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.