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The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell · English · Gutenberg #46436 · 514,457 chars · public domain (US)

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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]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RISING OF THE TIDE: THE STORY OF SABINSPORT ***

                         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 æsthetic and the æsthete 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 '_nächste 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 Liège. 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 Liége, 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 _Armée de Terre_ and _Armée 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 Liége. 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 Liége. 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 fête. 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 Liége,

                                                     "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 Liége 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 curé
  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 mêlée 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
attaché 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 rôle. 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 coöperative 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 preëminent 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
be

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