church, and
at the War Board, Dick made himself the advocate of Serbian and
Bohemian, Czecho-Slav and Pole. For the first time in all Sabinsport's
life, she began really to sense that these strange men who filled her
mines and her factories carried in their hearts loves for their lands
like hers for America; that they, too, had dreams--some of them coming
down from hundreds of years of struggle--of freedom and equal
opportunity in their own nations. And her chivalry, her sense of
protection, her determination to help them see it through, grew with
her knowledge.

It was perhaps quite natural that, as the days went on, Dick should
come to feel that Sabinsport had had a change of heart so profound that
it had softened even her bitterness against Germany, itself. It was
this feeling that he might even talk mercifulness to Sabinsport now
that led him into what afterwards was known as "the Parson's Big Break."

It was not until October that Dick was able to bring himself to believe
that at last the Allies had the upper hand. From the start he had seen
the war as long--long--long. It was that that made him suffer so.
Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, the falling back to the Vesle--none of these
things had really convinced him. But when the Americans captured St.
Mihiel, following on the break in the North, he suddenly realized the
splendid scheme on which the great French general was working. "She's
beaten," he said, "she's beaten. It will take time, but we've got her."
No longer was it, as the French had said it in that unquenchable faith
of theirs--_On les aura_; it was no _On les a_.

And as the days went on and he became more and more certain, his
imagination flew ahead to the time when the Allies would reach the
borders of enemy territory. He had his theory about this: Germany would
unconditionally surrender before she would allow the Allies to fight on
her territory.

But he could not give up the idea that the Allies should enter
Berlin--not as destroyers but as world peacemakers. He meditated much
on this, and at last one October Sunday morning preached a sermon on
the text: "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty. And he
that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city."

At the head of his notes he had put a title, "The Great Revenge." As he
talked his imagination kindled, and almost before he knew it he fell
into a rhapsody:

"In thinking of that great day--the day when victory is near and
certain," he said, "I have dreamed a dream, and in this dream I have
seen the Allied statesmen and their military leaders gathered for a
final conference which they believed will be the last before the end of
this greatest of human tragedies.

"With the terms for the world settlement outlined and accepted, with a
full knowledge of the military situation before them, with a sober
certainty that victory is in their hands, though it may be delayed, the
conference is ready to disband. And it is then that an American
general, whom first the Allied military forces and later the Allied
diplomats had come to listen to with respect, if not eagerness, not
only for the knowledge and fine judgment that he brought to their
councils but because of a quality of spiritual insight which many of
them believed to amount to genius--it was then that this American
general asked a hearing.

"'As you know,' he said, 'I am in the fullest agreement with every
conclusion of this conference. I believe that the military situation of
the Allied armies has been rightly presented, that nothing has been
concealed of either weakness or strength, that the conclusion that the
enemy must soon yield is inevitable from the facts that have been laid
before us. What I ask the privilege of saying to this conference will
add nothing to what you already know, it will add nothing to the plan
of world reorganization which has been suggested. It is not a matter on
which action is required. It may be called a dream or a vision, as you
please. I only beg that you will listen, and not deride, for what I
have to say comes from an inner conviction so deep that to withhold it
would be for me little better than treason to the great end of all this
suffering, this labor of spirit and of mind through which we have gone
in these many hard years.

"'The enemy will soon yield. I am one of those that believe that he
will yield at or before his last line of defense. I believe this, not
because I think that line less strong than it has been represented,
less strong than the enemy himself has boasted it to be--it may be the
most nearly impregnable line of defense that has been constructed in
all the history of the world--I believe he will yield because I believe
that yielding at this point is the inevitable result of his own
lifelong military teachings.

"'Germany has held that those people she wished to subdue could be
frightened into submission. Her people have been schooled for years to
believe that by inventing new and unheard of ways of destruction, by
attacking the defenseless, by stealthily striking where the laws of war
had forbidden men to strike, they could so terrorize the world that it
would submit to her supremacy without long resistance. She has learned
that neither the French nor the English, the Italian nor the American
people can be terrorized. She has learned that free people have no fear
of human devices, however hideous and destructive.

"'But what is the logical result of this story of teaching on the minds
of the people who teach it? This doctrine of frightfulness
will--already has--acted as a boomerang. There is not a military man in
this room who has not, from the beginning of his experience with the
enemy, found that when their own methods were turned back they were the
quickest to say "Enough." When we turned their own infernal gas
inventions against them they appealed to the laws of war. When, after
months and months of endurance of their bombardment of peaceful towns
and countrysides, England, in despair and rage, retaliated, they again
appealed to the laws of war. The natural reaction of their own gospel
is to make them and their peoples fear the things which they taught
other nations would fear.

"'Germany has given to the world the most awful exhibits of
destructiveness that mortal man has ever conceived. We, who have
marched through the torn and battered villages and homes of France and
Belgium and Serbia, have been made old and gray by the things that we
have seen. She believed that this destruction would take the heart out
of us. She did not know the peoples she attacked. And now her turn has
come. My conviction is that those who have taught this frightfulness,
and the people to whom they have taught it, will never have the moral
or physical courage to run the risk of having applied to them what they
have applied to us. The day we reach this last invincible line and make
our first break in it--as we know we shall--that day the sword of the
enemy will be laid down! They will not be able to face the horrors of
fighting on their own land, of seeing their own villages, their own
homes, undergoing the awful punishment which they have so wantonly
given the villages and homes of other countries. They will yield. They
will yield on the border. Gentlemen, we shall not be obliged to fight
our way to Berlin. And I am one of those who will be glad when the time
comes that we are not to take another life, not to devastate another
mile of the earth's fair face; that we are not to batter down another
cottage, or destroy another beautiful work of man's hands.

"'But that does not mean that I believe that the Allied armies should
not go to Berlin. What I have at this moment to propose to this
conference is that when the day comes--as it surely will--that the
German and the Austrian emperors and their high commands say to us, "We
yield,"--the Allied armies shall say to them: "Gentlemen, you will
yield in Berlin. We go to Berlin. But we go to your capital not as
destroyers; we go as saviors of freedom.

"'"We shall make no claim upon you in crossing your land. We shall lead
our armies--French, English, Italian, American--through your fertile
fields, your pleasant villages, into your beautiful capital, without
cost or pain or destruction to you. We shall take with us our food, we
shall ask no lodging for which we do not give fair return, and we shall
pledge our honor that no woman suffer, even by word or look, from those
hundreds of thousands of marching men."

"'Gentlemen, our armies will do this if we ask it of them. To do it
will give this people who have held as a religion the destructive
notion of progress and power which has encircled the earth with woe, an
exhibit of what free men really are. It will show them as no other act
could do that in our interpretation of progress and power, there is no
element of compulsion of others or of injury to others. If we can take
these hundreds of thousands of men of ours into Berlin and leave no
trace of destruction, no story of injustice behind us, we will give the
world the greatest exhibit of the control that free men can exercise
over themselves that it has ever seen or conceived. We shall prove the
Biblical saying that "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he who
taketh a city."

"'I ask, then, that when Germany yields--as she soon will--we say, "We
receive your sword in Berlin." And that we march our armies there for
that great ceremony. You will say that this is too much to ask of
armies. Gentlemen, I am willing to pledge the American army to that
great act of self-control.'

"The General sat down. For a long time there was silence at the table,
and then the oldest, the least smiling, the longest in arms of the
English staff, arose and said: 'I pledge the English Tommies to march
to Berlin without injury to man or woman or child.' A white haired
Italian sprang to his feet: 'You may count on us,' he cried. Then
slowly the great French general, to whose genius the campaign soon to
finish was due, arose. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'you all realize what it
would mean to the French poilus who have seen their country so
obliterated that many of them cannot even trace the lines of the little
farms on which they were born, who know that when they go back to the
villages in which they and their families once lived, they will not be
able to find the spot where their homes stood, you must know what it
would mean to these men to march into Germany as conquerors, to see her
fields still peaceful and fertile, her villages still untouched, and
with this bitter contrast before their eyes, neither by look or act to
show hate or insult. Yet, if this conception of our American friend
ever becomes possible, I pledge the French poilu to that majestic
undertaking.'

"There was but one to hear from--a king--a king who knew that scores of
his fairest towns and cities, with all their treasured work of
centuries of labor and skill and love, were in hopeless, blood-stained
ruins--who knew that thousands of his brave and honest countrymen and
countrywomen had been dragged from the remnants of homes left them, to
do the bidding of the enemy in his own land; who knew that, scattered
in foreign lands were little children of his realm who never would know
even the names to which they had been born.

"And the conference was still, and the hearts of all were big with
pity, looking on this king who sat with bowed head. Long minutes passed
before, rising proudly, he lifted to them a face which bore the look of
one who comes fresh from a great struggle and a great victory, and in
the quiet voice they had learned to know, the king said: 'Gentlemen, I
pledge you that the Belgian army will march to Berlin and leave behind
it no shattered wall, no mutilated old man, no outraged woman, no
orphaned child.'"

                  *       *       *       *       *

The rhapsody was over. Dick stopped, a little breathless. Never before
in all his experience as a speaker had he so lost himself. He blinked a
little, then suddenly was conscious of a curious change in his
audience--disapproval--almost hostility. What was the matter? It threw
him off his balance a bit, and he finished his sermon haltingly. They
went out stiff, disapproving backbones. What in the world had he done?

He went into the vestry room, saying to himself, "What is the matter?"
It was very common for the vestrymen to come around and say, "That was
fine, Ingraham. Just what ought to be said," but to-day the only person
that waited on him at the door as he came out was Miss Sarah Kenton, a
lady of sixty or so, whom he and Ralph were accustomed to call, "Our
Intellectual." Miss Sarah had had a literary experience, she had
written books. There was no subject which ever came up on which she did
not have a pronounced opinion. It must be confessed that she held most
of Sabinsport in awe. With Dick, she had always been as nearly humble
as was possible for her, for Dick was a man who had seen most of the
world which Miss Sarah had not. Besides, his reading and thinking, even
she admitted, was much broader and mellower than hers. Almost
invariably Miss Sarah approved of Dick, but this morning when he came
out she was waiting for him very rigid and very stern, and what she
said was to the point.

"You have made a great mistake, Mr. Ingraham, in your sermon this
morning. You have outraged us and you have injured yourself. No matter
what we would _do_ if we were given the direct alternative of sparing
Germany or injuring her--an alternative which can only be hypothetical,
and therefore should not be discussed now even as a 'mere dream'--no
matter, I say, what we would _do_ if face to face with such an
alternative, we don't want people to talk to us now about sparing the
smiling fields and cheerful little happy homes of Germany! It isn't
that we are bloodthirsty, but we are nauseated, Richard Ingraham, at
talking about the blessed state of Germany compared with the desolation
she has made in other countries. We don't want to hear about it."

And Miss Sarah turned on her heel and walked down the street,
indignation and disgust in every tap of her shoe on the pavement.

What Miss Sarah had so pointedly put straight to Dick himself, his
retiring congregation was saying in more or less abbreviated and
moderated form to one another. "I can't see it," said one; "it's
looking too far ahead to talk like that. Besides, it sounds like peace
propaganda to me, and I won't stand for that, even from the Domine,
much as I have always believed in him."

"It's pacifist talk," said another. "Makes me feel as if we'd been
harboring a serpent in our bosom through all these years. It might be
all very well to talk about a peaceful walk to Berlin if the Germans
were not Germans, but they are Germans, the people who have stood for
all these atrocities, who have been militarized out of all semblance to
human beings, they must have their lesson. It's a church for a church,
a cottage for a cottage, I think."

"He's all wrong," said another. "Get them with their backs to the wall
and they would fight like hell, for they've got it into their heads
that our men would do every fearful thing to their women and children
that they have done to ours."

The air was thick with disapproval that day in Sabinsport of the Rev.
Richard Ingraham; and suspicion gathered and gathered as the day went
on. Could it be that they had been mistaken, that he really was at
heart a pacifist?

The day was to come--and it was not far distant--when all these
indignant patriots were to do their best to make amends for their
resentment.

Under the great burst of joyous relief which the news of the signing of
the armistice caused in Sabinsport, her anger at Dick began to soften.
As the days went on and they actually saw at least the spirit of his
dream coming true--their own boys crossing into the enemy's country in
orderly fashion, going about the enemy's streets in self-control, even
holding the enemy's children on their knees and joining in their
Christmas trees and Christmas carols--a kind of wonder seized them. It
was a prophecy they had listened to. Even Miss Sarah Kenton was one day
to come to Dick and express her appreciation of his sermon, as frankly
as she had just expressed her disapproval.

But all that was for a later day. There is no question at all but that,
at the moment, Richard Ingraham had deeply outraged Sabinsport spirit
of righteous indignation against the Germans which he had done more
than any other man to awaken.

He went back to his study in the rectory after his interview with Miss
Sarah and sat for a long time, considering what he had done. "Good
Lord!" he said, "I certainly have put my foot in it. They really think
I am a pacifist," and he threw back his head and laughed aloud. But it
was a rueful laugh. Disapproval was a new experience for the young man.
He had had nothing but affectionate approval from the day that
Sabinsport first made his acquaintance. He could not remember a time in
all these years of speaking to them that his sermons had not met with
kindly appreciation, and now? Why, they had walked out of that church
as if they thought him a German spy.

And yet, underneath his chagrin, there was a certain exaltation. "She
has a mind of her own, Sabinsport, and she is not afraid to show it.
You can trust her to take care of her own, even against her own. But
what a climb I will have to get back!" And then quickly the thought
came, "I wonder if Nancy will feel as they do?" That gave him a cold
heart, almost a physical sickness. He could bear everything but to have
Nancy look at him as the people had when he first came out of his
rhapsody and realized their faces.

He put it through bravely. At the evening service there was the
smallest number of people that he ever remembered to have seen, but he
talked exactly as he had planned.

Monday had always been for him a play day. Usually he started off in
the morning for a long tramp, and since he had established his
friendly, homelike relations with Nancy, oftener than not he made it a
point to walk into her living room at half-past four or five for a cup
of tea. Reuben Cowder usually made it a point, too, to get home by five
on Mondays, knowing Dick would be there, for Reuben Cowder had grown
fonder as the months went by of the young parson, and sometimes he said
to himself, "I wish it were Dick and not Otto that she cared for. What
a son he would make."

This habit of Dick's was known to Patsy. Patsy had been stirred to
wrath by the echoes that had reached her before night of Sunday and all
through Monday morning of Dick's pro-Germanism. What utter stupidity,
she had said. Of course it's nothing but a reaction from the uplift
they have been wallowing in. Angry as she was at the thought of any
criticism of Dick, she was willing to slur even the spirit which had
taken possession of the town and in which she as much as Dick had
rejoiced. And to Patsy as to Dick, the only real alarm in the outbreak
was that it would reach Nancy and that she might be influenced. For
Patsy you see had come to believe that the two were in love.

"I think, Little Ralph," she said, talking aloud to the baby, "it's
time for your mother to take a decisive hand. He was the best friend
your father ever had. If it had not been for him you would not have
been here, little boy. If Nancy Cowder doesn't love him, she ought to.
At least she is not going to be turned against him now by this
senseless gossip." And so Patsy, whose anguished heart was becoming
braver and braver day by day in service to others, arrived at the
McCullon farm just about the time that Nancy came in from camp.

"I have come to lunch, Nancy," Patsy announced. "I want to know if you
have heard what Sabinsport is doing to Dick."

"Doing to Dick?" Nancy cried, turning white. "Why, what do you mean?"

"She does care!" Patsy said to herself. "They are doing a cruel thing;
they are accusing him of treason--he--he who has led us all into the
light, who showed Ralph the way, who gave me Ralph. They are badgering
him, heckling him, Nancy. And all out of their stupid, stupid, wicked,
revengeful spirits."

"But what--what do you mean?" Nancy cried, still white and trembling.

And Patsy, having made her impression, put aside her eloquence, and
told her what she knew of the sermon that had aroused resentment in the
town. As she went on, relief, tenderness, amusement chased one another
across Nancy's unconscious face.

"Oh, I understand, Patsy. You needn't defend Richard Ingraham to me. He
ought to have known better, though. He ought to have known the town
better. Why, Sabinsport really at heart was never so bitter against
Germany as she is to-day. It was foolish, foolish of him; but it's
wicked, wicked of them to doubt him. He has led us all. Why, my father,
Patsy. See what he has done for my father, and for me! Why, he brought
me back. Never would father have found me if it had not been for him."

It was a very satisfied Patsy that sat down at the lunch table, but it
was also a very curious one. There was one point that needed clearing
up, and that was Otto Littman. And so, with a calculated
unconsciousness that Nancy didn't catch at all, Patsy said, "I wish I
knew, just for my own guidance, what there is in all the suspicion
against Otto Littman. They are saying that he has done something fine,
that has made up for all his early defense of Germany; but nobody seems
to know what it is."

And Nancy, quite unguarded, told her as much as she dared of what Otto
himself had told her in confession, of how he had been carried away by
the German dream of world empire, of how his vanity had led him in the
first years of the war to aid the plotters in America, of how he had
come to his senses when he saw that violence against life and property,
as well as the spreading of German ideas (which he had considered
legitimate), was intended, of his break with Max, of his determination
to win back the confidence of Sabinsport, and of his plea that Nancy,
whom he had always loved, the one woman whom he had ever thought to
make his wife, should help him.

"I could not do it, Patsy," she said, with tears; "but it has almost
broken my heart not to stand by him as a friend in his hard, uphill
fight. I understand perfectly how Otto was deluded. I know his vanity;
and he has done a noble thing and the day will come when Sabinsport
will understand, after the war is over. But it hurts me, oh, you don't
know how it hurts me, not to be able to help. But what can I do? I do
not love him. I shall never love him."

And Patsy, the case quite clear in her mind, went back to Young Ralph,
satisfied that she had done a good afternoon's work.

It was a couple of hours later that Dick walked in on Nancy. Possibly,
he said to himself, she had not heard of the sermon of the day before,
for she came running down the steps to greet him, saying, "You are
late. I hoped you would come." It even seemed to him she was warmer in
her greetings than usual.

They were hardly in before Reuben Cowder's car drew up, and he came
into the drawing room. His greeting to Dick was curt and stern. He
neither delayed nor hesitated about expressing his disapproval.

"What is this I hear about that sermon of yours yesterday, Ingraham?
They tell me you talked some kind of twaddle about a peaceful entrance
into Berlin, that you don't want the Huns punished, that you don't want
any disturbance of their lands, that you propose to leave these
brigands and murderers untouched, their spoils in their hands, to let
them get away with their infamous atrocities. If that's the way you
feel, I don't want you in my house."

There was a sudden little stir on one side of the room. Dick thought of
it afterwards as something exactly like a bird fluttering out of its
nest, and flying to his side. And there was Nancy, standing straight
and looking into her father's eye--Cowder look for Cowder look.

"Stop that, Father," she said. "I know what Dick said. I know exactly
what he meant. No revenge could be so great as what he planned." Her
hand was laid protectingly on Dick's arm. She stood, his defender,
blazing with understanding and sympathy. She had said "Dick"--it was
the first time in all their acquaintance.

And Reuben Cowder had a great light. For a "hard business man," it was
quite extraordinary that he could divine that this was possibly the
great hour in the lives of these two young people, that possibly it was
not Otto, after all; and, with a gruff, "I beg your pardon, Ingraham,"
he left the room.

The girl did not stir from where she stood. She did not take her hand
from his arm. She only turned a very white face straight up to him.

"You said 'Dick,'" he said slowly. "You meant it, Nancy?"

"I meant it--Dick."

Then the Rev. Richard Ingraham did the most sensible thing he ever did
in his life, he put his hand over the cold one on his arm, and said, "I
love you, Nancy Cowder."

And the reply came swiftly, unhesitatingly, "I love you, Dick."

An hour later the two came out to the veranda, the look of glory still
on their faces. In a very few minutes--so few that he might have been
accused of waiting around the corner for their appearance,--Reuben
Cowder joined them. Dick went straight to the point: "I have asked
Nancy to marry me, Mr. Cowder. She has said, Yes. What do you say?"

"Well," said Reuben Cowder, "I say I would rather have you for a son
than any man I ever knew."

The three sat long on the veranda in the warm, deepening, October
twilight, looking out over the great valley in its glorious autumn
coloring, down to a segment of that curve of the great river above
which Sabinsport lay. It was not of the past that they talked, it was
not of Sabinsport's struggles and sorrows, it was not of the war news
of the day; it was of the future. To all three of them, Reuben Cowder
as well as Dick and Nancy, the last hour had opened the new world for
which the war had been fought.

"It will soon be over," Reuben said. "We've got them, sure thing. We
must think now of the future, Dick. There are a lot of changes coming
to Sabinsport. There will be things doing here when the boys get back.
I will need you both. I am old. I have the old ways; but I have learned
something since you and Ralph Gardner came to this town, and I'm not so
old that I can't learn more. I must do it, for we must reckon with
those stacks there."

He nodded his head to the opening he had cut long ago in the noble
trees which ran down the long slope of the great lawn, an opening that
he always carefully preserved for it brought into the landscape from
the veranda the tall smoke stacks of the wire mills.

Dick's mind flew back to the day a dozen years before when he had
walked over the hills and caught his first view of the town. There were
but four stacks that day, there were twelve now, and from every one of
the twelve black smoke rose, straight into the clear air, and they said
as clear and loudly to him now as they had so long ago, "We are the
strong things here, we are the things to be reckoned with."

Yes, they had great struggles for great things coming, he and Reuben
Cowder, and Nancy Cowder--his wife.

                                THE END

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