Chapter XXX…

Chapter XXX

GRANT ADAMS PREACHING A MESSAGE OF LOVE RAISES THE VERY DEVIL IN HARVEY

The most dramatic agency in life is time--time that escapes the staged drama. The passing years, the ceaseless chiselling of continuous events upon a soul, the reaction of a creed upon the material routine of the days, the humdrum living through of life that brings to it its final color and form--these things shape us and guide us, make us what we are, and alas, the story and the stage may only mention them. It is all very fine to say that as the years of work and aspiration passed, Grant Adams's channel of life grew narrower. But what does that tell? Does it tell of the slow, daily sculpturing upon his character of the three big, emotional episodes of his life? To be a father in boyhood, a father ashamed, yet in duty bound to love and cherish his child; to face death in youth horribly and escape only when other men's courage save him; to react upon that experience in a great spiritual awakening that all but touched madness; and to face unspeakable pain and terror and possible death to justify one's fanatic consecration. Then day by day to renounce ambition, to feel no desire for those deeper things of the heart that gather about a home and the joys of a home; to be atrophied where others are quick and to be supersensitive and highstrung where others are dull; these are facts of Grant Adams's life, but the greater facts are hidden; for they pass under the slow and inexorably moving current of life. They are that part of the living through of life that may not be staged nor told.

But something of the living through is marked on the man. Here he stands toward the close of the century that bore him--a tall, spare, red-haired, flint-visaged, wire-knit man, prematurely middle-aging in late youth. Under his high white forehead are restless blue eyes--deep, clear, challenging, combative blue eyes, a big nose protrudes from under the eyes that marks a willful, uncompromising creature and a big strong mouth, not finely cut, but with thick, hard lips, often chapped, that cover large irregular teeth. The face is determined and dogged--almost brutal sometimes when at rest; but when a smile lights it, a charm and grace from another being illumines the solemn countenance and Grant Adams's heart is revealed. The face is Puritan--all Adams, dour New England Adams, and the smile Irish--from the joyous life of Mary Sands.

We may only see the face: here and there on it is the mark of the sculptor's tool: now and then a glare or a smile reveals what deep creases and gashes the winds of the passing years have made in the soul behind the mask. Here and there, as a rising strident voice in passionate exhortation lifts, we may hear the roar of the narrowing channel into which his life is rushed with augmented force as he hurries forward into his destiny. In that tumult, family, home, ambition, his very child itself that was his first deep wellspring of love, are slipping from him into the torrent. The flood washes about him; his one idea dominates him. He is restless under it--restless even with the employment of the hour. The unions, for which he has been working for more than half a decade, do not satisfy him. His aim is perfection and mortality irritates him, but does not discourage him. For even vanity is slipping from him in the erosion of the waters rushing down their narrowing groove.

But it is only his grim flint face we see; only his high strident, but often melodiously sympathetic voice we hear; only his wiry, lank body with its stump of a right arm that stands before us. The minutes--awful minutes some of them--the hours, painful wrestling hours, the days, doubt-ridden days, and the long monotonous story of the years, we may not know. For the living through of life still escapes us, and only life's tableau of the moment is before us.

* * * * *

Now whatever gloss of gayety Dr. Nesbit might put upon his opinion of Grant Adams and his work in the world, it was evident that the Doctor's opinion of that work was not high. But it was comparatively high; for Harvey's opinion of Grant Adams and his work was abysmal in its depth. He was running his life on a different motor from the motor which moved Harvey; the town was moving after a centripetal force--every one was for himself, and the devil was entitled to the hindermost. Grant Adams was centrifugal; he was not considering himself particularly and was shamelessly taking heed of the hindermost which was the devil's by right. And so men said in their hearts, if this man wins, there will be the devil to pay. For Grant was going about the district spreading discontent. He was calling attention to the violation of the laws in the mines; he was calling attention to the need of other laws to further protect the miners and smelter men. He was going about from town to town in the Valley building up the unions and urging the men to demand more wages, either in actual money or in shorter hours, improved labor conditions, and cheaper rent and better houses from the company which housed the families of the workers.

"Why," he asked, "should labor bear the burden of industry and take its leavings?"

"Why," he demanded, "should capital toil not nor spin and be clothed as Solomon in his glory?"

"Why," he argued, "should the profits of toil be used to buy more tools for toil and not more comforts for toil?"

"Why, why--" he challenged Market Street, "is the partnership of society, not a partnership, but a conspiracy?"

Now Market Street had long been wrathful at that persistent Why.

But when it became known that John Dexter had invited Grant Adams to occupy the pulpit of the Congregational Church one Sunday evening to state his case, Market Street's wrath choked it. For several years John Dexter had been preaching sermons that made the choir the only possible theme of conversation between him and Ahab Wright. John Dexter had been crucified a thousand times by the sordid greed of man in Harvey, and had cried out in the wilderness of his pulpit against it; but his cries fell upon deaf ears, or in dumb hearts.

The invitation to Grant to speak at John Dexter's Sunday evening service was more of a challenge to Harvey than Harvey comprehended. But even if the town did not entirely realize the seriousness of the challenge, at least the minister found himself summoned by Market Street to a meeting to discuss the wisdom of his invitation. Whereupon John Dexter accepted the invitation and, girding up his loins, went as a strong man rejoicing to run a race.

To what a judgment seat they summoned John Dexter! First, up spake Commerce. "Dr. Dexter," said Commerce--Commerce always referred to John Dexter as Doctor, though no Doctor was he and he knew it well, "Dr. Dexter, we feel that your encouragement--hum--uhm--well, your patronage of this man Adams, in his--well, shall we say incendiary--" a harsh word is incendiary, so Commerce stopped and touched its graying side whiskers reverently and patted its immaculate white necktie, and then went on: "--well perhaps indiscreet will do!" With Commerce indeed there is no vast difference between the indiscreet and the incendiary. "--indiscreet agitation against the--well--uhm--the way we have to conduct business, is--is regrettable,--at least regrettable!"

"Why?" interrupted John Dexter sharply, throwing Commerce sadly out of balance. But the Law, which is the palladium of our liberties, answered for Commerce in a slow snarling, "because he is preaching discontent."

"But Mr. Calvin," returned John Dexter quickly, "if any one would come to town preaching discontent to Wright & Perry, showing them how to make more money, to enlarge their profits, to rise among their fellow merchants--would you refuse to give him audience in a pulpit?" The Law did not deign to answer the preacher and then Industry took heart to say, pulling its military goatee vigorously, and clearing its dear old throat for a passage at arms: "'Y gory man, there's always been a working class and they've always had to work like sixty and get the worst of it, I guess, and they always will--what say? You can't improve on the way the world is made. And when she's made, she's made--what say? I tell you now, you're wasting your time on that class of people."

The antagonists looked into each other's kindly eyes. Industry triumphing in its logic, the minister hunting in his heart for the soft answer that would refute the logic without hurting its author. "Captain," he said, "there was once a wiser than we who went about preaching a new order, spreading discontent with injustice, whose very mother was of the lowest industrial class."

"Yes--and you know what happened to Him," sneered the Courts, which are the keystones of government in the structure of civilization. "And," continued the Courts, in a grand and superior voice, "you can't drag business into religion, sir. Religion is one thing and I respect it,"--titters from the listening angels, "--and business is another thing, and we think, sir, that you are trying to mix the insoluble, and as business men who have our own deep religious convictions--" inaudible guffaws from the angels, "--we feel the sacrilege of asking this blatherskite Adams to speak on any subject in so sacred a place as our consecrated pulpit, sir." Hoarse hoots from the angels.

No soft benignity beamed in the preacher's face as he turned to the Courts. "My pulpit, Judge," answered John Dexter sternly, "first of all stands for the gospel of Justice between man and man. It will afford sanctuary for the thief and the Magdalene, but only the penitent thief and the weeping Magdalene!" And John Dexter brought down a resounding fist on the table before him. "I believe that the first duty of religion is to preach shame on the wicked, that they may quit their wickedness, and if," John Dexter's voice rose as he went on, "in the light of our widening intelligence we see that employers are organized wickedly to rob their workers of justice in one way or another, I stand with those who would make the thief disgorge for his own soul's sake, incidentally, but chiefly that justice may come into an evil world and men may not mock the mercy and goodness of God by pointing at the evil men do unrebuked in His name, and under His servants' noses. My pulpit is a free pulpit, sir. When it is not that, I shall leave it. And even though I do not agree sometimes with a man's message, so long as my pulpit is free, any man who desires to cry stop thief, in the darkness of this world, may lift his voice there, and no man shall say him nay! Have you gentlemen anything further to offer?"

Commerce ceased rubbing its hands. Its alter ego, Business, was obviously getting ready to say something, but was only whistling for the station, and the crowd knew it would be a minute before his stuttering speech should arrive. Patriotism was leaning forward with its hands back of its ears, smiling pleasantly at what he did not understand, and Industry, who saw the strings in which his world was wrapped up for delivery, cut, and the world sprawled in confusion before him by the preacher's defiance, was pulling his military goatee solemnly when Science toddled in, white-clad, pink-faced, smoking his short pipe and clicking his cane rather more snappily than usual. He saw that he had punctuated an embarrassed situation. Only Religion and Patriotism were smiling. Science brought his cane down with a whack and piped out:

"So you are going to muzzle John Dexter, are you--you witch-burning old pharisees. I heard of your meeting, and I just thought I'd come around to the bonfire! What are you trying to do here, anyway?"

At last Business which had been whistling for the station was ready to pull in; so it unloaded itself thus: "We are p-protesting, Doc, at th-th-th-th m-m-m-man Adams--this l-l-labor sk-sk-skate and s-s-socialist occupying J-J-John Dexter's p-pulp-p-pit!"

Science looked at Business a grave moment, then burst out, "What are you all afraid of! Here you are, a lot of grown men with fat bank accounts sitting around in a blue funk because Grant Adams does a little more or less objectionable talking. I don't agree with Grant much more than you do. But you're a lot of old hens, cackling around here because Grant Adams invades the roost to air his views. Let him talk. Let 'em all talk. Talk is cheap; otherwise we wouldn't have free speech." He grinned cynically as he asked, "Haven't you any faith in the Constitution of the fathers? They were smart enough to know that free speech was a safety valve; let 'em blow off. Then go down and organize and vote 'em afterwards according to the dictates of your own conscience. Politics is the antidote for free speech!" The Doctor glared at the Courts, smiled amiably at Business and winked conspicuously at Religion. Religion blushed at the blasphemy and as there seemed to be nothing further before the house the Doctor and John Dexter left the room.

But the honest indignation of Market Street that an agitator should appear in a pulpit--that an agitator for anything, should appear in any pulpit--waxed strong. For it was assumed that religion had nothing to do with social conduct; religion was solely a matter of individual salvation. Religion was a matter concerned entirely with getting to heaven oneself, and not at all a matter of getting others to heaven except as they took the narrow and individual path. The idea that environment affects character and that society through politics and social and economic institutions may change a man's environments and thus affect the characters and the chances for Heaven of whole sections of the population, was an idea which had not been absorbed by Market Street in Harvey. So Market Street raged.

That evening when Grant Adams returned from work he received two significant notes. One was from John Dexter and ran:

"Dear Grant: Fearing that you may hear of the comment my invitation to you to speak in my pulpit is causing and fearing that you may either decide at the last minute not to come or that you will modify your remarks out of consideration for me, I write to say that while of course I may not agree with everything you advocate, yet my pulpit is a free pulpit and I cannot consent that you restrict its freedom in saying your full say as a man, any more than I could consent to have my own freedom restricted. Yours in the faith--J. D."

The other note ran: "Father says to tell you to tone it down. I have delivered his message. I say here is your chance to get the truth where it is most needed, and even if for the most part it falls on stony ground--you still must sow it.--L. N. VD."

Sunday evening saw a large congregation in the pews of the Rev. John Dexter's church. In the front and middle portion of the church were the dwellers on the Hill, those whose lines fell in pleasant places. They were the "Haves" of the town,--conspicuous and highly respectable with rustle of silks and flutter of ribbons.

And back of these sat a score of men and women from South Harvey, the "Have-nots," the dwellers in the dreary valley. There was Denny Hogan, late of the mines, but now of the smelter--with his curly hair plastered over his forehead, and with his wife, she that was Violet Mauling holding a two-year-old baby with sweaty, curly red hair to her breast asleep; there was Ira Dooley, also late of the mines, but now proprietor of a little game of chance over the Hot Dog Saloon; there was Pat McCann, a pit boss and proud of it, with Mrs. McCann--looking her eyes out at Mrs. Nesbit's hat. There was John Jones, in his Sunday best, and Evan Hughes and Tom Williams, the wiry little Welsh miners who had faced death with Grant Adams five years before. They were with him that night at the church with all the pride in him that they could have if he were one of the real nobility, instead of a labor agitator with a little more than local reputation. And there were Dick and his boy Mugs and the silent Mrs. Bowman and Bennie her youngest and Mary the next to the youngest. And Mrs. Bowman in the South Harvey colony was a person of consequence, for she nodded to the Nesbits and the Mortons and to Laura and to Mrs. Calvin and to all the old settlers of Harvey--rather conspicuously. She had the gratification of noting that South Harvey saw the nobility nod back. With the South Harvey people came Amos Adams in his rough gray clothes and rough gray beard. Jasper Adams, in the highest possible collar, and in the gayest possible shell-pink necktie and under the extremest clothes that it might be possible for the superintendent of a Sunday School to wear, shared a hymnal, when the congregation rose to sing, with the youngest Miss Morton. There were those who thought the singing was merely a duet between young Mr. Adams and the youngest Miss Morton--so much feeling did they put into the music. Mr. Brotherton was so impressed, that he marked young Adams for a tryout at the next funeral where there was a bass voice needed, making the mental reservation that no one needed to look at the pimples of a boy who could sing like that.

When the congregation sat down after the first hymn John Dexter formally presented Grant Adams to the congregation. The young man rose, walked to the chancel rail and stood for a moment facing his audience without speaking. The congregation saw a tall, strong featured, uncouth man with large nose and a big mouth--clearly masculine and not finely chiselled. In these features there was something almost coarse and earthy; but in the man's eyes and forehead, there lurked the haunting, fleeting shadow of the eternal feminine in his soul. His eyes were deep and blue and tender, and in repose always seemed about to smile, while his forehead, high and broad, topped by a shock of red hair, gave him a kind of intellectual charity that made his whole countenance shine with kindness. Yet his clothes belied the promise of his brow. They were ill-fitting, with an air of Sunday-bestness that gave him an incongruous scarecrow effect. It was easy to see why Market Street was beginning to call him that "Mad Adams." As he lifted his glance from the floor, his eyes met Laura Van Dorn's, then flitted away quickly, and the smile she should have had for her own, he gave to his audience. He began speaking with his arms behind him to hide the crippled arm which was tipped with a gloved iron claw. His voice was low and gentle, yet his hearers felt its strength in reserve.

"I suppose," he began slowly, "every man has his job in the world, and I presume my job seems rather an unnecessary one to some of my friends, and I can hardly blame them. For the assumption of superiority that it may seem to require upon the whole must be distasteful to them. For as a professional apostle of discontent, urging men to cease the worship of things as they are, I am taking on myself a grave burden--that of leading those who come with me, into something better. In the end perhaps, you will not be proud of me. For my vision may be a delusion. Time may leave me naked to the cold truth of life, and I may awaken from my dreaming to reality. That is possible. But now I see my course; now I feel the deep call of a duty I cannot resist." He was speaking softly and in hardly more than a conversational tone, with his hand at his side and his gloved claw behind him. He lifted his hand and spoke in a deeper tone.

"I have come to you--to those of you who lead sheltered lives of comfort, amid work and scenes you love, to tell you of your neighbors; to call to you in their name, and in the name of our common God for help. I have come from the poor--to tell you of their sorrows, to beg of you to come over into Macedonia and help us; for without you we are helpless. True--God knows how true--the poor outnumber you by ten to one. True, they have the power within them to rise, but their strength is as water in their hands. They need you. They need your neighborly love."

As he spoke something within him, some power of his voice or of his presence played across the congregation like a wind. The wind which at first touched a few who bent forward to hear him, was moving every one. Faces gradually set in attention. He went on:

"How wonderful is this spirit of life that has come rolling in through the eons, rolling in from some vast illimitable sea of life that we call God. For ages and ages on this planet life could only give to new life the power to feed and propagate, could only pass on to new life the heritage of instinct; then another impulse of the outer sea washed in and there came a day when life could imitate, could learn a little, could pass on to new life some slight power of growth. And then came welling in from the unknown bourne another wave, and lo! life could reason, and God heard men whisper, Father, and deep called unto deep. Since then through the long centuries, through the gray ages, life slowly has been rising, slowly coming in from the hidden sea that laves the world. Millions and millions of men are doomed to know nothing of this life that gives us joy; millions are held bound in a social inheritance that keeps them struggling for food, over outworn paths, mere creatures of primal instinct, whose Godhood is taken from them at birth; by you--by you who get what you do not earn from those who earn what they do not get."

He turned to the group near the rear of the room, looked at them and continued:

"The poor need your neighborly sacrifice, and in that neighborly love and sacrifice you will grow in stature more than they. What you give you will keep; what you lose you will gain. The brotherhood you build up will bless and comfort you.

"The poor," he exclaimed passionately, "need you, but how, before God you need them! For only a loving understanding of your neighbors' lives will soften your calloused hearts. Long benumbing hours of grimy work, sordid homes amid daily and hourly scenes of filth and shame!" He leaned forward and cried: "Listen to me, Ahab Wright," and he thrust forward his iron claw toward the merchant while the congregation gasped, "what if you had to strip naked and bathe in a one-roomed hut before your family every night when you came home, dirty and coal-stained from your day's work! the beggar and the harlot and the thief nearby." He moved his accusing claw and the startled eyes of the crowd followed it as it pointed to Daniel Sands and Grant exclaimed: "Listen, Uncle Dan Sands, how would you like to have your daughter see the things the children see who live in your tenements next to the Burned District, which is your property also! Poisoned food, cheap, poisoned air, cheap, poisoned thoughts--all food and air and ideas, the cast-off refuse of your daily lives who live in these sheltered homes. You have a splendid sewer system up here; but it flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint--rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing children and father and brother go down in the muck all around them--that is the heritage of poverty.

"Hear me, Kyle Perry and John Kollander. I know you think poverty is the social punishment of the unfit. But I tell you poverty is not the punishment of the weak. Poverty is a social condition to which millions are doomed and from which only hundreds escape when the doom of birth is sealed. What has Ahab Wright given to Harvey more than James McPherson, who discovered coal here? What has Daniel Sands done for Harvey more than Tom Williams, who has spent his life at hard work mining coal? Is not his coal as valuable as Uncle Daniel's interest? Friends--think of these things!"

The wraith of smoke that had appeared when Grant first began speaking personally to the men of Harvey, in a minute had grown to a surer evidence of fire. The smiling ceased. Angry looks began flashing over the faces before Grant, like darts of flame. And after these looks came a great black cloud of wrath that was as perceptible as a gust of smoke. He felt that soon the fire would burst forth. But he hurried on with his message: "Poverty is not the social punishment of the weak, I repeat it. Poverty is a social inheritance of the many, a condition which holds men hard and fast--a condition that you may change, you who have so much. All this coal and oil and mineral have profited you greatly, oh, men of Harvey. You are rich, Daniel Sands. You are prosperous, Ahab Wright. You have every comfort around you and yours, John Kollander, and you, Joseph Calvin, are rearing your children in luxury compared with Dick Bowman's children. Hasn't he worked as hard as you? Here are Ira Dooley and Denny Hogan. They started as equals with you up here and have worked as hard and have lived average lives. Yet if their share is a fair share of the earnings of this community, you have an unfair share. How did you get it?" He leaned out over the chancel rail, pointed a bony, accusing finger at the congregation and glared at the eyes before him angrily. Quickly he recovered his poise but brought his steel claw down on the pulpit beside him with a sharp clash as he cried again, "How did you get it?"

Then it was that the flame of indignation burst forth. It came first in a hiss and another and a third--then a crackling fire of hisses greeted his last sentence. When the hissing calmed, his voice rose slightly. He went on:

"We of the middle classes--we have risen above the great mass below us: we are permitted to learn--a little--to imitate and expand somewhat. But above us, thank God, is another group in the social organization. Here at the top stand the blessed, privileged few who are the world's prophets and dreamers and seers--they know God; they drink deep of the rising tide of everlasting life that is booming in, flooding the world with mercy and love and brotherhood; and what they see in one century--and die for disclosing--we all see in the next century and fight to hold it fast!" He stood looking at the floor, then opened wide his glaring eyes, a fanatic's mania blazing in them, lifted his arms and cried with a great voice like a trumpet: "You--you--you who have known God's mercy and his goodness and his love--why, in the dead Christ's name do you sit here and let the flood of life be dammed away from your brothers, stealing the waters of life like thieves from your brethren by your cruel laws and customs and the chains of social circumstance!"

They tried to hiss again but he hurried on as one possessed of a demon: "A little love, a little sacrifice, a little practical brotherly care from each of you each day would help. We don't want your alms, we want justice. Thousands of babies--loved just as yours are loved--are slaughtered every month through poisoned food that comes from commercial greed. Thousands of fathers and brothers over this land are killed every year because it is cheaper to kill them than to protect them by machinery guarded and watched. Their blood is upon you--for by your laws, by your middle class courts you could stop its flowing. Thousands of mothers die every week from poor housing--you could stop that if you would. They are stopping it by laws in other lands. Millions of girls the world over are led like sheep to shameful lives because of industrial conditions that your vote and voice could change; and yet," his voice lost its accusing tone and he spoke gently, even tenderly, "as babies they cuddled in their mothers' arms and roused all the hope and inspired all the love that a soft little body may bring. Millions and millions of mothers who clasp their children to them in hope, must see those children go into life to be broken and crushed by the weight from above."

As Grant was speaking he noticed that Morty Sands was nodding his head off in gorgeous approval. Then without thinking how his words might cut, he cried, "And look at our good friend Morty Sands who enjoys every luxury and is arrayed as the lilies of the field! What does Morty give to society that he can promise the girl who marries him, comfort and ease and all the happiness that physical affluence may bring? And then there sits Mugs Bowman. What can Mugs offer his girl except a life of hard, grinding work, a houseful of children and a death perhaps of slow disease? Yet Mugs must have his houseful of children for they must all work to support Morty. Where is the justice in a society organized like this?

"For Christ's living sake," cried the man as his face glowed in his emotion, "let life wash in from its holy source to these our brothers. Shame on you--you greedy ones, you dollar worshipers--you dam the stream, you muddy the waters, you poison the well of life--shame--shame!" he cried and then paused, gloated perhaps in his pause, for the storm he saw gathering in the crowd, to break. His face was transfigured by the passion in his heart and seemed illumined with wrath.

"The flag--the flag!" bawled deaf John Kollander, rising, "He is desecrating Old Glory!"

Then fire met fire and the conflagration was past control. It raged over the church noisily.

"Look-a here, young man," called Joseph Calvin, standing in his seat.

"The flag--will no one defend the flag!" bellowed John Kollander, while Rhoda, his wife, looked on with amiable approval.

"P-put him out," stuttered Kyle Perry, and his clerks and understrappers joined the clamor.

"Well, say, men," cried George Brotherton in the confusion of hissing and groaning, "can't you let the man talk? Is free speech dead in this town?" His great voice silenced the crowd, and John Dexter was in the pulpit holding out his hands. As he spoke the congregation grew silent, and they heard him say:

"This is a free pulpit; this man shall not be disturbed." But Joseph Calvin stamped noisily out of the church. John Kollander and his wife marched out behind him with military tread and Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright with their families followed, amid a shuffling of feet and a clamor of voices. The men from South Harvey kept their places. There was a whispering among them and Grant, fearing that they would start trouble, called to them sternly:

"My friends must respect this house. Let property riot--poverty can wait. It has waited a long time and is used to it."

When Market Street was gone, the speaker drew a deep breath and said in a low, quiet voice charged with pent-up emotion: "Now that we are alone, friends,--now that they are gone whose hearts needed this message, let me say just this: God has given you who live beautiful lives the keeping of his treasure. Let us ask ourselves this: Shall we keep it to share it with our brethren in love, or shall we guard it against our brethren in hate?"

He walked back to the rear of the room and sat, with his head bowed down, beside his friends, spent and weary while the services closed.

At the church door Laura Van Dorn saw the despair that was somewhat a physical reaction from weariness. So she cut her way through the group and went to him, taking his arm and drawing him aside into the homebound walk, as quickly as she could. He remained grim and spoke only in answer to challenge or question from Laura. It was plain to her that he felt that his speech was a failure; that he had not made himself understood; that he had overstated his case. She was not sure herself that he had not lost more ground than he had gained in the town. But she wrapped him about in a garment of kindness--an almost maternal tenderness that was balm to his heart. She did not praise his speech but she let him know that she was proud of him, that her heart was in all that he had said, even if he felt definitely that there were places in his adventure where her head was not ready to go. She held no check upon the words that came to her lips, for she felt, even deeper and surer than she felt her own remoteness from the love which her girlhood had known, that in him it was forever dead. No touch of his hand; no look of his eye, no quality of his voice had come to her since her childhood, in which she could find trace or suggestion that sex was alive in him. The ardor that burned so wildly upon his face, the fire in his eyes that glowed when he spoke of his work and his problems, seemed to have charred within him all flower and beauty of romance. But they left with him a hunger for sympathy. A desire to be mothered and a longing for a deep and sweet understanding which made Laura more and more necessary to him as he went into his life's pilgrimage. As they reached a corner, he left her with her family while he turned away for a night walk.

As he walked, he was continually coming upon lovers passing or meeting him in the night; and Grant seeing them felt his sense of isolation from life renewed, but was not stirred to change his course. For hours he wandered through the town and out of it into the prairies, with his heart heavy and wroth at the iniquities of men which make the inequities of life. For his demon kept him from sleep. If another demon, and perhaps a gentler, tried to whisper to him that night of another life and a sweeter, tried to turn him from his course into the normal walks of man, tried to break his purpose and tempt him to dwell in the comely tents of Kedar--if some gentler angels that would have saved him from a harsher fate had beckoned to him and called him that night, through passing lovers' arms and the murmur of loving voices, his eyes were blind and his ears were deaf and his heart was hot with another passion.

Amos Adams was in bed when Grant came into the house. On the table was a litter of writing paper. Grant sat down for a minute under the lamp. His father in the next room stirred, and asked:

"What kept you?" And then, "I had a terrific time with Mr. Left to-night." The father appeared in the doorway. "But just look there what I got after a long session."

On the page were these words written in a little round, old-fashioned hand, some one's interminably repeated prayer. "Angels guide him--angels strengthen him; angels pray for him." These words were penned clear across the page and on the next line and the next and the next to the very bottom of the page, in a weary monotony, save that at the bottom of the sheet the pen had literally run into the paper, so heavily was the hand of the writer bearing down! Under that, written in the fine hand used by Mr. Left was this:

"Huxley:--On earth I wrote that I saw one angel--'the strong, calm angel playing for love.' Now I see the forces of good leading the world forward, compelling progress; all are personal--just as the Great All Encompassing Force is personal, just as human consciousness is personal. The positive forces of life are angels--not exact--but the best figure. So it is true that was written, 'there is more joy in Heaven'--and 'the angels sang for joy.' This also is only a figure--but the best I can get through to you. Angels guide us, angels strengthen us, angels pray for us."

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Chapter XXXI

IN WHICH JUDGE VAN DORN MAKES HIS BRAGS AND DR. NESBIT SEES A VISION

It was the last day of the last year of the Nineteenth Century--and a fair, beautiful day it was. The sun shone over Harvey in spite of the clouds from the smelter in South Harvey, and in spite of the clouds that were blown by the soft, south wind up the Wahoo Valley from other smelters and other coal mines, and a score of great smoke stacks in Foley and Magnus and Plain Valley, where the discovery of coal and oil and gas, within the decade that was passing, had turned the Valley into a straggling town almost twenty miles long. So high and busy were the chimneys that when the south wind blew toward the capital of this industrial community, often the sun was dimmed in Harvey by a haze. But on this fair winter's day the air was dry and cold and even in Harvey shadows were black and clear, and the sun's warmth had set the redbirds to singing in the brush and put so much joy into the world that Judge Thomas Van Dorn had ventured out with his new automobile--a chugging, clattering wonder that set all the horses of Greeley County on their hind feet, making him a person of distinction in the town far beyond his renown as a judge and an orator and a person of more than state-wide reputation. But the Judge's automobile was frail and prone to err--being not altogether unlike its owner in that regard. Thus many a time when it chugged out of his barn so proudly, it came limping back behind a span of mules. And so it happened on that bright, beautiful, December day that the Judge was sitting upon a box in Captain Morton's shop, while the Captain at his little forge was welding some bits of metal together and discoursing upon the virtues of his Household Horse, which he was assembling in small quantities--having arranged with a firm in South Chicago to cast the two iron pieces that were needed.

"Now, for instance, on a clothes wringer," the Captain was saying: "It's a perfect wonder on a clothes wringer: I have the agency of a clothes wringer that is making agents rich all over the country. But women don't like clothes wringers; why? Because they require such hard work. All right--hitch on my Household Horse, and the power required is reduced three-fifths and a day's wash may be put on the line as easy as a girl could play The Maiden's Prayer on a piano--eh? Or, say, put it on a churn--same Horse--one's all that's needed to a house. Or make it an ice cream freezer or a cradle or a sewing machine, or anything on earth that runs by a crank--and 'y gory, man, you make housework a joy. I sold Laura one--traded her one for lessons for Ruth, and she says wash-day at the Doctor's is like Sunday now--what say? Lila's so crazy about it they can't keep her out of the basement while the woman works,--likes to dabble in the water you know like all children, washing her doll clothes, what say?"

But the Judge said nothing. The Captain tinkered with the metal, and dipped it slowly in and out of a tub of dirty water to temper it, and as he tried it in the groove where it belonged upon the automobile backed up to the shop, he found that it was not exactly true, and went to work to spring it back into line. The Judge looked around the shop--a barny, little place filled with all sorts of wheels and pulleys and levers and half-finished inventions that wouldn't work, and that, even if they would work, would be of little consequence. There was an attempt to make a self-oiler for buggy wheels, a half-finished contrivance that was supposed to keep cordwood stacked in neat rows; an automatic contraption to prevent coffeepots from burning; a cornsheller that would all but work; a molasses faucet with an alcohol burner which was supposed to make the sirup flow faster--but which instead sometimes blew up and burned down grocery stores, and there were steamers and churns and household contrivances which the Captain had introduced into the homes of Harvey in past years, not of his invention, to be sure, but contrivances that had inspired his eloquence, and were mute witnesses to his prowess--trophies of the chase. Above the forge were rows of his patent sprockets, all neatly wrapped in brown paper, and under this row of merchandise was a clipping from the Times describing the Captain's invention, and predicting--at five cents a line--that it would revolutionize the theory of mechanics and soon become a household need all over the world.

As the Judge looked idly at the Captain's treasures while the Captain tinkered with the steel, he took off his hat, and the Captain, peering through his glasses, remarked:

"Getting kind of thin on top, Tom--eh? Doc, he's leaning a little hard on his cane. Joe Calvin, he's getting rheumatic, and you're getting thin-haired. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."

"So you believe the Lord runs things here in Harvey, do you, Cap?" asked the Judge, who was playing with a bit of wire.

"Well--I suppose if you come right down to it," answered the Captain, "a man's got to have the consolation of religion in some shape or other or he's going to get mighty discouraged--what say?"

"Why," scoffed the Judge, "it's a myth--there's nothing to it. Look at my wife--I mean Margaret--she changes religion as often as she changes dogs. Since we've been married she's had three religions. And what good does it do her?"

The Captain, sighting down the edge of the metal, shook his head, and the Judge went on: "What good does any religion do? I've broken the ten commandments, every one of them--and I get on. No one bothers me, because I keep inside the general statutes. I've beat God at his own game. I tell you, Cap, you can do what you please just so you obey the state and federal laws and pay your debts. This God-myth amuses me."

Captain Morton did not care to argue with the Judge. So he said, by way of making conversation for a customer, and neighbor and guest:

"I hear, well, to be exact, George Brotherton was telling me and the girls the other night that the Company is secretly dropping out the members of the unions that Grant Adams has been organizing down in South Harvey."

"Yes--that Adams is another one of your canting, God-and-morality fellows. Always watch that kind. I tell you, Captain," barked the Judge, "about the only thing my wife and I have agreed on for a year is that this Adams fellow is a sneaking, pharisaical hound. Lord, how she hates him! Sometimes I think women hate hard enough to compete with your God, who according to the preachers, is always slipping around getting even with fellows for their sins. God and women are very much alike, anyway," sneered the Judge. In the silence that followed, both men were attracted by a noise behind them--the rustling of straw. They looked around and saw the figure of a little girl--a yellow-haired, blue-eyed, shy, little girl, trying to slip out of the place. She had evidently been in the loft gathering eggs, for her apron was full, and she had her foot on the loft ladder.

"Why, Lila, child," exclaimed the Captain, "I clean forgot you being up there--did you find any eggs? Why didn't you come down long ago?"

"Come here, Lila," called the Judge. The child stood by the ladder hesitatingly, holding her little apron corners tightly in her teeth basketing the eggs--too embarrassed now that she was down the ladder, to use her hands.

"Lila," coaxed the Judge, reaching his hand into his pocket, "won't you let Papa give you a dollar for candy or something. Come on, daughter." He put out his hands. She shook her head. She had to pass him to get to the door. "You aren't afraid of your Papa are you, Lila--come--here's a dollar for you--that's a good girl."

Her mouth quivered. Big tears were dropping down her cheeks. The Captain's quick eye saw that something had hurt her. He went over to her, put his arm about her, took the eggs from her apron, fondled her gently without speaking. The Judge drew nearer "Lila--come--that's a good girl--here, take the money. Oh Lila, Lila," he cried, "won't you take it for Papa--won't you, my little girl?"

The child looked up at him with shy frightened eyes, and suddenly she put down her head and ran past him. He tried to hold her--to put the silver into her hand, but she shrank away and dropped the coin before him.

"Shy child, Judge--very shy. Emma let her gather the eggs this morning, she loves to hunt eggs," chuckled the Captain, "and she went to the loft just before you came in. I clean forgot she hadn't come down."

The Captain went on with his work.

"I suppose, Cap," said Van Dorn quietly, "she heard more or less of what I said." The Captain nodded.

"How much did she understand?" the Judge asked.

"More'n you'd think, Judge--more'n you'd think. But," added Captain Morton after a pause, "I know the little skite like a top, Judge--and there's one thing about her: She's a loyal little body. She'll never tell; you needn't be worrying about that."

The Judge sighed and added sadly: "It wasn't that, Cap--it was--" But the Judge left his sentence in the air. The mending was done. The Judge paid the old man and gave him a dollar more than he asked, and went chugging off in a cloud of smoke, while the Captain, thinking over what the Judge had said, sighed, shook his head, and bending over his work, cackled in an undertone, snatches of a tune that told of a land that is fairer than day. He had put together three sprockets and was working on the fourth when he looked up and saw his daughter Emma sitting on the box that the Judge had vacated. The Captain put his hand to his back and stood up, looking at his eldest daughter with loving pride.

"Emma," he said at length, "Judge Tom says women are like God." He stood near her and smoothed her hair, and patted her cheek as he pressed her head against his side. "I guess he's right--eh? Lila was in the loft getting eggs and she overheard a lot of his fool talk." The daughter made no reply. The Captain worked on and finally said: "It kind of hit Tom hard to have Lila hear him; took the tuck out of him, eh?"

Emma still waited. "My dear, the more I know of women the better I think of God, and the surer I am of God, the better I think of women--what say?" He sat on the box beside her and took her hand in his hard, cracked, grimy hand, "'Y gory, girl, I tell you, give me a line on a man's idea of God and I can tell you to a tee what he thinks of women--eh?" The Captain dropped the hand for a moment and looked out of the door into the alley.

"Well, Father, I agree with you in general about women but in particular I don't care about Mrs. Herdicker and I wish Martha had another job, though I suppose it's better than teaching school." The daughter sighed. "Honest, father, sometimes when I've been on my feet all day, and the children have been mean, and the janitor sticks his head in and grins, so I'll know the superintendent is in the building and get the work off the board that the rules don't allow me to put on, or one of the other girls sends a note up to watch for my spelling for he's cranky on spelling to-day, I just think, 'Lordee, if I had a job in some one's kitchen, I'd be too happy to breathe.' But then--"

"Yes--yes, child--I know it's hard work now--but 'y gory, Emmy, when I get this sprocket introduced and going, I'll buy you six superintendents in a brass cage and let you feed 'em biled eggs to make 'em sing--eh?" He smiled and patted his daughter's hair and rose to go back to work. The girl plucked at his coat and said: "Now sit down, father, I want to talk to you," she hesitated. "It's about Mr. Brotherton. You know he's been coming out here for years and I thought he was coming to see me, and now Martha thinks he comes to see her, and Martha always stays there and so does Ruth, and if he is coming to see me--" she stopped. Her father looked at her in astonishment. "Why, father," she went on,--"why not? I'm twenty-five, and Martha's twenty-two and even Ruth is seventeen--he might even be coming to see Ruth," she added bitterly.

"Yes, or Epaminondas--the cat--eh?" cut in the old man. Then he added, indignantly, "Well, how about this singing Jasper Adams--who's he coming to see? Or Amos--he comes around here sometimes Saturday night after G. A. R. meeting, with me--what say? Would you want us all to clear out and leave you the front room with him?" demanded the perturbed Captain.

Then the father put his arm about his child tenderly: "Twenty-five years old--twenty-five years--why, girl, in my time a girl was an old maid laid on the shelf at twenty-five--and here you are," he mused, "just thinking of your first beau and here I am needing your mother worse than I ever did in my life. Law-see' girl--how do I know what to do--what say?" But he did know enough to draw her to him and kiss her and sigh. "Well--maybe I can do something--maybe--we'll see." And then she left him and he went to his work. And as he worked the thought struck him suddenly that if he could put one of his sprockets in the Judge's automobile where he had seen a chain, that it would save power and stop much of the noise. So as he worked he dreamed that his sprocket was adopted by the makers of the new machines, and that he was rich--exceedingly rich and that he took the girls to visit the Ohio kin, and that Emma had her trip to the Grand Canyon, that Martha went to Europe and that Ruthie "took vocal" of a teacher in France whose name he could not pronounce.

As he hammered away at his bench he heard a shuffling at the door and looking up saw Dr. Nesbit in the threshold.

"Come in, Doctor; sit down and talk," shrilled the Doctor before the Captain could speak, and when the Doctor had seated himself upon the box by the workbench, the Captain managed to say: "Surely--come right in, I'm kind of lonesome anyhow."

"And I'm mad," cried the Doctor. "Just let me sit here and blow off a little to my old army friend."

"Well--well, Doctor, it's queer to see you hot under the collar--eh?" The Doctor began digging out his pipe and filling it, without speaking. The Captain asked: "What's gone wrong? Politics ain't biling? what say?"

"Well," returned the Doctor, "you know Laura works at her kindergarten down there in South Harvey, and she got me to pass that hours-of-service law for the smelter men at the extra session last summer. Good law! Those men working there in the fumes shouldn't work over six hours a day--it will kill them. I managed by trading off my hide and my chances of Heaven to get a law through, cutting them down to eight hours in smelter work. Denny Hogan, who works on the slag dump, is going to die if he has to do it another year on a ten-hour shift. He's been up and down for two years now--the Hogans live neighbors to Laura's school and I've been watching him. Well," and here the Doctor thumped on the floor with his cane, "this Judge--this vain, strutting peacock of a Judge, this cat-chasing Judge that was once my son-in-law, has gone and knocked the law galley west so far as it affects the slag dump. I've just been reading his decision, and I'm hot--good and hot."

The Captain interrupted:

"I saw Violet Hogan and the children--dressed like princesses, walking out to-day--past the Judge's house--showing it to them--what say? My, how old she looks, Doctor!"

"Well--the damned villain--the infernal scoundrel--" piped the Doctor. "I just been reading that decision. The men showed in their lawsuit that the month before the law took effect the company, knowing the law had been passed, went out and sold their switch and sold the slag dump, to a fake railroad company that bought a switch engine and two or three cars, and incorporated as a railroad, and then--the same people owning the smelter and the railroad, they set all the men in the smelter that they could working on the slag dump, so the men were working for the railroad and not for the smelter company and didn't come within the eight hour law. And now the Judge stands by that farce; he says that the men working there under the very chimney of the smelter on the slag dump where the fumes are worst, are not subject to the law because the law says that men working for the smelters shall not work more than eight hours, and these men are working for a cheating, swindling subterfuge of a railroad. That's judge-made law. That's the kind of law that makes anarchists. Law!" snorted the Doctor, "Law!--made by judges who have graduated out of the employ of corporations--law!--is just what the Judge on the bench dares to read into the statute. I tell you, Cap, if the doctors and engineers and preachers were as subservient to greed and big money as the lawyers are, we would soon lose our standing. But when a lawyer commits some flagrant malpractice like that of Tom Van Dorn's--the lawyers remind us that the courts are sacred institutions."

The Doctor's pipe was out and in filling it again, he jabbed viciously at the bowl with his knife, and in the meantime the Captain was saying:

"Well, I suppose he found the body of the decisions leaning that way, Doc--you know Judges are bound by the body of the law."

"The body of the law--yes, damn 'em, I've bought 'em to find the body of the law myself."

The Doctor sputtered along with his pipe and cried out in his high treble--"I never had any more trouble buying a court than a Senator. And lawyers have no shame about hiring themselves to crooks and notorious lawbreakers. And some lawyers hire themselves body and soul to great corporations for life and we all know that those corporations are merely evading the laws and not obeying them; and lawyers--at the very top of the profession--brazenly hire out for life to that kind of business. What if the top of the medical profession was composed of men who devoted themselves to fighting the public welfare for life! We have that kind of doctors--but we call them quacks. We don't allow 'em in our medical societies. We punish them by ostracism. But the quack lawyers who devote themselves to skinning the public--they are at the head of the bar. They are made judges. They are promoted to supreme courts. A damn nice howdy-do we're coming to when the quacks run a whole profession. And Tom Van Dorn is a quack--a hair-splitting, owl-eyed, venal quack--who doles out the bread pills of injustice, and the strychnine stimulants of injustice and the deadening laudanum of injustice, and falls back on the body of the decisions to uphold him in his quackery. Justice demands that he take that fake corporation, made solely to evade the law, and shake its guts out and tell the men who put up this job, that he'll put them all in jail for contempt of court if they try any such shenanigan in his jurisdiction again. That would be justice. This--this decision--is humbug and every one knows it. What's more--it may be murder. For men can't work on that slag dump ten hours a day without losing their lives."

The captain tapped away at his sprocket. He had his own ideas about the sanctity of the courts. They were not to be overthrown so easily. The Doctor snorted: "Burn their bodies, and blear their minds, and then wail about our vicious lower classes--I'm getting to be an anarchist."

He prodded his cane among the débris on the floor and then he began to twitch the loose skin of his lower face and smiled. "Thank you, Cap," he chirped. "How good and beautiful a thing it is to blow off steam in a barn to your old army friend."

The Captain looked around and smiled and the Doctor asked: "What was that you were saying about Violet Hogan?"

"I said I saw her to-day and she looked faded and old--she's not so much older than my Emma--eh?"

"Still," said the Doctor, "Violet's had a tough time--a mighty tough time; three children in six years. The last one took most of her teeth; young horse doctor gave her some dope that about killed her; she's done all the cooking, washing, scrubbing and made garden for the family in that time--up every morning at five, seven days in the week to get breakfast for Dennis--Emma would look broken if she'd had that." The Doctor paused. "Like her mother--weak--vain--puts all of Denny's wages on the children's backs--Laura says Violet spends more on frills for those kids than we spend for groceries--and Violet goes around herself looking like the Devil before breakfast." The Doctor rested his chin on his cane. "Remember her mother--Mrs. Mauling--funny how it breeds that way. The human critter, Cap, is a curious beast--but he does breed true--mostly." The Doctor loafed, whistling, around the work shop, prodding at things with his cane, and wound up leaning against one end of the bench.

"Last day of the century," he piped, "makes a fellow pause and study. I've seen fifty-three years of the old century--seen the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the fast printing press, the transcontinental railroad, the steam thresher, the gasoline engine--and all its wonders clear down to Judge Tom's devil wagon. That's a good deal for one short life. I've seen industry revolutionized--leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily habits of men, and distort their thoughts; one man can't run a steam engine; it takes more than one man to own one. So have I seen capital rise in the world until it is greater than kings, greater than courts, greater than governments--greater than God himself as matters stand, Cap--I'm terribly afraid that's true."

The Doctor was serious. His high voice was calm, and he smoked a while in peace. "But," he added reflectively--"Cap, I want to tell you something more wonderful than all; I've seen seven absolutely honest men elected this year to the State Senate--I've sounded them, felt them out, had all kinds of reports from all kinds of people on those seven men. Each man thinks he's alone, and there are seven."

The Doctor leaned over to the Captain and said confidentially, "Cap--we meet next week. Listen here. I was elected without a dollar of the old spider's money. He fought me for that smelter law on the quiet. Now look here; you watch my smoke. I'm going to organize those seven, and make eight and you're going to see some fighting."

"You ain't going to fight the party, are you, Doc?" asked the amazed Captain, as though he feared that the Doctor would fall dead if he answered yes. But the Doctor grinned and said: "Maybe--if it fights me."

"Well, Doc--" cried the Captain, "don't you think--"

"You bet I think--that's what's the matter. The smelter lawsuit's made me think. They want to control government so they can have a license to murder. That's what it means. Watch 'em blight Denny Hogan's lungs down on the dump; watch 'em burn 'em up and crush 'em in the mines--by evading the mining laws; watch 'em slaughter 'em on the railroads; murder is cheap in this country--if you control government and get a slaughter license."

The Doctor laughed. "That's the old century--and say, Cap--I'm with the new. You know old Browning--he says:

"It makes me mad To think what men will do an' I am dead."

The Doctor waved his cane furiously, and grinned as he threw back his head, laughed silently, kicked out one leg, and stood with one eye cocked, looking at the speechless Captain. "Well, Cap--speak up--what are you going to do about it?"

"'Y gory, Doc, you certainly do talk like a Populist--eh?" was all the Captain could reply. The Doctor toddled to the door, and standing there sang back: "Well, Cap--do you think the Lord Almighty laid off all the angels and quit work on the world when he invented Tom Van Dorn's automobile--that it is the last new thing that will ever be tried?"

And with that, the Doctor went out into the alley and through his alley gate into his house. But the Captain's mind was set going by the Doctor's parting words. He was considering what might follow the invention of Tom Van Dorn's automobile. There was that chain, and there was his sprocket. It would work--he knew it would work and save much power and much noise. But the sprocket must be longer, and stronger. Then, he thought, if the wire spokes and the ball-bearing and rubber tires of the bicycle had made the automobile possible, and now that they were getting the gasoline engine of the automobile perfected so that it would generate such vast power in such a small space--what if they could conserve and apply that power through his invention--what if the gasoline engine might not through his Household Horse some day generate and use a power that would lift a man off the earth? What then? As he tapped the bolts and turned the screws and put his little device together, he dreamed big dreams of the future when men should fly, and the boundaries of nations would disappear and tariffs would be impossible. This shocked him, and he tried to figure out how to prevent smuggling by flying machines; but as he could not, he dreamed on about the time when war would be abolished among civilized men, because of his invention.

So while he was dreaming in matter--forming the first vague nebulæ of coming events, the infinite intelligence washing around us all, floating this earth, and holding the stars in their courses, sent a long, thin fleck of a wave into the mind of this man who stood working and dreaming in the twilight while the old century was passing. And while he saw his vision, other minds in other parts of the earth saw their visions. Some of these myriad visions formed part of his, and his formed part of theirs, and all were part of the great vision that was brooding upon the bourne of time and space. And other visions, parts of the great vision of the Creator, were moving with quickening life in other minds and hearts. The disturbed vision of justice that flashed through the Doctor's mind was a part of the vast cycle of visions that were hovering about this earth. It was not his alone, millions held part of it; millions aspired, they knew not why, and staked their lives upon their faith that there is a power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness. And as the waves of infinite, resistless, all-encompassing love laved the world that New Year's night that cast the new Century upon the strange shores of time, let us hope that the dreams of strong men stirred them deeply that they might move wisely upon that mysterious tide that is drawing humanity to its unknown goal.

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Chapter XXXII

WHEREIN VIOLET HOGAN TAKES UP AN OLD TRADE AND MARGARET VAN DORN SEEKS A HIGHER PLANE

The new Century brought to Harvey such plenitude that all night and all day the smelter fires painted the sky up and down the Wahoo Valley; all night long and all day long the miners worked in the mines, and all through the night and the long day the great cement factory and the glass factories belched forth their lurid fumes. The trolley cars went creaking and moaning around the curves through the mean, dirty, squalid, little streets of the mining and manufacturing towns. They whined impatiently as they sailed across the prairie grass under the befogged sunshine between the settlements, but always they brought up with their loads at Harvey. So Harvey grew to be a prosperous inland city, and the Palace Hotel with its onyx and marble office, once the town's pride, found itself with all its striving but a third-class hostelry, while the three-story building of the Traders' Bank looked low and squatty beside its six and seven storied neighbors. The tin cornices of Market Street were wiped away, and yellow brick and terra cotta and marble took the place of the old ornaments of which the young town had been so proud. The thread of wires and pipes that made the web of the spider behind the brass sign, multiplied and the pipes and the rails and the cables that carried his power grew taut and strong. New people by thousands had come into the town and gradually the big house, the Temple of Love on Hill Crest, that had been deserted during the first years of its occupancy, filled up. Judge Thomas Van Dorn and his handsome wife were seen in the great hotels of New York and Boston, and in Europe more or less, though the acquaintances they made in Europe and in the East were no longer needed to fill their home. But the old settlers of Harvey maintained their siege. It was at a Twelfth Night festivity when young people from all over the Valley and from all over the West were masqueing in the great house, that Judge Van Dorn, to please a pretty girl from Baltimore whom the Van Dorns had met in Italy, shaved his mustache and appeared before the guests with a naked lip. The pursed, shrunken, sensuous lips of the cruel mouth showed him so mercilessly that Mrs. Van Dorn could not keep back a little scream of horror the first time he stood before her with his shaved lip. But she changed her scream to a baby giggle, and he did not know how he was revealed. So he went about ever after, preening himself that his smooth face gave him youth, and strutting inordinately because some of the women he knew told him he looked like a boy of twenty-five--instead of a man in his forties. He was always suave, always creakingly debonaire, always, even in his meannesses, punctilious and airy.

So the old settlers sometimes were fooled by his attitude toward Margaret, his wife. He bore toward her in public that shallow polish of attention, which puzzled those who knew that they were never together by themselves when he could help it, that he spent his evenings at the City Club, and that often at the theater they sat almost back to back unconsciously during the whole performance. But after the curtain was down, the polite husband was the soul of attendance upon the beautiful wife--her coat, her opera glasses, her trappings of various sorts flew in and out of his eager hands as though he were a conjurer playing with them for an audience. For he was a proud man, and she was a vain woman, and they were striving to prove to a disapproving world that the bargain they had made was a good one.

Yet the old settlers of Harvey felt instinctively that the price of their Judge's bargain was not so trifling a matter as at first the happy couple had esteemed it. The older people saw the big house glow with light as the town spread over the hill and prosperity blackened the Valley. The older people played their quiet games of bridge, by night, and said little. Judge Van Dorn polished the periods of his orations, kept himself like a race horse, strutted like a gobbler, showed his naked mouth, held himself always tightly in hand, kept his eye out for a pretty face, wherever it might be found, drank a little too much at night at the City Club; not much too much but a very little too much--so much that he needed something to brighten his eyes in the morning.

But whatever the Judge's views were on the chess game of the cosmos, Margaret, his wife, had no desire to beat God at his own game. She was a seeker, who always was looking for a new God. God after God had passed in weary review before her. She was always ready to tune up with the infinite, and to ignore the past--a most comfortable thing to do under the circumstances.

As she turned into Market Street one February morning of the New Year in the New Century, leading her dachshund, she was revolving a deep problem in her head. She was trying to get enough faith to believe that her complexion did not need a renovation. She knew that the skin-thought she kept holding was earth-bound and she had tried to shake it, but it wouldn't shake. She had progressed far enough in the moment's cult to overcome a food-thought when her stomach hurt her, by playing a stiff game of bridge for a little stake. But the skin-thought was with her, and she was nervous and irritable and upon the verge of tears for nothing at all. Moreover, her dog kept pulling at his leash, so altogether her cup was running over and she went into Mr. Brotherton's store to ask him to try to find an English translation of a highly improper German book with a pious title about which she had heard from a woman from Chicago who had been visiting her.

Now Mr. Brotherton had felt the impulse of the town's prosperity in his business. The cigar stand was gone. In its place was a handsome plain glass case containing expensive books--books bound in vellum, books in hand-tooled leather, books with wide, ragged margins of heavy linen paper around deep black types with illuminated initials at the chapter heads; books filled with extravagant illustrations, books so beautiful that Mr. Brotherton licked his chops with joy when he considered the difference between the cost mark and the price mark. The Amen Corner was gone--the legend that had come down from the pool room, "Better go to bed lonesome than wake up in debt," had been carted to the alley. While the corner formerly occupied by the old walnut bench still held a corner seat, it was a corner seat with sharp angles, with black stain upon it, and upholstered in rich red leather, and red leather pillows lounged luxuriously in the corners of the seat; a black, angular table and a red, angular shade over a green angular lamp sat where the sawdust box had been. True--a green angular smoker's set also was upon the table--the only masculine appurtenance in the corner; but it was clearly a sop thrown out to offended and exiled mankind--a mere mockery of the solid comfort of the sawdust box, filled with cigar stubs and ashes that had made the corner a haven for weary man for nearly a score of years. Above the black-stained seat ran a red dado and upon that in fine old English script, where once the old sign of the Corner had been nailed, there ran this legend:

"'The sweet serenity of Books' and Wallpaper, Stationery and Office Supplies."

For Mr. Brotherton's commercial spirit could not permit him to withhold the fact that he had enlarged his business by adding such household necessities as wall paper and such business necessities as stationery and office supplies. Thus the town referred ever after to Mr. Brotherton's "Sweet serenity of Books and Wallpaper," and so it was known of men in Harvey.

When Mrs. Van Dorn entered, she was surprised; for while she had heard casually of the changes in Mr. Brotherton's establishment, she was not prepared for the effulgence of refined and suppressed grandeur that greeted her.

Mr. Brotherton, in a three buttoned frock coat, a rich black ascot tie and suitable gray trousers, came forward to meet her.

"Ah, George," she exclaimed in her baby voice, "really what a lit-ry," that also was from her Chicago friend, "what a lit-ry atmosphere you have given us."

Mr. Brotherton's smile pleaded guilty for him. He waved her to a seat among the red cushions. "How elegant," she simpered, "I just think it's perfectly swell. Just like Marshall Field's. I must bring Mrs. Merrifield in when she comes down--Mrs. Merrifield of Chicago. You know, Mr. Brotherton," it was the wife of the Judge who spoke, "I think we should try to cultivate those whose wide advantages make our association with them a liberal education. What is it Emerson says about Friendship--in that wonderful essay--I'm sure you'll recall it."

And Mr. Brotherton was sure he would too, and indicated as much, for as he had often said to Mr. Fenn in their literary confidences, "Emerson is one of my best moving lines." And Mrs. Van Dorn continued confidentially: "Now there's a book, a German book--aren't those Germans candid--you know I'm of German extraction, and I tell the Judge that's where I get my candor. Well, there's a German book--I can't pronounce it, so I've written it out--there; will you kindly order it?" Mr. Brotherton took the slip and went to the back of the store to make a memorandum of the order. He left the book counter in charge of Miss Calvin--Miss Ave Calvin--yes, Miss Ave Maria Calvin, if you must know her full name, which she is properly ashamed of. But it pleased her mother twenty years before and as Mr. Calvin was glad to get into the house on any terms when the baby was named, it went Ave Maria Calvin, and Ave Maria Calvin stood behind the counter reading the Bookman and trying to remember the names of the six best sellers so that she could order them for stock.

Mrs. Van Dorn, who kept Mrs. Calvin's one card conspicuously displayed in her silver card case in the front hall, saw an opportunity to make a little social hay, so she addressed Miss Calvin graciously: "Good morning, Ave--how is your dear mother? What a charming effect Mr. Brotherton has produced!" Then Mrs. Van Dorn dropped the carefully modulated voice a trifle lower: "When the book comes that I just ordered, kindly slip it to one side; I wouldn't have Mr. Brotherton--he might misunderstand. But you can read it if you wish--take it home over night. It's very broadening."

When Mr. Brotherton returned the baby voice prattled at him. The voice was saying, "I was just telling Ave how dead swell it is here. I just can't get over it--in Harvey--dear old Harvey; do you remember when I was a little school teacher down in the Prospect schoolhouse and you used to order Chautauqua books--such an innocent little school girl--don't you remember? We wouldn't say how long ago that was, would we, Mr. Brotherton? Oh, dear, no. Isn't it nice to talk over old times? Did you know the Jared Thurstons have left Colorado and have moved to Iowa where Jared has started another paper? Lizzie and I used to be such chums--she and Violet and I--where is Violet now, Mr. Brotherton? Oh, yes, I remember Mrs. Herdicker said she lives next door to the kindergarten--down in South Harvey. Isn't it terrible the way Anne Sands did--just broke her father's heart. And Nate Perry quarrelling with ten million dollars. Isn't this a strange world, Mr. Brotherton?"

Mr. Brotherton confessed for the world and Mrs. Van Dorn shook her over-curled head sadly. She made some other talk with Mr. Brotherton which he paraphrased later for Henry Fenn and when Mrs. Van Dorn went out, Mr. Brotherton left the door open to rid the room of the scent of attar of roses and said to Miss Calvin:

"Well, s--," but checked himself and went on in his new character of custodian of "The Sweet Serenity of Books and Wall Paper," but he added as a compromise:

"'And for bonnie Annie Laurie' I certainly would make a quick get-away!"

After which reflection, Mr. Brotherton walked down the long store room to his dark stained desk, turned on the electric under the square copper shade, and began to figure up his accounts. But a little social problem kept revolving in his head. It was suggested by Mrs. Van Dorn and by something she had said. Beside Mrs. Van Dorn in her tailored gown and seal-skin, with her spanking new midwinter hat to match her coat, dragging the useless dog after her, he saw the picture of another woman who had come in the day before--a woman no older than Margaret Van Dorn--yet a broken woman, with rounded shoulders who rarely smiled, wishing to hide her broken teeth, who wheeled one baby and led another, and shooed a third and slipped into the corner near the magazine counter and thumbed over the children's fashions in the Delineator eagerly and looked wistfully at the beautiful things in the store. Her red hands and brown skin showed that she had lived a rough, hard life, and that it had spent her and wasted her and taken everything she prized--and given her nothing--nothing but three overdressed children and a husband whose industrial status had put its heavy mark on her.

Mr. Brotherton's memory went back ten years, and recalled the two girls together--Violet and Margaret. Both were light-headed and vain; so far as their relations with Van Dorn were concerned, one was as blamable as the other. Yet one had prospered and the other had not--and the one who had apparently suffered most had upon the whole lived the cleaner, more normal life--and Mr. Brotherton drummed his penholder upon the black desk before him and questioned the justice of life.

But, indeed, if we must judge life's awards and benefits from the material side there is no justice in life. If there was any difference between the two women whom Tom Van Dorn had wronged--difference in rewards or punishments, it must have been in their hearts. It is possible that in her life of motherhood and wifehood, in the sacrifices that broke her body and scarred her face, Violet Mauling may have been compensated by the love she bore the children upon whom she lavished her life. For she had that love, and she did squander--in blind vain folly--the strength of her body, afterwards the price of her soul--upon her children. As for Margaret Van Dorn--Mr. Brotherton was no philosopher. He could not pity her. Yet she too had given all. She had given her mind--and it was gone. She had given her heart and it was gone also, and she had given that elusive blending of the heart and mind we call her soul--and that was gone, too. Mr. Brotherton could see that they were gone--all gone. But he could not see that her loss was greater than Violet's.

That night when Dennis Hogan came in for his weekly Fireside Companion as he said, "for the good woman," Mr. Brotherton, for old sake's sake, put in something in paper backs by Marie Corelli, and a novel by Ouida; and then, that he might give until it hurt, he tied up a brand new Ladies' Home Journal, and said, as he locked up the store and stepped into the chill night air with Mr. Hogan: "Dennis--tell Violet--I sent 'em in return for the good turns she used to do me when I was mayor and she was in Van Dorn's office and drew up the city ordinances--she'll remember."

"Indeed she will, George Brotherton--that she will. Many's the night she's talked me to sleep of them golden days of her splendor--indeed she will."

They walked on together and Hogan said: "Well--I turn at the next crossin'. I'm goin' home and I'm glad of it. Up in the mornin' at five; off on the six-ten train, climbin' the slag dump at seven, workin' till six, home on the six-fifteen train, into the house at seven; to bed at ten, up at five, eat and work and sleep--sleep and eat and work, fightin' the dump by day and fightin' the fumes in me chist by night--all for a dollar and sixty a day; and if we jine a union, we get canned, and if we would seek dissipation, we're invited to go down to the Company hall and listen to Tommy Van Dorn norate upon what he calls the 'de-hig-nity of luh-ay-bor.' Damn sight of dignity labor has, lopin' three laps ahead of the garnishee from one year's end to the other."

He laughed a good-natured, creaking laugh, and said as he waved his hand to part with Mr. Brotherton--"Well, annyhow, the good woman will thank you for the extra readin'; not that she has time to read it, God knows, but it gives the place a tone when Laura Nesbit drops in for a bit of a word of help about the makin' of the little white things she's doin' for the Polish family on 'D' Street these days." In another minute Brotherton heard the car moaning at the curve, and saw Hogan get in. It was nearly midnight when Hogan got to sleep; for the papers that Brotherton sent brought back "the grandeur that was Greece," and he had to hear how Mr. Van Dorn had made Mr. Brotherton mayor and how they had both made Dr. Nesbit Senator, and how ungrateful the Doctor was to turn against the hand that fed him, and many other incidents and tales that pointed to the renown of the unimpeachable Judge, who for seven years had reigned in the humble house of Hogan as a first-rate god.

That night Hogan tossed as the fumes in his lungs burned the tissues and at five he got up, made the fire, helped to dress the oldest child while his wife prepared the breakfast. He missed the six-ten car, and being late at work stopped in to take a drink at the Hot Dog, near the dump on the company ground, thinking it would put some ginger into him for the day's work. For two hours or so the whiskey livened him up, but as the forenoon grew old, he began to yawn and was tired.

"Hogan," called the dump-boss, "go down to the powder house and bring up a box of persuaders."

The slag was hard and needed blasting. Hogan looked up, said "What?" and before the dump boss could speak again Hogan had started down and around the dump to the powder house, near the saloon. He went into the powder house, and then came out, carrying a heavy box. At the sidewalk edge, Hogan, who was yawning, stumbled--they saw him stumble, two men standing in the door of the Hot Dog saloon a block away, and they told the people at the inquest that that was the last they saw. A great explosion followed. The men about the dump huddled for a long minute under freight cars, then crawled out, and the dump boss called the roll; Hogan was missing. In an hour they came and took Mrs. Hogan to the undertaker's room near the smelter--where so many women had stood beside death in its most awful forms. She had her baby in her arms, with another plucking at her skirts and she stood mutely beside the coffin that they would not open. For she knew what other women knew about the smelter, knew that when they will not open the coffin, it must not be opened. So the little procession rode to the Hogan home, where Laura Van Dorn was waiting. Perhaps it was because she could not see the face of the dead that it seemed unreal to the widow. But she did not moan nor cry--after the first scream that came when she knew the worst. Stolidly she went through her tasks until after the funeral.

Then she called Laura into the kitchen and said, as she pressed out her black satin and tried to hide the threadbare seams that had been showing for years: "Mrs. Van Dorn, I'm going to do something you won't like." To Laura's questioning eyes Violet answered: "I know your ma, or some one else has told you all about me--but," she shut her mouth tightly and said slowly:

"But no matter what they say--I'm going to the Judge; he's got to make the railroad company pay and pay well. It's all I've got on earth--for the children. We have three dollars in my pocketbook and will have to wait until the fifteenth before I get his last month's wages, and I know they'll dock him up to the very minute of the day--that day! I wouldn't do it for anything else on earth, Mrs. Van Dorn--wild horses couldn't drag me there--but I'm going to the Judge--for the children. He can help."

So, putting on her bedraggled black picture hat with the red ripped off, Violet Hogan mounted the courthouse steps and went to the office of the Judge. A sorry, broken, haggard figure she cut there in the Judge's office. She would have told him her story--but he interrupted: "Yes, Violet--I read it in the Times. But what can I do--you know I'm not allowed to take a case and, besides, he was working for the railroad, and you know, Violet, he assumed the risk. What do they offer you?"

"Judge--for God's sake don't talk that way to me. That's the way you used to talk to those miners' wives--ugh!" she cried. "I remember it all--that assumed risk. Only this--he was working ten hours a day on a job that wouldn't let him sleep, and he oughtn't to be working but eight hours, if they hadn't sneaked under the law. They've offered me five hundred, Judge--five hundred--for a man, five hundred for our three children--and me. You can make them do better--oh, I know you can. Oh, please for the sake--oh!"

She looked at him with her battered face, and as her mouth quivered, she tried to hide her broken teeth. He saw she was about to give way to tears. He dreaded a scene. He looked at her impatiently and finally gripping himself after a decision, he said:

"Now, Violet, take a brace. Five hundred is what they always give in these cases." He smiled suavely at her and she noticed for the first time that his lip was bare and started at the cruel mouth that leered at her.

"But," he added expansively, "for old sake's sake--I'm going to do something for you." He rose and stood over her. "Now, Violet," he said, strutting the diagonal of his room, and smiling blandly at her, "we both know why I shouldn't give you my personal check--nor why you shouldn't have any cash that you cannot account for. But the superintendent of the smelter, who is also the general manager of the railroad, is under some obligations to me, and I'll give you this note to him." He sat down and wrote:

"For good reasons I desire one hundred dollars added to your check to the widow of Dennis Hogan who presents this, and to have the same charged to my personal account on your books."

He signed his name with a flourish, and after reading the note handed it to the woman.

She looked at him and her mouth opened, showing her broken, ragged teeth. Then she rose.

"My God, Tom Van Dorn--haven't you any heart at all! Six hundred dollars with three little children--and my man butchered by a law you made--oh," she cried as she shook her head and stood dry-eyed and agonized before him--"I thought you were a man--that you were my friend way down deep in your heart--I thought you were a man."

She picked up the paper, and at the door turned and said: "And you could get me thousands from the company for my hundreds by the scratch of your pen--and I thought you were a man." She opened the door, looked at him beseechingly, and repeating her complaint, turned away and left him.

She heard the click of the door-latch behind her and she knew that the man behind the door in whom she had put her faith was laughing at her. Had she not seen him laugh a score of times in other years at the misery of other women? Had they not sat behind this door, he and she, and made sport of foolish women who came asking the disagreeable, which he ridiculed as the impossible? Had she not sat with him and laughed at his first wife, when she had gone away after some protest? The thought of his mocking face put hate into her heart and she went home hardened toward all the world. Laura Van Dorn was with the Hogan children, and when Violet entered the house, she gathered them to her heart with a mad passion and wept--a woman without hope--a woman spurned and mocked in the only holy place she had in her heart.

Laura saw the widowed mother hysterically fondling the children, madly caressing them, foolishly chattering over them, and when Violet made it clear that she wished to be alone, Laura left. But if she could have heard Violet babbling on during the evening, of the clothes she would buy for the youngsters, about the good times they would have with the money, about the ways they were going to spend the little fortune that was theirs, Laura Van Dorn--thrifty, frugal, shrewd Laura, might have helped the thoughtless woman before it was too late. But even if Laura had interfered, it would have been but for a few months or a few years at most.

The end was inevitable--whether it had been five hundred or six hundred or five thousand or six thousand. For Violet was a prodigal bred and born. At first she tried to get some work. But when she found she had to leave the children alone in the house or in care of a neighbor or on the streets, she gave up her job. For when she came home, she found the foolish frills and starched tucks in which she kept them, dirty and torn, and some way she felt that they were losing social caste by the low estate of their clothes, so she bought them silks and fine linens while her money lasted, and when it was gone in the spring--then they were hungry, and needy; and she could not leave them by day.

If the poor were always wise, and the rich were always foolish, if hardship taught us sense, and indulgence made us giddy, what a fine world it would be. How virtue would be rewarded. How vice would be rebuked. But wisdom does not run with social rank, nor with commercial rating. Some of us who are poor are exceedingly foolish, and some of those who are rich have a world of judgment. And Violet Hogan,--poor and mad with a mother love that was as insane as an animal's when she saw her children hungry and needy, knew before she knew anything else that she must live with them by day. So she went out at night--went out into the streets--not of South Harvey--but over into the streets of Foley, down to Magnus and Plain Valley--out into the dark places. There Violet by night took up the oldest trade in the world, and came home by day a mad, half crazed mothering animal who covers her young in dread and fear.

When Laura knew the truth--knew it surely in spite of Violet's studied deceptions, and her outright falsehoods, the silver in the woman's laugh was muffled for a long time. She tried to help the mad mother; but the mother would not admit the truth, would not confess that she needed help. Violet maintained the fiction that she was working in the night shift at the glass factory in Magnus, and by day she starched and ironed and pressed and washed for the overdressed children and as she said, "tried to keep them somebody." Moreover, she would not let them play with the dirty children of the neighborhood, but such is the fear of social taint among women, that soon the other mothers called their children home when the Hogan children appeared.

When Violet discovered that her trade was branding her children--she moved to Magnus and became part of the drab tide of life that flows by us daily with its heartbreak unheeded, its sorrows unknown, its anguish pent up and uncomforted.

Now much meditation on the fate of Violet Hogan and upon the luck of Margaret Van Dorn had made George Brotherton question the moral government of the universe and, being disturbed in his mind, he naturally was moved to language. So one raw spring day when no one was in the Amen Corner but Mr. Fenn, in a moment of inadvertent sobriety, Mr. Brotherton opened up his heart and spoke thus:

"Say, Henry--what's a yogi?" Mr. Fenn refused to commit himself. Mr. Brotherton continued: "The Ex was in here the other day and she says that she thinks she's going to become a yogi. I asked her to spell it, and I told her I'd be for her against all comers. Then she explained that a yogi was some kind of an adept who could transcend space and time, and--well say, I said 'sure,' and she went on to ask me if I was certain we were not thinking matter instead of realizing it, and I says:

"'I bite; what's the sell?'

"And the Ex says--'Now, seriously, Mr. Brotherton, something tells me that you have in your mind, if you would only search it out, vague intimations, left-over impressions of the day you were an ox afield.'

"And, well say, Henry, I says, 'No, madam, it is an ass that rises in me betimes.'

"And the Ex says, 'George Brotherton, you just never can talk sense.'

"So while I was wrapping up 'Sappho' and ordering her a book with a title that sounded like a college yell, she told me she was getting on a higher plane, and I bowed her out. Say, Hen--now wouldn't that jar you?--the Ex getting on a higher plane."

Mr. Fenn grinned--a sodden grin with a four days' beard on it, and dirty teeth, and heavy eyes, then looked stupidly at the floor and sighed and said,

"George, did you know I've quit?" To Mr. Brotherton's kindly smile the other man replied:

"Yes, sir, sawed 'er right off short--St. Patrick's Day. I thought I'd ought to quit last Fourth of July--when I tried to eat a live pinwheel. I thought I had gone far enough." He lifted up his burned-out eyes in the faded smile that once shone like an arc light, and said:

"Man's a fool to get tangled up with liquor. George, when I get my board bill paid--I'm going to quit the auctioning line, and go back to law. But my landlady's needing that money, and I'm a little behind--"

Mr. Brotherton made a motion for his pocket. "No, I don't want a cent of your money, George," Fenn expostulated. "I was just telling you how things are. I knew you'd like to know."

Mr. Brotherton came from behind the counter where he had been arranging his stock for the night, and grasped Henry Fenn's hand. "Say, Henry--you're all right. You're a man--I've always said so. I tell you, Hen, I've been to lots of funerals in this town first and last as pall-bearer or choir singer--pretty nearly every one worth while, but say, I'm right here to tell you that I have never went to one I was sorrier over than yours, Henry--and I'm mighty glad to see you're coming to again."

Henry Fenn smiled weakly and said: "That's right, George--that's right."

And Mr. Brotherton went on, "I claim the lady give you the final push--not that she needed to push hard of course; but a little pulling might have held you."

Mr. Fenn rose to leave and sighed again as he stood for a moment in the doorway--"Yes, George, perhaps so--poor Maggie--poor Maggie."

Mr. Brotherton looked at the man a moment--saw his round hat with neither back nor front and only the wreck of a band around it, his tousled clothes, his shoes with the soles curling at the sides and the frowsy face, from which the man peered out a second and then slunk back again, and Mr. Brotherton took to his book shelf, scratched his head and indicated by his manner that life was too deep a problem for him.

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XXXIII. IN WHICH THE ANGELS SHAKE A FOOT FOR HENRY FENN

The business of life largely resolves itself into a preparation for the next generation. The torch of life moves steadily forward. For children primarily life has organized itself to satisfy decently and in order, the insatiate primal hungers that motive mankind. It was with a wisdom deeper than he understood that George Brotherton spoke one day, as he stood in his doorway and saw Judge Van Dorn hurrying across the street to speak to Lila. "There," roared Mr. Brotherton to Nathan Perry, "well, say--there's the substance all right, man." And then as the Judge turned wearily away with slinking shoulders to avoid meeting the eyes of his wife, plump, palpable, and always personable, who came around the corner, Mr. Brotherton, with a haw-haw of appreciation of his obvious irony, cried, "And there's the shadow--I don't think." But it was the substance and the shadow nevertheless, and possibly the Judge knew them as the considerations of his bargain with the devil. For always he was trying to regain the substance; to take Lila to his heart, where curiously there seemed some need of love, even in a heart which was consecrated in the very temple of love. Without realizing that he was modifying his habits of life, he began to drop in casually to see the children's Christmas exercises, and Thanksgiving programs, and Easter services at John Dexter's church. From the back seat where he always sat alone, he sometimes saw the wealth of affection that her mother lavished on Lila, patting her ribbons, smoothing her hair, straightening her dress, fondling her, correcting her, and watching the child with eyes so full of love that they did not refrain sometimes from smiling in kindly appreciation into the eager, burning, tired eyes of the Judge. The mother understood why he came to the exercises, and often she sent Lila to her father for a word. The town knew these things, and the Judge knew that the town knew, and even then he could not keep away. He had to carry the torch of life, whether he would or not, even though sometimes it must have scorched his proud, white hands. It was the only thing that burned with real fire in his heart.

With Laura Van Dorn the fact of her motherhood colored her whole life. Never a baby was born among her poor neighbors in the valley that she did not thrill with a keen delight at its coming, and welcome it with some small material token of her joy. In the baby she lived over again her own first days of maternity. But it was no play motherhood that restored her soul and refilled her receptacle of faith day by day. The bodily, huggable presence of her daughter continually unfolding some new beauty kept her eager for the day's work to close in the Valley that she might go home to drop the vicarious happiness that she brought in her kindergarten for the real happiness of a home.

Often Grant Adams, hurrying by on his lonely way, paused to tell Laura of a needy family, or to bring a dirty, motherless child to her haven, or to ask her to go to some wayward girl, newly caught in the darker corners of the spider's web.

Doggedly day by day, little by little, he was bringing the workmen of the Valley to see his view of the truth. The owners were paying spies to spy upon him and he knew it, and the high places of his satisfaction came when, knowing a spy and marking him for a victim, Grant converted him to the union cause. With the booming of the big guns of prosperity in Harvey, he was a sort of undertone, a monotonous drum, throbbing through the valley a menace beneath it all. Once--indeed, twice, as he worked, he organized a demand for higher wages in two or three of the mines, and keeping himself in the background, yet cautiously managing the tactics of the demand, he won. He held Sunday meetings in such halls as the men could afford to hire and there he talked--talked the religion of democracy. As labor moved about in the world, and as the labor press of the country began to know of Grant, he acquired a certain fame as a speaker among labor leaders. And the curious situation he was creating gave him some reputation in other circles. He was good for an occasional story in a Kansas City or Chicago Sunday paper; and the Star reporter, sent to do the feature story, told of a lonely, indomitable figure who was the idol of the laboring people of the Wahoo Valley; of his Sunday meetings; of his elaborate system of organization; of his peaceful demands for higher wages and better shop conditions; of his conversion of spies sent to hinder him, of his never-ceasing effort, unsupported by outside labor leaders, unvisited by the aristocracy of the labor world, yet always respecting it, to preach unionism as a faith rather than as a material means for material advancement.

Generally the reporters devoted a paragraph to the question--what manner of man is this?--and intimating more or less frankly that he was a man of one idea, or perhaps broadening the suggestion into a query whether or not a man who would work for years, scorning fame, scorning regular employment and promotion, neglecting opportunities to rise as a labor leader in his own world, was not just a little mad. So it happened that without seeking fame, fame came to him. All over the Missouri Valley, men knew that Grant Adams, a big, lumbering, red-polled, lusty-lunged man with one arm burned off--and the story of the burning fixed the man always in the public heart--with a curious creed and a freak gift for expounding it, was doing unusual things with the labor situation in the Harvey district. And then one day a reporter came from Omaha who uncovered this bit of news in his Sunday feature story:

"Last week the Wahoo district was paralyzed by the announcement that Nathan Perry, the new superintendent of the Independent mines had raised his wage scale, and had acceded to every change in working conditions that the local labor organizations under Adams had asked. Moreover, he has unionized his mine and will recognize only union grievance committees in dealing with the men. The effect of such an announcement in a district where the avowed purpose of the mine operators is to run their own business as they please, may easily be imagined.

"Perry is a civil engineer from Boston Tech., a rich man's son, who married a rich man's daughter, and then cut loose from his father and father-in-law because of a political disagreement over the candidacy of the famous Judge Thomas Van Dorn for a judicial nomination a few years ago. Perry belongs to a new type in industry--rather newer than Adams's type. Perry is a keen eyed, boyish-looking young man who has no illusions about Adams's democracy of labor.

"'I am working out an engineering problem with men,' said Perry to a reporter to-day. 'What I want is coal in the cage. I figure that more wages will put more corn meal in a man's belly, more muscle on his back, more hustle in his legs, and more blood in his brain. And primarily I'm buying muscle and hustle and brains. If I can make the muscle and hustle and brains I buy, yield better dividends than the stuff my competitors buy, I'll hold my job. If not, I'll lose it. I am certainly working for my job.'

"Of course the town doesn't believe for a moment what Perry says. The town is divided. Part of the town thinks that Perry is an Adams convert and a fool, the other half of the town believes that the move is part of a conspiracy of certain eastern financial interests to get control of the Wahoo Valley properties by spreading dissension. Feeling is bitter and Adams and Perry are coming in for considerable abuse. D. Sands, the local industrial entrepreneur, has raised the black flag on his son-in-law, and an interesting time looms ahead."

But often at night in Perry's home in South Harvey, where Morty Sands and Grant Adams loved to congregate, there were hot discussions on the labor question. For Nathan Perry was no convert of Grant Adams.

As the men wrangled, many an hour sat Anne Perry singing the nest song as she made little things for the lower bureau drawer. Sometimes in the evening, Morty would sit by the kitchen stove, sadly torn in heart, between the two debaters, seeing the justice of Grant's side as an ethical question, but admiring the businesslike way in which Nathan waved aside ethical considerations, damned Grant for a crazy man, and proclaimed the gospel of efficiency.

Often Grant walked home from these discussions with his heart hot and rebellious. He saw life only in its spiritual aspect and the logic of Nathan Perry angered him with its conclusiveness.

Often as he walked Kenyon was upon his heart and he wondered if Margaret missed the boy; or if the small fame that the boy was making with his music had touched her vanity with a sense of loss. He wondered if she ever wished to help the child. The whole town knew that the Nesbits were sending Kenyon to Boston to study music, and that Amos Adams and Grant could contribute little to the child's support. Grant wondered, considering the relations between the Van Dorns and Nesbits, whether sometimes Margaret did not feel a twinge of irritation or regret at the course of things.

He could not know that even as he walked through the November night, Margaret Van Dorn, was sitting in her room holding in her hand a tiny watch, a watch to delight a little girl's heart. On the inside of the back of the watch was engraved:

"To Lila from her Father, for Her 10th birthday."

And opposite the inscription in the watch was pasted the photograph of the unhappy face of the donor. Margaret sat gazing at the trinket and wondering vaguely what would delight a little boy's heart as a watch would warm the heart of a little girl. It was not a sense of loss, not regret, certainly not remorse that moved her heart as she sat alone holding the trinket--discovered on her husband's dresser; it was a weak and footless longing, and a sense of personal wrong that rose against her husband. He had something which she had not. He could give jeweled watches, and she--

But if she only could have read life aright she would have pitied him that he could give only jeweled watches, only paper images of a dissatisfied face, only material things, the token of a material philosophy--all that he knew and all that he had, to the one thing in the world that he really could love. And as for Margaret, his wife, who lived his life and his philosophy, she, too, had nothing with which to satisfy the dull, empty feeling in her heart when she thought of Kenyon, save to make peace with it in hard metal and stupid stones. Thus does what we think crust over our souls and make us what we are.

Grant Adams, plodding homeward that night, turned from the thought of Margaret to the thought of Kenyon with a wave of joy, counting the days and weeks and the months until the boy should return for the summer. At home Grant sat down before the kitchen table and began a long talk that kept him until midnight. He had undertaken to organize all the unions of the place into a central labor council; the miners, the smeltermen, the teamsters, the cement factory workers, the workers in the building trades. It was an experimental plan, under the auspices of the national union officers. Only a man like Grant Adams, with something more than a local reputation as a leader, would have been intrusted with the work. And so, after his day's toil for bread, he sat at his kitchen table, elaborately working his dream into reality.

That season the devil, if there is a devil who seeks to swerve us from what we deem our noblest purposes, came to Grant Adams disguised in an offer of a considerable sum of money to Grant for a year's work in the lecture field. The letter bearing the offer explained that by going out and preaching the cause of labor to the people, Grant would be doing his cause more good than by staying in Harvey and fighting alone. The thought came to him that the wider field of work would give him greater personal fame, to be used ultimately for a wider influence. All one long day as he worked with hammer and saw at his trade, Grant turned the matter over in his mind. He could see himself in a larger canvas, working a greater good. Perhaps some fleeting unformed idea came to him of a home and a normal life as other men live; for at noon, without consciously connecting her with his dream, he took his problem to Laura Van Dorn at her kindergarten. That afternoon he decided to accept the offer, and put much of his reason for acceptance upon Kenyon and the boy's needs. That night he penned a letter of acceptance to the lecture bureau and went to bed, disturbed and unsatisfied. Before he slept he turned and twisted, and finally threshed himself to sleep. It was a light fragmentary sleep, that moves in and out of some strange hypnoidal state where the lower consciousness and the normal consciousness wrestle for the control of reason. Then after a long period of half-waking dreams, toward morning, Grant sank into a profound sleep. In that sleep his soul, released from all that is material, rose and took command of his will.

When Grant awoke, it was still black night. For a few seconds he did not know where he was--nor even who he was, nor what. He was a mere consciousness. The first glimmer of identity that came to him came with a roaring "No," that repeated itself over and over, "No--no," cried the voice of his soul--"you are no mere word spinner; you are a fighter; you are pledged, body and soul; you are bought with a price--no, no, no."

And then he knew where he was and he knew surely and without doubt or quaver of faith that he must not give up his place in the fight. When he thought of Kenyon living on the bounty of the Nesbits, he thought also of Dick Bowman, ordering his own son under the sliding earth to hold the shovel over Grant's face in the mine.

So Grant Adams bent his shoulders to this familiar burden. In the early morning, before his father and Jasper were up, the gaunt, ungainly figure hurried with his letter of refusal to the South Harvey Station and put the letter on the seven-ten train for Chicago.

That evening, sitting on their front porch, the Dexters talked over Grant's decision. "Well," said John Dexter, looking up into the mild November sky, and seeing the brown gray smudge of the smelter there, "so Grant has sidled by another devil in his road. We have seen that women won't stop him; it's plain that money nor fame won't stop him, though they clearly tore his coat tails. I imagine from what Laura says he must have decided once to accept."

"Yes," answered his wife, "but it does seem to me, if my old father needed care as his does, and my brother had to accept charity, I'd give that particular devil my whole coat and see if I couldn't make a bargain with him for a little money, at some small cost."

"Mother Eve--Mother Eve," smiled the minister, "you women are so practical--we men are the real idealists--the only dreamers who stand by our dreams in this wicked, weary world."

He leaned back in his chair. "There is still one more big black devil waiting for Grant: Power--the love of power which is the lust of usefulness--power may catch Grant after he has escaped from women and money and fame. Vanity--vanity, saith the preacher--Heaven help Grant in the final struggle with the big, black devil of vanity."

Yet, after all, vanity has in it the seed of a saving grace that has lifted humanity over many pitfalls in the world. For vanity is only self-respect multiplied; and when that goes--when men and women lose their right to lift their faces to God, they have fallen upon bad times indeed. It was even so good a man as John Dexter himself, who tried to put self-respect into the soul of Violet Hogan, and was mocked for it.

"What do they care for me?" she cried, as he sat talking to her in her miserable home one chill November day. "Why should I pay any attention to them? Once I chummed with Mag Müller, before she married Henry Fenn, and I was as good as she was then--and am now for that matter. She knew what I was, and I knew what she was going to be--we made no bones of it. We hunted in pairs--as women like to. And I know Mag Müller. So why should I keep up for her?"

The woman laughed and showed her hollow mouth and all the wrinkles of her broken face, that the paint hid at night. "And as for Tom Van Dorn--I was a decent girl before I met him, Mr. Dexter--and why in God's name should I try to keep up for him?"

She shuddered and would have sobbed but he stopped her with: "Well, Violet--wife and I have always been your friends; we are now. The church will help you."

"Oh, the church--the church," she laughed. "It can't help me. Fancy me in church--with all the wives looking sideways at all the husbands to see that they didn't look too long at me. The church is for those who haven't been caught! God knows if there is a place for any one who has been caught--and I've been caught and caught and caught." She cried. "Only the children don't know--not yet, though little Tom--he's the oldest, he came to me and asked me yesterday why the other children yelled when I went out. Oh, hell--" she moaned, "what's the use--what's the use--what's the use!" and fell to sobbing with her head upon her arms resting upon the bare, dirty table.

It was rather a difficult question for John Dexter. Only one other minister in the world ever answered it successfully, and He brought public opinion down on Him. The Rev. John Dexter rose, and stood looking at the shattered thing that once had been a graceful, beautiful human body enclosing an aspiring soul. He saw what society had done to break and twist the body; what society had neglected to do in the youth of the soul--to guide and environ it right--he saw what poverty had done and what South Harvey had done to cheat her of her womanhood even when she had tried to rise and sin no more; he remembered how the court-made law had cheated her of her rightful patrimony and cast her into the streets to spread the social cancer of her trade; and he had no answer. If he could have put vanity into her heart--the vanity which he feared for Grant Adams, he would have been glad. But her vanity was the vanity of motherhood; for herself she had spent it all. So he left her without answering her question. Money was all he could give her and money seemed to him a kind of curse. Yet he gave it and gave all he had.

When she saw that he was gone, Violet fell upon the tumbled, unmade bed and cried with all the vehemence of her unrestrained, shallow nature. For she was sick and weary and hungry. She had given her last dollar to a policeman the night before to keep from arrest. The oldest boy had gone to school without breakfast. The little children were playing in the street--they had begged food at the neighbors' and she had no heart to stop them. At noon when little Tom came in he found his mother sitting before a number of paper sacks upon the table waiting for him. Then the family ate out of the sacks the cold meal she had bought at the grocery store with John Dexter's money.

That night Violet shivered out into the cold over her usual route. She was walking through the railroad yards in Magnus when suddenly she came upon a man who dropped stealthily out of a dead engine. He carried something shining and tried to slip it under his coat when he saw her. She knew he was stealing brass, but she did not care; she called as they passed through the light from an arc lamp:

"Hello, sweetheart--where you going?"

The man looked up ashamed, and she turned a brazen, painted face at him and tried to smile without opening her lips.

Their eyes met, and the man caught her by the arm and cried:

"God, Violet--is this you--have you--" She cut him off with:

"Henry Fenn--why--Henry--"

The brass fell at his feet. He did not pick it up. They stood between the box cars in speechless astonishment. It was the man who found voice.

"Violet--Violet," he cried. "This is hell. I'm a thief and you--"

"Say it--say it--don't spare me," she cried. "That's what I am, Henry. It's all right about me, but how about you, how about you, Henry? This is no place for you! Why, you," she exclaimed--"why, you are--"

"I'm a drunken thief stealing brass couplings to get another drink, Violet."

He picked up the brass and threw it up into the engine, still clutching her arm so that she could not run away.

"But, girl--" he cried, "you've got to quit this--this is no way for you to live."

She looked at him to see what was in his mind. She broke away, and scrambled into the engine cab and put the brass where it could not fall out.

"You don't want that brass falling out, and them tracing you down here and jugging you--you fool," she panted as she climbed to the ground.

"Lookee here, Henry Fenn," she cried, "you're too good a man for this. You've had a dirty deal. I knew it when she married you--the snake; I know it--I've always known it."

The woman's voice was shrill with emotion. Fenn saw that she was verging on the hysterical, and took her arm and led her down the dark alley between the cars. The man's heart was touched--partly by the wreck he saw, and partly by her words. They brought back the days when he and she had seen their visions. The liquor had left his head, and he was a tremble. He felt her cold, hard hand, and took it in his own dirty, shaken hand to warm it.

"How are you living?" he asked.

"This way," she replied. "I got my children--they've got to live someway. I can't leave them day times and see 'em run wild on the streets--the little girls need me."

She looked up into his face as they hurried past an arc lamp, and she saw tears there.

"Oh, you got a dirty deal, Henry--how could she do it?" cried the woman.

He did not answer and they walked up a dingy street. A car came howling by.

"Got car fare," he asked. She nodded.

"Well, I haven't," he said, "but I'm going with you."

They boarded the car. They were the only passengers. They sat down, and he said, under the roar of the wheels:

"Violet--it's a shame--a damn shame, and I'm not going to stand for it. This a Market Street car?" he asked the conductor who passed down the aisle for their fares. The woman paid. When the conductor was gone, Henry continued:

"Three kids and a mother robbed by a Judge who knew better--just to stand in with the kept attorneys of the bar association. He could have knocked the shenanigan, that killed Hogan, galley west, if he'd wanted to, and no Supreme Court would have dared to set it aside. But no--the kept lawyers at the Capital, and all the Capitals have a mutual admiration society, and Tom has always belonged. So he turns you and all like you on the street, and Violet, before God I'm going to try to help you."

She looked at the slick, greasy, torn stiff hat, and the dirty, shiny clothes that years ago had been his Sunday best, and the shaggy face and the sallow, unwashed skin; and she remembered the man who was.

The car passed into South Harvey. She started to rise. "No," he said, stopping her, "you come on with me."

"Where are we going?" she asked. He did not answer. She sat down. Finally the car turned into Market Street. They got off at the bank corner. The man took hold of the woman's arm, and led her to the alley. She drew back.

He said: "Are you afraid of me--now, Violet?" They slinked down the alley and seeing a light in the back room of a store, Fenn stopped and went up to peer in.

"Come on," he said. "He's in."

Fenn tapped on the barred window and whistled three notes. A voice inside cried, "All right, Henry--soon's I get this column added up."

The woman shrank back, but Fenn held her arm. Then the door opened, and the moon face of Mr. Brotherton appeared in a flood of light. He saw the woman, without recognizing her, and laughed:

"Are we going to have a party? Come right in, Marianna--here's the moated Grange, all right, all right."

As they entered, he tried to see her face, but she dropped her head. Fenn asked, "Why, George--don't you know her? It's Violet--Violet Mauling--who married Denny Hogan who was killed last winter."

George Brotherton looked at the painted face, saw the bald attempt at coquetry in her dress, and as she lifted her glazed, dead eyes, he knew her story instantly.

For she wore the old, old mask of her old, old trade.

"You poor, poor girl," he said gently. Then continued, "Lord--but this is tough."

He saw the miserable creature beside him and would have smiled, but he could not. Fenn began,

"George, I just got tired of coming around here every night after closing for my quarter or half dollar; so for two or three weeks I've been stealing. She caught me at it; caught me stripping a dead engine down in the yards by the round house."

"Yes," she cried, lifting a poor painted face, "Mr. Brotherton--but you know how I happened to be down there. He caught me as much as I caught him! And I'm the worst--Oh, God, when they get like me--that's the end!"

The three stood silently together. Finally Brotherton spoke: "Well," he drew a long breath, "well, they don't need any hell for you two--do they?" Then he added, "You poor, poor sheep that have gone astray. I don't know how to help you."

"Well, George--that's just it," replied Fenn. "No one can help us. But by God's help, George, I can help her! There's that much go left in me yet! Don't you think so, George?" he asked anxiously. "I can help her."

The weak, trembling face of the man moved George Brotherton almost to tears. Violet's instinct saw that Brotherton could not speak and she cried:

"George--I tell Henry he's had a dirty deal, too--Oh, such a dirty deal. I know he's a man--he never cast off a girl--like I was cast off--you know how. Henry's a man, George--a real man, and oh, if I could help him--if I could help him get up again. He's had such a dirty deal."

Brotherton saw her mouth in all its ugliness, and saw as he looked how tears were streaking the bedaubed face. She was repulsive beyond words, yet as she tried to hold back her tears, George Brotherton thought she was beautiful.

Fenn found his voice. "Now, here, George--it's like this: I don't want any woman; I've washed most of that monkey business out of me with whisky--it's not in me any more. And I know she's had enough of men. And I've brought her here--we've come here to tell you that part is straight--decent--square. I wanted you to know that--and Violet would, too--wouldn't you, Violet?" She nodded.

"Now, then, George--I'm her man! Do you understand--her man. I'm going to see that she doesn't have to go on the streets. Why, when she was a girl I used to beau her around, and if she isn't ashamed of a drunken thief--then in Christ's name, I'm going to help her."

He smiled out of his leaden eyes the ghost of his glittering, old, self-deprecatory smile. The woman remembered it, and bent over and kissed his dirty hand. She rose, and put her fingers gently upon his head, and sobbed:

"Oh, God, forgive me and make me worthy of this!"

There was an awkward pause. When the woman had controlled herself Fenn said: "What I want is to keep right on sleeping in the basement here--until I can get ahead enough to pay for my room. I'm not going to make any scandal for Violet, here. But we both feel better to talk it out with you."

They started for the back door. The front of the store was dark. Brotherton saw the man hesitate, and look down the alley to see if any one was in sight.

"Henry," said Brotherton, "here's a dollar. You might just as well begin fighting it out to-night. You go to the basement. I'll take Violet home."

The woman would have protested, but the big man said gently: "No, Violet--you were Denny Hogan's wife. He was my friend. You are Henry's ward--he is my friend. Let's go out the front way, Violet."

When they were gone, and the lights were out in the office of the bookstore, Henry Fenn slipped through the alley, went to the nearest saloon, walked in, stood looking at the whiskey sparkling brown and devilishly in the thick-bottomed cut glasses, saw the beer foaming upon the mahogany board, breathed it all in deeply, felt of the hard silver dollar in his pocket, shook as one in a palsy, set his teeth and while the tears came into his eyes stood and silently counted one hundred and another hundred; grinning foolishly when the loafers joked with him, and finally shuffled weakly out into the night, and ran to his cellar. And if Mr. Left's theory of angels is correct, then all the angels in heaven had their harps in their hands waving them for Henry, and cheering for joy!

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Chapter XXXIV

A SHORT CHAPTER, YET IN IT WE EXAMINE ONE CANVAS HEAVEN, ONE REAL HEAVEN, AND TWO SNUG LITTLE HELLS

"The idea of hell," wrote the Peach Blow Philosopher in the Harvey Tribune, "is the logical sequence of the belief that material punishments must follow spiritual offenses. For the wicked go unscathed of material punishments in this naughty world. And so the idea of Heaven is a logical sequence of the idea that only spiritual rewards come to men for spiritual services. Not that Heaven is needed to balance the accounts of good men after death--not at all. Good men get all that is coming to them here--whether it is a crucifixion or a crown--that makes no difference; crowns and crosses are mere material counters. They do not win or lose the game--nor even justly mark its loss or winning.

"The reason why Heaven is needed in the scheme of a neighborly man," said the Peach Blow Philosopher as he stood at his gate and reviewed the procession of pilgrims through the wilderness, "is this: The man who leads a decent life, is building a great soul. Obviously, this world is not the natural final habitat of great souls; for they occur here sporadically--though perhaps more and more frequently every trip around the sun. But Heaven is needed in any scheme of general decency for decency's sake, so that the decent soul for whose primary development the earth was hung in the sky, may have a place to find further usefulness, and a far more exceeding glory than may be enjoyed in this material dwelling place. So as we grow better and kinder in this world, hell sloughs off and Heaven is more real."

There is more of this dissertation--if the reader cares to pursue it, and it may be found in the files of the Harvey Tribune. It also appears as a footnote to an article by an eminent authority on Abnormal Psychology in a report on Mr. Left, Vol. XXXII, p. 2126, of the Report of the Psychological Association. The remarks of the Peach Blow Philosopher credited in the Report of the Proceedings above noted, to Mr. Left, appeared in the Harvey Tribune Jan. 14, 1903. They may have been called forth by an editorial in the Harvey Times of January 9 of that same year. So as that editorial has a proper place in this narrative, it may be set down here at the outset of this chapter. The article from the Times is headed: "A Successful Career" and it follows:

"To-day Judge Thomas Van Dorn retires from ten years of faithful service as district judge of this district. He was appointed by the Governor and has been twice elected to this position by the people, and feeling that the honor should go to some other county in the district, the Judge was not a candidate for a third nomination or election. During the ten years of his service he has grown steadily in legal and intellectual attainments. He has been president of the state bar association, delegate from that body to the National Bar Association, member of several important committees in that organization, and now is at the head of that branch of the National Bar Association organized to secure a more strict interpretation of the Federal Constitution, as a bulwark of commercial liberty. Judge Van Dorn also has been selected as a member of a subcommittee to draft a new state constitution to be submitted to the legislature by the state bar association. So much for the recognition of his legal ability.

"As an orator he has won similar and enviable fame. His speech at the dedication of the state monument at Vicksburg will be a classic in American oratory for years. At the Marquette Club Banquet in Chicago last month his oration was reprinted in New York and Boston with flattering comment. Recently he has been engaged--though his term of service has just ended--in every important criminal action now pending west of the Mississippi. As a jury lawyer he has no equal in all the West.

"But while this practice is highly interesting, and in a sense remunerative, the Judge feels that the criminal practice makes too much of a drain upon his mind and body, and while he will defend certain great lumber operators and will appear for the defense in the famous Yarborrough murder case, and is considering accepting an almost unbelievably large retainer in the Skelton divorce case with its ramifications leading into at least three criminal prosecutions, and four suits to change or perfect certain land titles, yet this kind of practice is distasteful to the Judge, and he will probably confine himself after this year to what is known as corporation practice. He has been retained as general counsel for all the industrial interests in the Wahoo Valley. The mine operators, the smelter owners, the cement manufacturers, the glass factories have seen in Judge Van Dorn a man in whom they all may safely trust their interests--amicably settling all differences between themselves in his office, and presenting for the Wahoo Valley an unbroken front in all future disputes--industrial or otherwise. This arrangement has been perfected by our giant of finance, Hon. Daniel Sands of the Traders' State Bank, who is, as every one knows, heavily interested in every concern in the Valley--excepting the Independent Coal Company, which by the way has preferred to remain outside of the united commercial union, and do business under its own flag--however dark that flag may be.

"This new career of Judge Van Dorn will be highly gratifying to his friends--and who is there who is not his friend?

"Courteous, knightly, impetuous, gallant Tom Van Dorn? What a career he has builded for himself in Harvey and the West.

"Scorning his enemies with the quiet contempt of the intellectual gladiator that he is, Tom Van Dorn has risen in this community as no other man young or old since its founding. His spacious home is the temple of hospitality; his magnificent talent is given freely, often to the poor and needy to whom his money flows in a generous stream whenever the call comes. His shrewd investment of his savings in the Valley have made him rich; his beautiful wife and his widening circle of friends have made him happy--his fine, active brain has made him great.

"The Times extends to the Judge upon his retirement from the bench the congratulations of an admiring community, and best wishes for future success."

Now perhaps it was not this article that inspired the Peach Blow Philosopher. It may have been another item in the same paper hidden away in the want column.

"Wanted--All the sewing and mending, quilt patching, sheet making, or other plain sewing that the good women of Harvey have to give out. I know certain worthy women with families, who need this work. Also wood-sawing orders promptly filled by competent men out of work. I will bring work and the workers together. H. Fenn, care Brotherton Book & Stationery Co., 1127 Market Street."

Or if it was not that item, perhaps it was this one from the South Harvey Derrick of January 7, that called forth the Peach Blow Philosopher's remarks on Heaven:

"Mrs. Violet Hogan and family have rented the rooms adjoining Mrs. Van Dorn's kindergarten. Mrs. Hogan has made arrangements to provide ladies of South Harvey and the Valley in general with plain sewing by the piece. A day nursery for children has been fitted up by our genial George Brotherton, former mayor of Harvey, where mothers sewing may leave their children in an adjoining room."

Now the Heaven of the Peach Blow Philosopher is not gained at one bound. Even the painted, canvas Heaven of Thomas Van Dorn cost him something--to be exact, $100, which he took in "stock" of the Times company--which always had stock for sale, issued by a Price & Chanler Gordon job press whenever it was required. And the negotiations for the Judge's painted Heaven made by his partner, Mr. Joseph Calvin, of the renewed and reunited firm of Van Dorn & Calvin, were not without their painful moments. As, for instance, when the editor of the Times complained bitterly at having it agreed that he would have to mention in the article the Judge's "beautiful wife," specifically and in terms, the editor was for raising the price to $150, by reason of the laughing stock it would make of the paper, but compromised upon the promise of legal notices from the firm amounting to $100 within the following six months. Also there was a hitch in the negotiations hereinbefore mentioned when the Times was required to refer to the National Bar Association meeting at all. For it was notorious that the Judge's flourishing signature with "and wife" had been photographed upon the register of a New York Hotel when he attended that meeting, whereas every one knew that Mrs. Van Dorn was in Europe that summer, and the photograph of the Judge's beautifully flourishing signature aforesaid was one of the things that persuaded the Judge to enter the active practice and leave the shades and solitudes of the bench for more strenuous affairs. To allude to the Judge's wife, and to mention the National Bar Association in the same article, struck the editor of the Times as so inauspicious that it required considerable persuasion on the part of the diplomatic Mr. Calvin, to arrange the matter.

So the Judge's Heaven bellied on its canvas, full of vain east wind, and fooled no one--not even the Judge, least of all his beautiful wife, who, knowing of the Bar Association incident, laughed a ribald laugh. Moreover, having abandoned mental healing for the Episcopalian faith and having killed her mental healing dog with caramels and finding surcease in a white poodle, she gave herself over to a riot of earth thoughts--together with language thereunto appertaining of so plain a texture that the Judge all but limped in his strut for several hours.

But when the strut did come back, and the mocking echoes of the strident tones of "his beautiful wife" were stilled by several rounds of Scotch whisky at the Club, the Judge went forth into the town, waving his hands right and left, bowing punctiliously to women, and spending an hour in police court getting out of trouble some of his gambler friends who had supported him in politics.

He told every one that it was good to be off the bench and to be "plain Tom Van Dorn" again, and he shook hands up and down Market Street. And as "plain Tom Van Dorn" he sat down in the shop of the Paris Millinery Company, Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., and talked to the amiable Prop. for half an hour--casting sly glances at the handsome Miss Morton, who got behind him and made faces over his back for Mrs. Herdicker's edification.

But as Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., made it a point--and kept it--never to talk against the cash drawer, "plain Tom Van Dorn" didn't learn the truth from her. So he pranced up and down before his scenic representation of Heaven in the Times, and did not know that the whole town knew that his stage Heaven was the masque for as hot and cozy a little hell as any respectable gentleman of middle years could endure.

However clear he made it to the public, that he and Mrs. Van Dorn were passionately fond of each other; however evident he intended it to be that he was more than satisfied with the bargain that he had made when he took her, and put away his first wife; however strongly he played the card of the gallant husband and "dearied" her, and however she smirked at him and "dawlinged" him in public when the town was looking, every one knew the truth.

"We may," says the Peach Blow Philosopher in one of his dissertations on the Illusion of Time, "counterfeit everything in this world--but sincerity." So Judge Thomas Van Dorn--"plain Tom Van Dorn," went along Market Street, and through the world, handing out his leaden gratuities. But people felt how greasy they were, how heavy they were, how soft they were; and threw them aside, and sneered.

As for the Heaven which the Peach Blow Philosopher may have found for Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan, it was a different affair, but of slow and uncertain growth. Henry Fenn went into the sewer gang the day after he found Violet in the railroad yards, and for two weeks he worked ten hours a day with the negroes and Mexicans in the ditch. It took him a month to get enough money ahead to pay for a room. Leaving the sewer gang, he was made timekeeper on a small paving contract. But every day he sent through the mails to Violet enough to pay her rent and feed the children--a little sum, but all he could spare. He did not see her. He did not write to her. He only knew that the money he was making was keeping her out of the night, so he bent to his work with a will.

And at night,--it was not easy for Violet to stay in the house. She needed a thousand little things--or thought she did. And there was the old track and the easy money. But she knew what the pittance that came from Henry Fenn meant to him, so in pride and in shame one night she turned back home when she had slipped clear to the corner of the street with her paint on. When she got home she threw herself upon the bed and wept like a child in anguish. But the next night she did not even touch the rouge pot, and avoided it as though it were a poison. Her idea was the sewing room. She wrote it all out, in her stylish, angular hand to Mr. Brotherton, told him what it would cost, and how she believed she could make expenses for herself and help a number of other women who, like her, were tempted to go the wrong road. She even sent him five spoons--the last relic of the old Mauling decency, five silver spoons dented with the tooth marks of the Mauling children, five spoons done up in pink tissue that she had always told little Ouida Hogan should come to her some day--she sent those spoons to Mr. Brotherton to sell to make the start toward the sewing room.

But Mr. Brotherton took the spoons to Mr. Ira Dooley's home of the fine arts and crafts, and then and there, mounting a lookout stand, addressed the crowd through the smoke in simple but effective language, showing the spoons, telling the boys at the gaming tables that they all knew Denny Hogan's wife and how about her; that she wanted to get in right; that the spoons were sent to him to sell to the highest and best bidder for cash in hand. He also said that chips would count at the market price, and lo! he got a hat full of rattly red and white and blue chips and jingly silver dollars and a wad of whispering five-dollar bills big enough to cork a cannon. He went back to Harvey, spoons and all, considering deeply certain statements that Grant Adams had made about the presence of the holy ghost in every human heart.

As for the bright particular Heaven of Mr. Fenn, as hereinbefore possibly hinted at by the Peach Blow Philosopher, these are its specifications:

Item One. Job as storekeeper at the railroad roundhouse, from which by specific order of the master mechanic two hours a day are granted to Mr. Fenn, to take his hat in his hand and go marching over the town, knocking at doors and soliciting sewing for women, and wood-sawing or yard or furnace work for men; but

Item Two. Being a generous man, Mr. Fenn is up before eight for an hour of his work, and stays at it until seven, and thereby gets in two or three extra hours on the job, and feels

Item Three. That he is doing something worth while;

Item Four. Upon the first of the month he has nothing;

Item Five. Balancing his books at the last of the month he has nothing,

Item Six. And having no debt he is happy. But speaking of debt, there is

Item Seven. In Mr. Fenn's room a collection of receipts:

(a) One from the Midland Railroad Company for brass as per statement rendered.

(b) One from the Harvey Transfer Co. for one box of cutlery marked Wright & Perry, and

(c) One--the hardest receipt of all to get--from Martha Morton for six chickens as per account rendered. These receipts hang on a spindle in the little room. Under the spindle is

Item Eight. A bottle of whisky--full but uncorked. He is in his room but little. Sometimes he comes in late at night, and does not light the lamp to avoid seeing the bottle, but plunges into bed, and covers up his head in fear and trembling. On the day when the Peach Blow Philosopher printed his view on Heaven, Mr. Fenn, by way of personal adornment, had purchased of Wright & Perry

Item Nine. One new coat. He hoped and so indicated to the firm, to be able to afford a vest in the spring and perhaps trousers by summer, and because of the cutlery transaction above mentioned, the firm indicated

Item Ten. That Mr. Fenn's credit was good for the whole suit. But Mr. Fenn waved a proud hand and said he had

Item Eleven. No desire to become involved in the devious ways of high finance, and took only the coat.

But, nevertheless, no small part of his Heaven lies in the serene knowledge that the whole suit is waiting for him, carefully put aside by the head of the house until Mr. Fenn cares to call for it. That is perhaps a material Heaven but it is a part of Mr. Fenn's Heaven, and as he goes about from door to door soliciting for sewing, the knowledge that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous--even on two meals a day and in a three-dollar-a-month room.

And now that we may balance up the Heaven account in these books, we should come to some conclusion as to what Heaven is. Let us call it, for the sake of our hypothesis, the most work one can do for the least self-interest, and let it go at that and get on with the story. For this story has to do with large and real affairs. It must not dally here with the sordid affairs of a lady who certainly was no better than she should be and of a gentleman who was as the hereinbefore mentioned receipts will show, much worse than he might have been.

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Chapter XXXV

THE ODD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE BROTHERTON IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT

Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valley. In May a young gentleman in a high hat and a suit of exquisite gray twill cut with a long frock coat, appeared at the Hotel Sands--and took the bridal suite on the second floor. He brought letters to the Traders' Bank and from the Bank took letters to the smelters, and with a notebook in hand the young man in exquisite gray twill went about for three or four days smiling affably, and asking many questions. Then he left and in due course--that is to say, in a fortnight--Mr. Sands called the managing officials of all the smelters into his back room and read them a letter from a New York firm offering to trade stock in a holding company, taking over smelters of the class and kind in the Wahoo Valley for the stocks and bonds of the Harvey Smelters Company. The letterhead was so awe-inspiring and the proposition was so convincing by reason of the terror inherent in the letterhead that the smelters went into the holding company, and thereafter the managing officials who had been men of power and consequence in Harvey became clerks. About the same time the coal properties went the same way, and the cement concerns saw their finish as individual competing concerns. The glass factories were also gobbled up. So when the Fourth of July came and the youngest Miss Morton, under great protest, but at her father's stern command, wrapped an American flag about her--and sang the "Star Spangled Banner" to the Veterans of Persifer F. Smith Post of the G.A.R. in Sands'

Park, the land of the free and the home of the brave in Harvey was somewhat abridged.

Daniel Sands felt the abridgement more than any one else. For a generation he had been a spider, weaving his own web for his own nest. All his webs and filaments and wires and pipes and cables went out and brought back things for him to dispose of. He was the center of the universe for himself and for Harvey. He was the beginning and the end. His bank was the first and the last word in business and in politics in that great valley. What he spun was his; what he drew into the web was his. When he invited the fly into his parlor, it was for the delectation of the spider, not to be passed on to some other larger web and fatter spider. But that day as he sat, a withered, yellow-skinned, red-eyed, rattle-toothed, old man with a palsied head that never stopped wagging, as he sat under his skull cap, blinking out at a fat, little world that always had been his prey, Daniel Sands felt that he had ceased to be an end, and had become a means.

His bank, his mines, his smelters, even his municipal utilities, all were slipping from under his control. He could feel the pull of the rope from the outside around his own foot. He could feel that he was not a generator of power. He was merely a pumping station, gathering up all the fat of the little land that once was his, and passing it out in pipes that ran he knew not where, to go to some one else--he knew not whom. True, his commissions came back, and his dividends came back, and they were rich and sweet, and worth while. But--he was shocked when he found courage to ask it--if they did not come back, what could he do? He was part of a great web--a little filament in one obscure corner, and he was spinning a fabric whose faintest plan he could not conceive.

This angered him, and the spider spat in vain rage. The power he loved was gone; he was the mere shell of a spider; he was dead. Some man might come into the bank to-morrow and take even the semblance of his power from him. They might, indeed, shut up every mill, close every mine, lock every factory, douse the fire in every smelter in the Wahoo Valley, and the man who believed he had opened the mills, dug the mines, builded the factories and lighted the smelter fires with all but his own hands, could only rage and fume, or be polite and pretend it was his desire.

The town that he believed that he had made out of sunshine and prairie grass, for all he could do, might be condemned as a bat roost, and the wires and cables, that ran from his desk all over the Wahoo Valley, might grow rusty and jangle in the prairie winds, while the pipes rotted under the sunflowers and he could only make a wry face. Spiders must have some instinctive constructive imagination to build their marvelous webs; surely this old spider had an imagination that in Elizabeth's day would have made him more than a minor poet. Yet in the beginning of the Twentieth Century he felt himself a bound prisoner in his decaying web. So he showed his blue mouth, and red eyelids in fury, and was silent lest even his shadow should find how impotent a thing he was.

But he knew that one man knew. "How about your politics down here?" asked the affable young man in exquisite gray twill, when he closed the gas-works deal. And Dan'l Sands said that until recently he and Dr. Nesbit had been cronies, but that some way the Doctor had been getting high notions, and hadn't been around the bank lately. The young man in the exquisite gray twill asked a few questions, catalogued the Doctor, and then said:

"This man Van Dorn, it appears, is local attorney for all the mines and smelters--he hasn't the reform bug, has he?"

The old spider grinned and shook his head.

"All right," said the polite young man in the exquisite gray twill, as he picked up his gray, high hat, and flicked a speck of dust from his exquisite gray frock coat, "I'll take matters of politics up with him."

So the spider knew that the servant had been put over the master, and again he opened his mouth in malice, but spoke no word.

And thus it was that Judge Thomas Van Dorn formed a strong New York connection that stood him in stead in after years. For the web that the old spider of Market Street had been weaving all these years, was at its strongest but a rope of sand compared with the steel links of the chain that was wrapped about the town, with one end in the Judge's hand, but with the chain reaching out into some distant, mysterious hawser that moved it with a power of which even the Judge knew little or nothing.

So he was profoundly impressed, and accordingly proud, and added half an inch to the high-knee action of his strut. He felt himself a part of the world of affairs--and he was indeed a part. He was one of a thousand men who, whether they knew it or not, had been bought, body and soul--though the soul was thrown in for good measure in the Judge's case--to serve the great, greedy spider of organized capital at whatever cost of public welfare or of private faith. He was indeed a man of affairs--was Thomas Van Dorn--a part of a vast business and political cabal, that knew no party and no creed but dividends and still more dividends, impersonal, automatic, soulless--the materialization of the spirit of commerce.

And strangely enough, just as Tom Van Dorn worshiped the power that bought him, so the old spider, peering through the broken, rotting meshes of what was once his web, felt the power to which it was fastened, felt the power that moved him as a mere pawn in a game whose direction he did not conceive; and Dan'l Sands, in spite of his silent rage, worshiped the power like a groveling idolater.

But the worm never lacks for a bud; that also is a part of God's plan. Thus, while the forces of egoism, the powers of capital, were concentrating in a vast organization of socialized individualism, the other forces and powers of society which were pointing toward a socialized altruism, were forming also. There was the man in the exquisite gray twill, harnessing Judge Van Dorn and Market Street to his will; and there was Grant Adams in faded overalls, harnessing labor to other wheels that were grinding another grist. Slowly but persistently had Grant Adams been forming his Amalgamation of the Unions of the valley. Slowly and awkwardly his unwieldy machinery was creaking its way round. In spite of handicaps of opposing interests among the men of different unions, his Wahoo Valley Labor Council was shaping itself into an effective machine. If the shares of stock in the mills and the mines and the smelters all ran their dividends through one great hopper, so the units of labor in the Valley were connected with a common source of direction. God does not plant the organizing spirit in the world for one group; it is the common heritage of the time. So the sinister power of organized capital loomed before Market Street with its terrible threat of extinction for the town if the town displeased organized capital; so also rose in the town a dread feeling of uneasiness that labor also had power. The personification of that power was Grant Adams. And when the young man in exquisite gray twill had become only a memory, Tom Van Dorn squarely faced Grant Adams. Market Street was behind the Judge. The Valley was back of Grant. For a time there was a truce, but it was not peace. The truce was a time of waiting; waiting and arming for battle.

During the year of the truce, Nathan Perry was busy. Nathan Perry saw the power that was organizing about him and the Independent mine among the employers in the district, and intuitively he felt the resistlessness of the power. But he did not shrink. He advised his owners to join the combination as a business proposition. But his advice was a dead fly fed to the old spider's senile vanity. For Daniel Sands had been able to dictate as a part of his acceptance of the proposition, this one concession: That the Independent mine be kept out of the agreement. Nathan Perry suspected this. But most of his owners were game men, and they decided not even to apply for admission to the organization. They found that the young man's management of the mine was paying well; that the labor problem was working satisfactorily; that the safety devices, while expensive, produced a feeling of good-will among the men that was worth more even in dividends than the interest on the money.

But after he had warned his employers of the wrath to come, Nathan Perry did not spend much time in unavailing regret at their decision. He was, upon the whole, glad they had made it. And having a serious problem in philology to work out--namely, to discover whether Esperanto, Chinese or Dutch is the natural language of man, through study of the conversational tendencies of Daniel Kyle Perry, the young superintendent of the Independent mine gave serious thought to that problem.

Then, of course, there was that other problem that bothered Nathan Perry, and being an engineer with a degree of B. S., it annoyed him to discover that the problem wouldn't come out straight. Briefly and popularly stated, it is this: If you have a boiler capacity of 200 pounds per square inch and love a girl 200 pounds to the square inch, and then the Doctor in his black bag brings one fat, sweaty, wrinkled baby, and you see the girl in a new and sweeter light than ever before, see her in a thousand ways rising above her former stature to a wonderful womanhood beyond even your dreams--how are you going to get more capacity out of that boiler without breaking it, when the load calls for four hundred pounds? Now these problems puzzled the young man, living at that time in his eight-room house with a bath, and he sat up nights to work them. And some times there were two heads at work on the sums, and once in a while three heads, but the third head talked a various language, whose mild and healing sympathy stole the puzzle from the problem and began chewing on it before they were aware. So Nathan put the troubles of the mine on the hook whereon he hung his coat at night, and if he felt uneasy at the trend of the day's events, his uneasiness did not come to him at home. He had heard it whispered about--once by the men and once in a directors' meeting--that the clash with Grant Adams was about to come. If Nathan had any serious wish in relation to the future, it was the ardent hope that the clash would come and come soon.

For the toll of death in the Wahoo Valley was cruel and inexorable. The mines, the factories, the railroads, the smelters, all were death traps, and the maimed, blind and helpless were cast out of the great industrial hopper like chaff. Every little neighborhood had its cripple. From the mines came the blind--whose sight was taken from them by cheap powder; from the railroad yards came the maimed--the handless, armless, legless men who, in their daily tasks had been crushed by inferior car couplings; the smelters sent out their sick, whom the fumes had poisoned, and sometimes there would come out a charred trunk that had gone into the great molten vats a man. The factories took hands and forearms, and sometimes when an accident of unusual horror occurred in the Valley, it would seem like a place of mourning. The burden of all this bloodshed and death was upon the laborers. And more than that,--the burden of the widows and orphans also was upon labor. Capital charged off the broken machinery, the damaged buildings, the worn-out equipment to profit and loss with an easy conscience, while the broken men all over the Valley, the damaged laborers, the worn-out workers, who were thrown to the scrap heap in maturity, were charged to labor. And labor paid this bill, chiefly because capital was too greedy to provide safe machinery, or sanitary shops, or adequate tools!

Nathan Perry, first miner, then pit-boss and finally superintendent, and always member of Local Miners' Union No. 10, knew what the men were vaguely beginning to see and think. When some man who had been to court to collect damages for a killed or crippled friend, some man who had heard the Judge talk of the assumed risk of labor, some man who had heard lawyers split hairs to cheat working men of what common sense and common justice said was theirs, when some such man cried out in hatred and agony against society, Nathan Perry tried to counsel patience, tried to curb the malice. But in his heart Nathan Perry knew that if he had suffered the wrongs that such a man suffered, he too would be full of wrath and class hatred.

Sometimes, of course, men rose from the pit. Foremen became managers, managers became superintendents, superintendents became owners, owners became rich, and society replied--"Look, it is easy for a man to rise." Once at lunch time, sitting in the shaft house, Nathan Perry with his hands in his dinner bucket said something of the kind, when Tom Williams, the little Welsh miner, who was a disciple and friend of Grant Adams, cried:

"Yes--that's true. It is easy for a man to rise. It was easy for a slave to escape from the South--comparatively easy. But is it easy for the class to rise? Was it easy for the slaves to be free? That is the problem--the problem of lifting a whole class--as your class has been lifted, young fellow, in the last century. Why, over in Wales a century ago, a mere tradesman's son like you--was--was nobody. The middle classes had nothing--that is, nothing much. They have risen. They rule the world now. This century must see the rise of the laboring class; not here and there as a man who gets out of our class and then sneers at us, and pretends he was with us by accident--but we must rise as a class, boy--don't you see?"

And so, working in the mine, with the men, Nathan Perry completed his education. He learned--had it ground into him by the hard master of daily toil--that while bread and butter is an individual problem that no laborer may neglect except at his peril, the larger problems of the conditions under which men labor--their hours of service, their factory surroundings, their shop rights to work, their relation to accidents and to the common diseases peculiar to any trade--those are not individual problems. They are class problems and must be solved--in so far as labor can solve them alone, not by individual struggle but by class struggle. So Nathan Perry came up out of the mines a believer in the union, and the closed shop. He felt that those who would make the class problem an individual problem, were only retarding the day of settlement, only hindering progress.

Rumor said that the truce in the Wahoo Valley was near an end. Nathan Perry did not shrink from it. But Market Street was uneasy. It seemed to be watching an approaching cyclone. When men knew that the owners were ready to stop the organization of unions, the cloud of unrest seemed to hover over them. But the clouds dissolved in rumor. Then they gathered again, and it was said that Grant Adams was to be gagged, his Sunday meetings abolished or that he was to be banished from the Valley. Again the clouds dissolved. Nothing happened. But the cloud was forever on the horizon, and Market Street was afraid. For Market Street--as a street--was chiefly interested in selling goods. It had, of course, vague yearnings for social justice--yearnings about as distinct as the desire to know if the moon was inhabited. But as a street, Market Street was with Mrs. Herdicker--it never talked against the cash drawer. Market Street, the world over, is interested in things as they are. The statuo quo is God and laissez faire is its profit! So Market Street murmured, and buzzed--and then Market Street also organized to worship the god of things as they are.

But Mr. Brotherton of the Brotherton Book & Stationery Company held aloof from the Merchants' Protective Association. Mr. Brotherton at odd times, at first by way of diversion, and then as a matter of education for his growing business, had been glancing at the contents of his wares. Particularly had he been interested in the magazines. Moreover, he was talking. And because it helped him to sell goods to talk about them, he kept on talking.

About this time he affected flowing negligee bow ties, and let his thin, light hair go fluffy and he wrapped rather casually it seemed, about his elephantine bulk, a variety of loose, baggy garb, which looked like a circus tent. But he was a born salesman--was Mr. Brotherton. He plastered literature over Harvey in carload lots.

One day while Mr. Brotherton was wrapping up "Little Women" and a "Little Colonel" book and "Children of the Abbey" that Dr. Nesbit was buying for Lila Van Dorn, the Doctor piped, "Well, George, they say you're getting to be a regular anarchist--the way you're talking about conditions in the Valley?"

"Not for a minute," answered Mr. Brotherton. "Why, man, all I said was that if the old spider kept making the men use that cheap powder that blows their eyes out and their hands off, and their legs off, they ought to unionize and strike. And if it was my job to handle that powder I'd tie the old devil on a blast and blow him into hamburger." Mr. Brotherton's rising emotions reddened his forehead under his thin hair, and pulled at his wind. He shook a weary head and leaned on a show case. "But I say, stand by the boys. Maybe it will make a year of bad times or maybe two; but what of that? It'll make better times in the end."

"All right, George--go in. I glory in your spunk!" chirped the Doctor as he put Lila's package under his arm. "Let me tell you something," he added, "I've got a bill I'm going to push in the next legislature that will knock a hole in that doctrine of the assumed risk of labor, you can drive a horse through. It makes the owners pay for the accidents of a trade, instead of hiding behind that theory, that a man assumes those risks when he takes a job."

The Doctor put his head to one side, cocked one eye and cried: "How would that go?"

"Now you're shoutin', Doc. Bust a machine, and the company pays for it. Bust a man, the man pays for it or his wife and children or his friends or the county. That's not fair. A man's as much of a part of the cost of production as a machine!"

The Doctor toddled out, clicking his cane and whistling a merry tune and left Mr. Brotherton enjoying his maiden meditations upon the injustices of this world. In the midst of his meditations he found that he had been listening for five minutes to Captain Morton. The Captain was expounding some passing dream about his Household Horse. Apparently the motor car, which was multiplying rapidly in Harvey, had impressed him. He was telling Mr. Brotherton that his Household Horse, if harnessed to the motor car, would save much of the power wasted by the chains. He was dreaming of the distant day when motor cars would be used in sufficient numbers to make it profitable for the Captain to equip them with his power saving device.

But Mr. Brotherton cut into the Captain's musings with: "You tell the girls to wash the cat for I'm coming out to-night."

"Girls?--huh--girls?" replied the Captain as he looked over his spectacles at Mr. Brotherton. "'Y gory, man, what's the matter with me--eh? I'm staying out there on Elm Street yet--what say?" And he went out smiling.

When the Captain entered the house, he found Emma getting supper, Martha setting the table and Ruth, with a candy box before her at the piano, going over her everlasting "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ahs" from "C to C" as Emma called it.

Emma took her father's hat, put it away and said: "Well, father--what's the news?"

"Well," replied the Captain, with some show of deliberation, "a friend of mine down town told me to tell you girls to wash the cat for he'll be along here about eight o'clock."

"Mr. Brotherton," scoffed Ruth. "It's up to you two," she cried gayly in the midst of her eternal journey from "C" to "C." "He never wears his Odd Fellows' pin unless he's been singing at an Odd Fellows' funeral, so that lets me out to-night."

"Well," sighed Emma, "I don't know that I want him even if he has on his Shriner's pin. I just believe I'll go to bed. The way I feel to-night I'm so sick of children I believe I wouldn't marry the best man on earth."

"Oh, well, of course, Emma," suggested the handsome Miss Morton, "if you feel that way about it why, I--"

"Now Martha--" cried the elder sister, "can't you let me alone and get out of here? I tell you, the superintendent and the principal and the janitor and the dratted Calvin kid all broke loose to-day and I'm liable to run out doors and begin to jump and down in the street and scream if you start on me."

But after supper the three Misses Morton went upstairs, and did what they could to wipe away the cares of a long and weary day. They put on their second best dresses--all but Emma, who put on her best, saying she had nothing else that wasn't full of chalk and worry. At seven forty-five, they had the parlor illuminated. As for the pictures and bric-a-brac--to-wit, a hammered brass flower pot near the grate, and sitting on an onyx stand a picture of Richard Harding Davis, the contribution of the eldest Miss Morton's callow youth, also a brass smoking set on a mission table, the contribution of the youngest Miss Morton from her first choir money--as for the pictures and bric-a-brac, they were dusted until they glistened, and the trap was all set, waiting for the prey.

They heard the gate click and the youngest Miss Morton said quickly: "Well, if he's an Odd Fellow, I guess I'll take him. But," she sighed, "I'll bet a cooky he's an Elk and Martha gets him."

The Captain went to the door and brought in the victim to as sweet and demure a trio of surprised young women and as patient a cat, as ever sat beside a rat hole. After he had greeted the girls--it was Ruth who took his coat, and Martha his hat, but Emma who held his hand a second the longest, after she spied the Shriner's pin--Mr. Brotherton picked up the cat.

"Well, Epaminondas," he puffed as he stroked the animal and put it to his cheek, "did they take his dear little kitties away from him--the horrid things."

This was Mr. Brotherton's standard joke. Ruth said she never felt the meeting was really opened until he had teased them about Epaminondas' pretended kittens.

For the first hour the talk ranged with obvious punctility over a variety of subjects--but never once did Mr. Brotherton approach the subject of politics, which would hold the Captain for a night session. Instead, Mr. Brotherton spun literary tales from the shop. Then the Captain broke in and enlivened the company with a description of Tom Van Dorn's new automobile, and went into such details as to cams and cogs and levers and other mechanical fittings that every one yawned and the cat stretched himself, and the Captain incidentally told the company that he had got Van Dorn's permission to try the Household Horse on the old machine before it went in on the trade.

Then Ruth rose. "Why, Ruth, dear," said Emma sweetly, "where are you going?"

"Just to get a drink, dear," replied Ruth.

But it took her all night to finish drinking and she did not return. Martha rose, began straightening up the littered music on the piano, and being near the door, slipped out. By this time the Captain was doing most of the talking. Chiefly, he was telling what he thought the sprocket needed to make it work upon an automobile. At the hall door of the dining room two heads appeared, and though the door creaked about the time the clock struck the half hour, Mr. Brotherton did not see the heads. They were behind him, and four arms began making signs at the Captain. He looked at them, puzzled and anxious for a minute or two. They were peremptorily beckoning him out. Finally, it came to him, and he said to the girls: "Oh, yes--all right." This broke at the wrong time into something Mr. Brotherton was saying. He looked up astonished and the Captain, abashed, smiled and after shuffling his feet, backed up to the base burner and hummed the tune about the land that was fairer than day. Emma and Mr. Brotherton began talking. Presently, the Captain picked up the spitting cat by the scruff of the neck and held him a moment under his chin. "Well, Emmy," he cut in, interrupting her story of how Miss Carhart had told the principal if "he ever told of her engagement before school was out in June, she'd just die," with:

"I suppose there'll be plenty of potatoes for the hash?"

And not waiting for answer, he marched to the kitchen with the cat, and in due time, they heard the "Sweet Bye and Bye" going up the back stairs, and then the thump, thump of the Captain's shoes on the floor above them.

The eldest Miss Morton, in her best silk dress, with her mother's cameo brooch at her throat, and with the full, maidenly ripeness of twenty-nine years upon her brow, with her hair demurely parted on said brow, where there was the faintest hint of a wrinkle coming--which Miss Morton attributed to a person she called "the dratted Calvin kid,"--the eldest Miss Morton, hair, cameo, silk dress, wrinkle, the dratted Calvin kid and all, did or did not look like a siren, according to the point of view of the spectator. If he was seeking the voluptuous curves of the early spring of youth--no: but if he was seeking those quieter and more restful lines that follow a maiden with a true and tender heart, who is a good cook and who sweeps under the sofa, yes.

Mr. Brotherton did not know exactly what he desired. He had been coming to the Morton home on various errands since the girls were little tots. He had seen Emma in her first millinery store hat. He had bought Martha her first sled; he had got Ruth her last doll. But he shook his head. He liked them all. And then, as though to puzzle him more, he had noticed that for two or three years, he had never got more than two consecutive evenings with any of them--or with all of them. The mystery of their conduct baffled him. He sometimes wondered indignantly why they worked him in shifts? Sometimes he had Ruth twice; sometimes Emma and Martha in succession--sometimes Martha twice. He like them all. But he could not understand what system they followed in disposing of him. So as he sat and toyed with his Shriner's pin and listened to the tales of a tepid schoolmistress' romance that Emma told, he wondered if after all--for a man of his tastes, she wasn't really the flower of the flock.

"You know, George," she was old enough for that, and at rare times when they were alone she called him George, "I'm working up a kind of sorrow for Judge Van Dorn--or pity or something. When I taught little Lila he was always sending her candy and little trinkets. Now Lila is in the grade above me, and do you know the Judge has taken to walking by the schoolhouse at recess, just to see her, and walking along at noon and at night to get a word with her. He has put up a swing and a teeter-totter board on the girls' playgrounds. This morning I saw him standing, gazing after her, and he was as sad a figure as I ever saw. He caught me looking at him and smiled and said:

"'Fine girl, Emma,' and walked away."

"Lord, Emma," said Mr. Brotherton, as he brought his big, baseball hands down on his fat knees. "I don't blame him. Don't you just think children are about the nicest things in this world?"

Emma was silent. She had expressed other sentiments too recently. Still she smiled. And he went on:

"Oh, wow!--they're mighty fine to have around."

But Mr. Brotherton was restless after that, and when the clock was striking ten he was in the hall. He left as he had gone for a dozen years. And the young woman stood watching him through the glass of the door, a big, strong, handsome man--who strode down the walk with clicking heels of pride, and she turned away sadly and hurried upstairs.

"Martha," she asked, as she took down her hair, "was it ordained in the beginning of the world that all school teachers would have to take widowers?"

And without hearing the answer, she put out the light.

Mr. Brotherton, stalking--not altogether unconsciously down the walk, turned into the street and as he went down the hill, he was aware that a boy was overtaking him. He let the boy catch up with him. "Oh, Mr. Brotherton," cried the boy, "I've been looking for you!"

"Well, here I am; what's the trouble?"

"Grant sent me," returned the boy, "to ask you if he could see you at eight o'clock to-morrow morning at the store?"

Brotherton looked the boy over and exclaimed:

"Grant?" and then, "Oh--why, Kenyon, I didn't know you. You are certainly that human bean-stalk, son. Let's take a look at you. Well, say--" Mr. Brotherton stopped and backed up and paused for dramatic effect. Then he exploded: "Say, boy, if I had you in an olive wood frame, I could get $2.75 or $3.00 for you as Narcissus or a boy Adonis! You surely are the angel child!"

The boy's great black eyes shone up at the man with something wistful and dream-like in them that only his large, sensitive mouth seemed to comprehend. For the rest of the child's face was boy--boy in early adolescence. The boy answered simply:

"Grant said to tell you that he expects the break to-morrow and is anxious to see you."

Mr. Brotherton looked at the boy again--the eyes haunted the man--he could not place them, yet they were familiar to him.

"Where you been, kid?" he asked. "I thought you were in Boston, studying."

"It's vacation, sir," answered Kenyon.

Brotherton pulled the lad up under the next corner electric lamp and again gazed at him. Then Mr. Brotherton remembered where he had seen the eyes. The second Mrs. Van Dorn had them. This bothered the man.

The eyes of the boy that flashed so brightly into Mr. Brotherton's eyes, certainly puzzled him and startled him. But not so much as the news the boy carried. For then Mr. Brotherton knew that Market Street would be buzzing in the morning and that the cyclone clouds that were lowering, soon would break into storm.

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Chapter XXXVI

A LONG CHAPTER BUT A BUSY ONE, IN WHICH KENYON ADAMS AND HIS MOTHER HAVE A STRANGE MEETING, AND LILA VAN DORN TAKES A NIGHT RIDE

The next morning at eight o'clock, Grant Adams came hurrying into Brotherton's store. As he strode down the long store room, Brotherton thought that Grant in his street clothes looked less of a person than Grant in his overalls. But the big man rose like a frisky mountain in earthquake and called:

"Hello there, Danton--going to shake down the furnace fires of revolution this morning, I understand."

Grant stared at Brotherton. Solemnly he said, as he stood an awkward moment before sitting. "Well, Mr. Brotherton, the time has come, when I must fight. To-day is the day!"

"Yes," replied Brotherton, "I heard a few minutes ago that they were going to run you out of the district to-day. The meeting in the Commercial Club rooms is being called now."

"Yes," said Grant, "and I've been asked to appear before them."

"I guess they are going to try and bluff you out, Grant," said Brotherton.

"I got wind of it last night," said Grant, "when they nailed up the last hall in the Valley against me. One after another of the public halls has been closed to me during the past year. But to-day is to be our first public rally of the delegates of the Wahoo Valley Trades Council. We have rented office rooms in the second floor of the Vanderbilt House in South Harvey, and are coming out openly as an established labor organization, ready for business in the Valley, and we are going to have a big meeting--somewhere--I don't know where now, but somewhere--" his face turned grim and a fanatic flame lighted his eyes as he spoke. "Somewhere the delegates of the Council will meet to-night, and I shall talk to them--or--"

"Soh, boss--soh, boss--don't get excited," counseled Mr. Brotherton. "They'll blow off a little steam in the meeting this morning, and then you go on about your business."

"But you don't know what I know, George Brotherton," protested Grant as he leaned forward. "I have converted enough spies--oh, no--not counting the spies who were converted merely to scare me--but enough real spies to know that they mean business!" He stopped, and sitting back in his chair again, he said grimly, "And so do I--I shall talk to the men to-night, or--"

"All right, son; you'll talk or 'the boy, oh, where was he?' I'll tell you what," cried Mr. Brotherton; "you'll fool around with the buzz saw till you'll get killed. Now, look here, Grant--I'm for your revolution, and six buckets of blood. But you can't afford to lose 'em! You're dead right about the chains of slavery and all that sort of thing, but don't get too excited about it. You live down there alone with your father and he is talking to spooks, and you're talking to yourself; and you've got a kind of ingrown idea of this thing. Give the Lord a little time, and he'll work out this pizen in our social system. I'll help you, and maybe before long Doc'll see the light and help you; but now you need a regulator. You ought to have a wife and about six children to hook you up to the ordinary course of nature! And see here, Grant," Mr. Brotherton dropped a weighty hand on Grant's shoulder, "if you don't be careful you'll furnish the ingredients of a public funeral, and where will your revolution be then--and the boys in the Valley and your father and Kenyon?"

While Brotherton was speaking, Grant sat with an impassive face. But when Kenyon's name was uttered he looked up quickly and answered:

"That is why I am here this morning; it's about Kenyon. George Brotherton, that boy is more than life to me." The fanatic light was gone from Grant's eyes, and the soft glow in them revealed a man that George Brotherton had not seen in years. "Mr. Brotherton," continued Grant, "father is getting too old to do much for Kenyon. The Nesbits have borne practically all the expense of educating him. But the Doctor won't always be here." Again he hesitated. Then he went ahead as if he had decided for the last time. "George Brotherton, if I should be snuffed out, I want you to look after Kenyon--if ever he needs it. You have no one, and--" Grant leaned forward and grasped Brotherton's great hands and cried, "George Brotherton, if you knew the gold in that boy's heart, and what he can do with a violin, and how his soul is unfolding under the spell of his music. He's so dumb and tongue-tied and unformed now; and yet--"

"Well--say!" It came out of Mr. Brotherton with a crash like a falling tree, "Grant--well, say! Through sickness and health, for better or for worse, till death do us part--if that will satisfy you." He put his big paw over and grabbed Grant's steel hook and jerked him to his feet. "You've sure sold Kenyon into bondage. When I saw him last night--honest to God, man--I thought I'd run into a picture roaming around out of stock without a frame! Him and me together can do Ariel and Prospero without a scratch of make-up." Grant beamed, but when Brotherton exclaimed as an afterthought, "Say, man, what about that boy's eyes?" Grant's features mantled and the old grim look overcast his face, as Brotherton went on: "Why, them eyes would make a madonna's look like fried eggs! Where did he get 'em--they're not Sands and they're not Adams. He must take back to some Peri that blew into Massachusetts from an enchanted isle." Brotherton saw that he was annoying Grant in some way. Often he realized that his language was not producing the desired effect; so he veered about and said gently, "You're not in any danger, Grant; but so long as I'm wearing clothes that button up the front--don't worry about Kenyon, I'll look after him."

Five minutes later, Grant was standing in the front door of Brotherton's store, gazing into Market Street. He saw Daniel Sands and Kyle Perry and Tom Van Dorn walking out of one store and into the next. He saw John Kollander in a new blue soldier uniform stalking through the street. He saw the merchants gathering in small, volatile groups that kept forming and re-forming, and he knew that Mr. Brotherton's classic language was approximately correct when he said there was a hen on. Grant eyed the crowd that was hurrying past him to the meeting like a hungry hound watching a drove of chickens. Finally, when Grant saw that the last straggler was in the hall, he turned and stalked heavily to the Commercial Club rooms, yet he moved with the self-consciousness of one urged by a great purpose. His head was bent in reflection. His hand held his claw behind him, and his shoulders stooped. He knew his goal, but the way was hard and uncertain, and he realized the peril of a strategic misstep at the outset. Heavily he mounted the steps to the hall, entered, and took a seat in the rear. He sat with his head bowed and his gaze on the floor. He was aware that Judge Van Dorn was speaking; but what the Judge was saying did not interest Grant. His mind seemed aloof from the proceedings. Suddenly what he had prepared to say slipped out of his consciousness completely, as he heard the Judge declare, "We deem this, sir, a life and death struggle for our individual liberties; a life and death struggle for our social order; a life and death struggle for our continuance to exist as individuals." There was a long repetition of the terms "life and death." They appealed to some tin-pan rhythmic sense in the Judge's oratorical mind. But the phrase struck fire in Grant Adams's heart. Life and death, life and death, rang through his soul like a clamor of bells. "We have given our all," bellowed the Judge, "to make this Valley an industrial hive, where labor may find employment--all of our savings, all of our heritage of Anglo-Saxon organizing skill, and we view this life and death struggle for its perpetuity--" But all Grant Adams heard of that sentence was "life and death," as the great bell of his soul clanged its alarm. "We are a happy, industrial family," intoned the Judge, the suave Judge, who was something more than owner; who was Authority without responsibility, who was the voice of the absentee master; the voice, it seemed to Grant, of an enchanted peacock squawking in the garden of a dream; the voice that cried: "and to him who would overthrow all this contentment, all this admirable adjustment of industrial equilibrium we offer the life and death alternative that is given to him who would violate a peaceful home."

But all that Grant Adams sensed of his doom in the Judge's pronouncement was the combat of death with life. Life and death were meeting for their eternal struggle, and as the words resounded again and again in the Judge's oratory, there rushed into Grant Adams's mind the phrase, "I am the resurrection and the life," and he knew that in the life and death struggle for progress, for justice, for a more abundant life on this planet, it would be finally life and not death that would win.

As he sat blindly glaring at the floor, there may have stolen into his being some ember from the strange flame burning about our earth, whose touch makes men mad with the madness that men have, who come from the wildernesses of life, from the lowly walks and waste places--the madness of those who feed on locusts and wild honey; who, like St. Francis and Savonarola, go forth on hopeless quests for the unattainable ideal, or like John Brown, who burn in the scorching flame all the wisdom of the schools and the courts, and for one glorious day shine forth with their burning lives a beacon by which the world is lighted to its own sad shame.

Grant never remembered what he said by way of introduction as he stood staring at the crowd. It was a different crowd from audiences he knew. To Grant it was the market place; merchants, professional men; clerks, bankers,--well-dressed men, with pale, upturned faces stretched before him to the rear of the hall. It was all black and white, and as his soul cried "life and death" back of his conscious speech, the image came to him that all these pale, black-clad figures were in their shrouds, and that he was talking to the visible body of death--laid out stiffly before him.

What answer he made to Van Dorn does not matter. Grant Adams could not recall it when he had finished. But ever as he spoke through his being throbbed the electrical beat of the words, "I am the resurrection and the life." And he was exultant in the consciousness that in the struggle of "life and death," life would surely win. So he stood and spoke with a tongue of flame.

"If you have given all--and you have, we also have given all. But our all is more vitally our all--than yours; for it is our bodies, our food and clothing; our comfortable homes; our children's education, our wives' strength; our babies' heritage; many of us have indeed given our sons' integrity and our daughters' virtue. All these we have put into the bargain with you. We have put them into the common hopper of this industrial life, and you have taken the grain and we the chaff. It is indeed a life and death struggle. And this happy family, this well-balanced industrial adjustment, this hell of labor run through your mills like grist, this is death; death is the name for all your wicked system, that shrinks and cringes before God's ancient justice. 'I am the resurrection and the life' was not spoken across the veil that rises from the grave. It was spoken for men here in the flesh who shall soon come into a more abundant life. Life and death, life and death are struggling here this very hour, and you--you," he leaned forward shaking his steel claw in their faces, "you and your greedy system of capital are the doomed; you are death's embodiment."

Then came the outburst. All over the house rose cries. Men jumped from their chairs and waved their arms. But Judge Van Dorn quieted them. He knew that to attack Grant Adams physically at that meeting would inflame the man's followers in the Valley. So he pounded the gavel for quiet. To Adams he thundered, "Sit down, you villain!" Still the crowd hissed and jeered. A great six-footer in new blue overalls, whom Grant knew as one of the recent spies, one of the sluggers sent to the Valley, came crowding to the front of the room. But Judge Van Dorn nodded him back. When the Judge had stilled the tumult, he said in his sternest judicial manner, "Now, Adams--we have heard enough of you. Leave this district. Get out of this Valley. You have threatened us; we shall not protect you in life or limb. You are given two hours to leave the Valley, and after that you stay here at your own peril. If you try to hold your labor council, don't ask us, whom you have scorned, to surround you with the protection of the society you would overthrow in bloodshed. Now, go--get out of here," he cried, with all the fire and fury that an outraged respectability could muster. But Grant, turning, twisted his hook in the Judge's coat, held him at arm's length, and leaning toward the crowd, with the Judge all but dangling from his steel arm, cried: "I shall speak in South Harvey to-night. This is indeed a life and death struggle, and I shall preach the gospel of life. Life," he cried with a trumpet voice, "life--the life of society, and its eternal resurrection out of the forces of life that flow from the everlasting divine spring!"

After the crowd had left the hall, Grant hurried toward the street leading to South Harvey. As he turned the corner, the man whom Grant had seen in the hall met him, the man whom Grant recognized as a puddler in one of the smelters. He came up, touched Grant on the shoulder and asked:

"Adams?" Grant nodded.

"Are you going down to South Harvey?"

Grant replied, "Yes, I'm going to hold a meeting there to-night."

"Well, if you try," said the man, pushing his face close to Grant's, "you'll get your head knocked off--that's all. We don't like your kind--understand?" Grant looked at the man, took his measure physically and returned:

"All right, there'll be some one around to pick it up--maybe!"

The man walked away, but turned to say:

"Mind now--you show up in South Harvey, and we'll fix you right!"

As Grant turned to board a South Harvey car, Judge Van Dorn caught his arm, and said:

"Wait a minute, the next car will do."

The Judge's wife was with him, and Grant was shocked to see how doll-like her face had become, how the lines of character had been smoothed out, the eyelids stained, the eyebrows penciled, the lips colored, until she had a bisque look that made him shudder. He had seen faces like hers, and fancied that he knew their story.

"I would like to speak with you just a minute. Come up to the office. Margaret, dearie," said Van Dorn, "you wait for me at Brotherton's." In the office, Van Dorn squared himself before Grant and said:

"It's no use, sir. You can't hold a meeting there to-night--the thing's set against you. I can't stop them, but I know the rough element there will kill you if you try. You've done your best--why risk your head, man--for no purpose? You can't make it--and it's dangerous for you to try."

Grant looked at Van Dorn. Then he asked:

"You represent the Harvey Fuel Company, Judge?"

"Yes," replied the Judge with much pride of authority, "and we--"

Grant stopped him. "Judge," he said, "if you blow your horn--I'll ring my bell and--If I don't hold my meeting to-night, your mines won't open to-morrow morning." The Judge rose and led the way to the door.

"Oh, well," he sneered, "if you won't take advice, there's no need of wasting time on you."

"No," answered Grant, "only remember what I've said."

When Grant alighted from the car in South Harvey, he found his puddler friend waiting for him. The two went into the Vanderbilt House, where Grant greeted Mrs. Williams, the landlady, as an old friend, and the puddler cried: "Say, lady--if you keep this man--we'll burn your house."

"Well, burn it--it wouldn't be much loss," retorted the landlady, who turned her back upon the puddler and said to Grant: "We've given you the front room upstairs, Grant, for the committee. It has the outside staircase. Your room is ready. You know the Local No. 10 boys from the Independent are all coming around this afternoon--as soon as they learn where the meeting is."

The puddler walked away and Grant went out into the street; looked up at the wooden structure with the stairway rising from the sidewalk and splitting the house in two. Mounting the stairs, he found a narrow hall, leading down a long line of bedrooms. He realized that he must view his location as a general looks over a battlefield.

The closing of the public halls to Grant and his cause had not discouraged him. He knew that he still had the great free out-of-doors, and he had thought that an open air meeting would give the cause dramatic setting. He felt that to be barred from the halls of the Valley helped rather than hurt his meeting. The barring proved to the workers the righteousness of their demands. So Grant sallied forth to locate a vacant lot; he shot out of his room full of the force of his enthusiasm, but his force met another force as strong as his, and ruthless. God's free out of doors, known and beloved of Grant from his boyhood, was preëmpted: What he found in his quest for a meeting place was a large red sign, "No trespassing," upon the nearest vacant lot, and a special policeman parading back and forth in front of the lot on the sidewalk. He found a score of lots similarly placarded and patrolled. He sent men to Magnus and Foley scurrying like ants through the Valley, but no lot was available.

Up town in Harvey, the ants also were busy. The company was sending men over Market Street, picking out the few individuals who owned vacant lots, leasing them for the month and preparing to justify the placarding and patrolling that already had been done. One of the ants that went hurrying out of the Sands hill on this errand, was John Kollander, and after he had seen Wright & Perry and the few other merchants who owned South Harvey real estate, he encountered Captain Ezra Morton, who happened to have a vacant lot, given to the Captain in the first flush of the South Harvey boom, in return for some service to Daniel Sands. John Kollander explained his errand to the Captain, who nodded wisely, and stroked his goatee meditatively.

"I got to think it over," he bawled, and walked away, leaving John Kollander puzzled and dismayed. But Captain Morton spent no time in academic debate. In half an hour he was in South Harvey, climbing the stairs of the Vanderbilt House, and knocking at Grant Adams's door. Throwing open the door Grant found Captain Morton, standing to attention with a shotgun in his hands. The Captain marched in, turned a square corner to a chair, but slumped into it with a relieved sigh.

"Well, Grant--I heard your speech this morning to the Merchants' Association. You're crazy as a bed bug--eh? That's what I told 'em all. And then they said to let you go to it--you couldn't get a hall, and the company could keep you off the lots all over the Valley, and if you tried to speak on the streets they'd run you in--what say?" His old eyes snapped with some virility, and he lifted up his voice and cried:

"But 'y gory--is that the way to do a man, I says? No--why, that ain't free speech! I remember when they done Garrison and Lovejoy and those old boys that way before the war. I fit, bled and died for that, Grant--eh? And I says to the girls this noon: 'Girls--your pa's got a lot in South Harvey, over there next to the Red Dog saloon, that he got way back when they were cheap, and now that the company's got all their buildings up and don't want to buy any lots--why, they're cheaper still--what say?'

"And 'y gory, I says to the girls--'If your ma was living I know what she'd say. She'd say, "You just go over there and tell that Adams boy that lot's hisn, and if any one tries to molest him, you blow 'em to hell"--that's what your ma'd say'--only words to that effect--eh? And so by the jumping John Rogers, Grant--here I am!"

He looked at the shotgun. "One load's bird shot--real fine and soft, with a small charge of powder." He put his hand to his mouth sheepishly and added apologetically, "I suppose I won't need it,--but I just put the blamedest load of buck shot and powder in that right barrel you ever saw--what say?"

Grant said: "Well, Captain--this isn't your fight. You don't believe in what I'm talking about--you've proved your patriotism in a great war. Don't get into this, Captain."

"Grant Adams," barked the Captain as if he were drilling his company, "I believe if you're not a Socialist, you're just as bad. But 'y gory, I fought for the right of free speech, and free meetings, and Socialist or no Socialist, that's your right. I'm going to defend you on my own lot." He rose again, straightened up in rheumatic pain, marched to the door, saluted, and said:

"I brought my supper along with me. It's in my coat pocket. I'm going over to the lot and sit there till you come. I know this class of people down here. They ain't worth hell room, Grant," admonished the Captain earnestly. "But if I'm not there, the company will crowd their men in on that lot as sure as guns, when they know you are to meet there. And I'm going there to guard it till you come. Good day--sir."

And with that he thumped limpingly down the narrow stairs, across the little landing, out of the door and into the street.

Grant stood at the top of the stairs and watched him out of sight. Then Grant pulled himself together, and went out to see the gathering members of the Labor Council in the hotel office and the men of Local No. 10 to announce the place of meeting. Later in the afternoon he met Nathan Perry. When he told Nathan of the meeting, the young man cried in his rasping Yankee voice:

"Good--you're no piker. They said they had scared the filling out of you at the meeting this morning, and they've bragged they were going to beat you up this afternoon and kill you to-night. You look pretty husky--but watch out. They really are greatly excited."

"Well," replied Grant grimly, "I'll be there to-night."

"Nevertheless," returned Nathan, snapping off his words as though he was cutting them with steel scissors, "Anne and I agreed to-day, that I must come to Mrs. Williams's and take you to the meeting. They may get ugly after dark."

Half an hour later on the street, Grant was passing his cousin Anne, wheeling Daniel Kyle Perry out to take the air. He checked his hurried step when he caught her smile and said, "Well, Anne, Nate told me that you wish to send him over to the meeting to-night, as my body guard. I don't need a body guard, and you keep Nate at home." He smiled down on his cousin and for a moment all of the emotional storm in his face was melted by the gentleness of that smile. "Anne," he said--"what a brick you are!"

She laughed and gave him the full voltage of her joyous eyes and answered:

"Grant, I'd rather be the widow of a man who would stand by you and what you are doing, than to be the wife of a man who shrank from it." She lowered her voice, "And Grant, here's a curious thing: this second Mrs. Van Dorn called me up on the phone a little bit ago, and said she knew you and I were cousins and that you and Nate were such friends, but would I tell Nate to keep you away from any meeting to-night? She said she couldn't tell me, but she had just learned some perfectly awful things they were going to do, and she didn't want to see any trouble. Wasn't that queer?"

Grant shook his head. "Well, what did you say?" he asked.

"Oh, I said that while they were doing such perfectly awful things to you, your friends wouldn't be making lace doilies! And she rang off. What do you think of it?" she asked.

"Just throwing a scare into me--under orders," responded the man and hurried on.

When Grant returned to the hotel at supper time, he found Mr. Brotherton sitting in a ramshackle rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom, waiting.

"I thought I'd come over and bring a couple of friends," explained Mr. Brotherton, pointing to the corner, where two shotguns leaned against the wall.

"Why, man," exclaimed Grant, "that's good of you, but in all the time I've been in the work of organization, I've never carried a gun, nor had one around. I don't want a gun, Mr. Brotherton."

"I do," returned the elder man, "and I'm here to say that moral force is a grand thing, but in these latitudes when you poke Betsy Jane under the nose of an erring comrade, he sees the truth with much more clearness than otherwise. I stick to the gun--and you can go in hard for moral suasion.

"Also," he added, "I've just taken a survey of these premises, and told the missus to bring the supper up here. There may be an early curtain raiser on this entertainment, and if they are going to chase you out of town to-night, I want a good seat at the performance." He grinned. "Nate Perry will join us in a little quiet social manslaughter. I called him up an hour ago, and he said he'd be here at six-thirty. I think he's coming now." In another minute the slim Yankee figure of Nathan was in the room. It was scarcely dusk outside. Mrs. Williams came up with a tray of food. As she set it down she said:

"There's a crowd around at the Hot Dog, you can see them through the window."

Nate and Grant looked. Mr. Brotherton went into the supper. "Crowd all right," assented Nate. There was no mistaking the crowd and its intention. There were new men from the day shift at the smelter, imported by the company to oppose the unions. A thousand such men had been brought into the district within a few months.

"There's another saloon across the road here," said Mr. Brotherton, looking up from his food. "My understanding is that they're going to make headquarters across the street in Dick's Place. You know I got a pipe-line in on the enemy through the Calvin girl. She gets it at home, and her father gets it at the office. Our estimable natty little friend Joe will be down here--he says to keep the peace. That's what he tells at home. I know what he's coming for. Tom Van Dorn will sit in the back room of that saloon and no one will know he's there, and Joseph will issue Tom's orders. Lord," cried Mr. Brotherton, waving a triangle of pie in his hand, "don't I know 'em like a book."

While he was talking the crowd slowly was swelling in front of the Hot Dog saloon. It was a drinking and noisy crowd. Men who appeared to be leaders were taking other men in to the bar, treating them, then bringing them out again, and talking excitedly to them. The crowd grew rapidly, and the noise multiplied. Another crowd was gathering--just a knot of men down the street by the Company's store, in the opposite direction from the Hot Dog crowd. Grant and Nate noticed the second crowd at the same time. It was Local No. 10. Grant left the window and lighted the lamp. He wrote on a piece of paper, a few lines, handed it to Nathan, saying:

"Here, sign it with me." It read:

"Boys--whatever you do, don't start anything--of any kind--no matter what happens to us. We can take care of ourselves."

Nathan Perry signed it, slipped down the stairs into the hall, and beckoned to his men at the Company's store. The crowd at the Hot Dog saw him and yelled, but Evan Evans came running for the note and took it back. Little Tom Williams came up the stairs with Nathan, saying:

"Well--they're getting ready for business. I brought a gun up to No. 3 this afternoon. I'm with Grant in this."

The little landlord went into No. 3, appeared with a rifle, and came bobbing into the room.

Grant at the window could see the crowd marching from the Hot Dog to Dick's Place, yelling and cursing as it went. The group in the bedroom over the street opened the street windows to see better and hear better. An incandescent over the door of the saloon lighted the narrow street. In front of the saloon and under the light the mob halted. The men in the room with Grant were at the windows watching. Suddenly--as by some prearranged order, four men with revolvers in their hands ran across the street towards the hotel. Brotherton, Williams and Perry ran to the head of the stairs, guns in hand. Grant followed them. There they stood when the door below was thrown open, and the four men below rushed across the small landing to the bottom of the stairs. It was dark in the upper hall, but a light from the street flooded the lower hall. The men below did not look up; they were on the stairs.

"Stop," shouted Brotherton with his great voice.

That halted them. They looked up into darkness. They could see no faces--only four gun barrels. The men farthest up the stairs literally fell into the arms of those below. Then the four men below scrambled down the stairs as Mr. Brotherton roared:

"I'll kill the first man who puts his foot on the bottom step again."

With a cry of terror they rushed out. The crowd at the Company store hooted, and the mob before the saloon jeered. But the four men scurried across the street, and told the crowd what had happened. For a few minutes no move was made. Then Grant, who had left the hallway and was looking through the window, saw the little figure of Joseph Calvin moving officiously among the men. He went into the saloon, and came out again after a time. Then Grant cried to Brotherton at the head of the stairs:

"Watch out--they're coming; more of them this time." And half a dozen armed men rushed across the street and appeared at the door of the hallway.

"Stop," yelled Brotherton--whose great voice itself sounded a terrifying alarm in the darkened hallway. The feet of two men were on the first steps of the stairs--they looked up and saw three gun barrels pointing down at them, and heard Brotherton call "one--two--three," but before he could say "fire" the men fell back panic stricken and ran out of the place.

The crowd left the sidewalk and moved into the saloon, and the street was deserted for a time. Local No. 10 held its post down by the Company Store. It seemed like an age to the men at the head of the stairs. Yet Mr. Brotherton's easy running fire of ribaldry never stopped. He was excited and language came from his throat without restraint.

Then Grant's quick ear caught a sound that made him shudder. It was far away, a shrill high note; in a few seconds the note was repeated, and with it the animal cry one never mistakes who hears it--the cry of an angry mob. They could hear it roaring over the bridge upon the Wahoo and they knew it was the mob from Magnus, Plain Valley and Foley coming. On it came, with its high-keyed horror growing louder and louder. It turned into the street and came roaring and whining down to the meeting place at the saloon. It filled the street. Then appeared Mr. Calvin following a saloon porter, who was rolling a whiskey barrel from the saloon. The porter knocked in the head, and threw tin cups to the crowd.

"What do you think of that for a praying Christian?" snarled Mr. Brotherton. No one answered Mr. Brotherton, for the whiskey soon began to make the crowd noisy. But the leaders waited for the whiskey to make the crowd brave. The next moment, Van Dorn's automobile--the old one, not the new one--came chugging up. Grant, at the window, looked out and turned deathly sick. For he saw the puddler who had bullied him during the day get out of the car, and in the puddler's grasp was Kenyon--with white face, but not whimpering.

The men made way for the puddler, who hurried the boy into the saloon. Grant did not speak, but stood unnerved and horror-stricken staring at the saloon door which had swallowed up the boy.

"Well, for God--" cried Brotherton.

"A screen--they're going to use the boy as a shield--the damn cowards!" rasped Nathan Perry.

The little Welshman moaned. And the three men stood staring at Grant whose eyes did not shift from the saloon door. He was rigid and his face, which trembled for a moment, set like molten bronze.

"If I surrender now, if they beat me here with anything less than my death, the whole work of years is gone--the long struggle of these men for their rights." He spoke not to his companions, but through them to himself. "I can't give up--not even for Kenyon," he cried. "Tom--Tom," Grant turned to the little Welshman. "You stood by and heard Dick Bowman order Mugs to hold the shovel over my face! Did he shrink? Well, this cause is the life and death struggle of all the Dicks in the Valley--not for just this week, but for always."

Below the crowd was hushed. Joe Calvin had appeared and was giving orders in a low tone. The hulking figure of the puddler could be seen picking out his men; he had three set off in a squad. The men in the room could see the big beads of sweat stand out on Grant's forehead. "Kenyon--Kenyon," he cried in agony. Then George Brotherton let out his bellow, "Grant--look here--do you think I'm going to fire on--"

But the next minute the group at the window saw something that made even George Brotherton's bull voice stop. Into the drab street below flashed something all red. It was the Van Dorn motor car, the new one. But the red of the car was subdued beside the scarlet of the woman in the back seat--a woman without hat or coat, holding something in her arms. The men at the window could not see what those saw in the street; but they could see Joe Calvin fall back; could see the consternation on his face, could see him waving his hands to the crowd to clear the way. And then those at the window above saw Margaret Van Dorn rise in the car and they heard her call, "Joe Calvin! Joe Calvin--" she screamed, "bring my husband out from behind that wine room door--quick--quick," she shrieked, "quick, I say."

The mob parted for her. The men at the hotel window could not see what she had in her arms. She made the driver wheel, drive to the opposite side of the street directly under the hotel window--directly in front of the besieged door. In another instant Van Dorn, ghastly with rage, came bare-headed out of the saloon. He ran across the street crying:

"You she devil, what do you--"

But he stopped without finishing his sentence. The men above looked down at what he was looking at and saw a child--Tom Van Dorn's child, Lila, in the car.

"My God, Margaret--what does this mean?" he almost whispered in terror.

"It means," returned the strident voice of the woman, "that when you sent for your car and the driver told me he was going to Adamses--I knew why--from what you said, and now, by God," she screamed, "give me that boy--or this girl goes to the union men as their shield."

Van Dorn did not speak. His mouth seemed about to begin, but she stopped him, crying:

"And if you touch her I'll kill you both. And the child goes first."

The woman had lost control of her voice. She swung a pistol toward the child.

"Give me that boy!" she shrieked, and Van Dorn, dumb and amazed, stood staring at her. "Tell them to bring that boy before I count five: One, two," she shouted, "three--"

"Oh, Joe," called Van Dorn as his whole body began to tremble, "bring the Adams boy quick--here!" His voice broke into a shriek with nervous agitation and the word "here" was uttered with a piercing yell, that made the crowd wince.

Calvin brought Kenyon out and sent him across the street. Grant opened a window and called out: "Get into the car with Lila, Kenyon--please."

The woman in the car cried: "Grant, Grant, is that you up there? They were going to murder the boy, Grant. Do you want his child up there?"

She looked up and the arc light before the hotel revealed her tragic, shattered face--a wreck of a face, crumpled and all out of line and focus as the flickering glare of the arc-light fell upon it. "Shall I send you his child?" she babbled hysterically, keeping the revolver pointed at Lila--"His child that he's silly about?"

Van Dorn started for her car, but Brotherton at the window bellowed across a gun sight: "Move an inch and I'll shoot."

Grant called down: "Margaret, take Lila and Kenyon home, please."

Then, with Mr. Brotherton's gun covering the father in the street below, the driver of the car turned it carefully through the parting crowd, and was gone as mysteriously and as quickly as he came.

"Now," cried Mr. Brotherton, still sighting down the gun barrel pointed at Van Dorn, standing alone in the middle of the street, "you make tracks, and don't you go to that saloon either--you go home to the bosom of your family. Stop," roared Mr. Brotherton, as the man tried to break into a run. Van Dorn stopped. "Go down to the Company store where the union men are," commanded Mr. Brotherton. "They will take you home.

"Hey--you Local No. 10," howled the great bull voice of Brotherton. "You fellows take this man home to his own vine and fig tree."

Van Dorn, looking ever behind him for help that did not come, edged down the street and into the arms of Local No. 10, and was swallowed up in that crowd. A rock from across the street crashed through the window where the gun barrels were protruding, but there was no fire in return. Another rock and another came. But there was no firing.

Grant, who knew something of mobs, felt instinctively that the trouble was over. Nathan and Brotherton agreed. They stood for a time--a long time it seemed to them--guarding the stairs. Then some one struck a match and looked at his watch. It was half past eight. It was too late for Grant to hold his meeting. But he felt strongly that the exit of Van Dorn had left the crowd without a leader and that the fight of the night was won.

"Well," said Grant, drawing a deep breath. "They'll not run me out of town to-night. I could go to the lot now and hold the meeting; but it's late and it will be better to wait until to-morrow night. They should sleep this off--I'm going to talk to them."

He stepped to an iron balcony outside the window and putting his hands to his mouth uttered a long horn-like blast. The men saw him across the street. "Come over here, all of you--" he called. "I want to talk to you--just a minute."

The crowd moved, first one or two, then three or four, then by tens. Soon the crowd stood below looking up half curiously--half angrily.

"You see, men," he smiled as he shoved his hand in his pocket, and put his head humorously on one side:

"We are more hospitable when you all come than when you send your delegations. It's more democratic this way--just to kind of meet out here like a big family and talk it over. Some way," he laughed, "your delegates were in a hurry to go back and report. Well, now, that was right. That is true representative government. You sent 'em, they came; were satisfied and went back and told you all about it." The crowd laughed. He knew when they laughed that he could talk on. "But you see, I believe in democratic government. I want you all to come and talk this matter over--not just a few."

He paused; then began again: "Now, men, it's late. I've got so much to say I don't want to begin now. I don't like to have Tom Van Dorn and Joe Calvin divide time with me. I want the whole evening to myself. And," he leaned over clicking his iron claw on the balcony railing while his jaw showed the play of muscles in the light from below, "what's more I'm going to have it, if it takes all summer. Now then," he cried: "The Labor Council of the Wahoo Valley will hold its meeting to-morrow night at seven-thirty sharp on Captain Morton's vacant lot just the other side of the Hot Dog saloon. I'll talk to that meeting. I want you to come to that meeting and hear what we have to say about what we are trying to do."

A few men clapped their hands. Grant Adams turned back into the room and in due course the crowd slowly dissolved. At ten o'clock he was standing in the door of the Vanderbilt House looking at his watch, ready to turn in for the night. Suddenly he remembered the Captain. He hurried around to the Hot Dog, and there peering into the darkness of the vacant lot saw the Captain with his gun on his shoulder pacing back and forth, a silent, faithful sentry, unrelieved from duty.

When Grant had relieved him and told him that the trouble was over, the little old man looked up with his snappy eyes and his dried, weazened smile and said: "'Y gory, man--I'm glad you come. I was just a-thinking I bet them girls of mine haven't cooked any potatoes to go with the meat to make hash for breakfast--eh? and I'm strong for hash."

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Chapter XXXVII

IN WHICH WE WITNESS A CEREMONY IN THE TEMPLE OF LOVE

George Brotherton took the Captain to the street car that night. They rode face to face and all that the Captain had seen and more, outside the Vanderbilt House, and all that George Brotherton had seen within its portals, a street car load of Harvey people heard with much "'Y gorying" and "Well--saying," as the car rattled through the fields and into Market Street. Amiable satisfaction with the night's work beamed in the moon-face of Mr. Brotherton and the Captain was drunk with martial spirit. He shouldered his gun and marched down the full length of the car and off, dragging Brotherton at his chariot wheels like a spoil of battle.

"Come on, George," called the Captain as the audience in the car smiled. "Young man, I need you to tell the girls that their pa ain't gone stark, staring mad--eh? And I want to show 'em a hero!--What say? A genuine hee-ro!"

It was half an hour after the Captain bursting upon his hearthstone like a martial sky rocket, had exploded the last of his blue and green candles. The three girls, sitting around the cold base burner, beside and above which Mr. Brotherton stood in statuesque repose, heard the Captain's tale and the protests of Mr. Brotherton much as Desdemona heard of Othello's perils. And when the story was finished and retold and refinished and the Captain was rising with what the girls called the hash-look in his snappy little eyes, Martha saw Ruth swallow a vast yawn and Martha turned to Emma an appreciative smile at Ruth's discomfiture.

But Emma's eyes were fixed upon Mr. Brotherton and her face turned toward him with an aspect of tender adoration. Mr. Brotherton, who was not without appreciation of his own heroic caste, saw the yawn and the smile and then he saw the face of Emma Morton.

It came over him in a flash of surprise that Ruth and Martha were young things, not of his world; and that Emma was of his world and very much for him in his world. It got to him through the busy guard of his outer consciousness with a great rush of tenderness that Emma really cared for the dangers he had faced and was proud of the part he had played. And Mr. Brotherton knew that, with Ruth and Martha, it was a tale that was told.

As he saw her standing among her sisters, his heart hid from him the little school teacher with crow's feet at her eyes, but revealed instead the glowing heart of an exalted woman, who did not realize that she was uncovering her love, a woman who in the story she had heard was living for a moment in high romance. Her beloved, imperiled, was restored to her; the lost was found and the journey which ends so happily in lovers' meetings was closing.

His eyes filled and his voice needed a cough to prime it. The fire, glowing in Emma Morton's eyes, steamed up George Brotherton's will--the will which had sent him crashing forward in life from a train peddler to a purveyor of literature and the arts in Harvey. Deeds followed impulses with him swiftly, so in an instant the floor of the Morton cottage was shaking under his tread and with rash indifference, high and heroic, ignoring with equal disdain two tittering girls, an astonished little old man and a cold base burner, the big man stalked across the room and cried:

"Well, say--why, Emma--my dear!" He had her hands in his and was putting his arm about her as he bellowed: "Girls--" his voice broke under its heavy emotional load. "Why, dammit all, I'm your long-lost brother George! Cap, kick me, kick me--me the prize jackass--the grand sweepstake prize all these years!"

"No, no, George," protested the wriggling maiden. "Not--not here! Not--"

"Don't you 'no--no' me, Emmy Morton," roared the big man, pulling her to his side. "Girl--girl, what do we care?" He gave her a resounding kiss and gazed proudly around and exclaimed, "Ruthie, run and call up the Times and give 'em the news. Martha, call up old man Adams--and I'll take a bell to-morrow and go calling it up and down Market Street. Then, Cap, you tell Mrs. Herdicker. This is the big news." As he spoke he was gathering the amazed Ruth and Martha under his wing and kissing them, crying, "Take that one for luck--and that to grow on." Then he let out his laugh. But in vain did Emma Morton try to squirm from his grasp; in vain she tried to quiet his clatter. "Say, girls, cluster around Brother George's knee--or knees--and let's plan the wedding."

"You are going to have a wedding, aren't you, Emma?" burst in Ruth, and George cut in:

"Wedding--why, this is to be the big show--the laughing show, all the wonders of the world and marvels of the deep under one canvas. Why, girls--"

"Well, Emma, you've just got to wear a veil," laughed Martha hysterically.

"Veil nothing--shame on you, Martha Morton. Why, George hasn't asked--"

"Now ain't it the truth!" roared Brotherton. "Why veil! Veil?" he exclaimed. "She's going to wear seven veils and forty flower girls--forty--count 'em--forty! And Morty Sands best man--"

"Keep still, George," interrupted Ruth. "Now, Emma, when--when, I say, are you going to resign your school?"

Mr. Brotherton gave the youngest and most practical Miss Morton a look of quick intelligence. "Don't you fret; Ruthie, I'm hog tied by the silken skein of love. She's going to resign her school to-morrow."

"Indeed I am not, George Brotherton--and if you people don't hush--"

But Mr. Brotherton interrupted the bride-to-be, incidentally kissing her by way of punctuation, and boomed on in his poster tone, "Morty Sands best man with his gym class from South Harvey doing ground and lofty tumbling up and down the aisles in pink tights. Doc Jim in linen pants whistling the Wedding March to Kenyon Adams's violin obligato, with the General hitting the bones at the organ! The greatest show on earth and the baby elephant in evening clothes prancing down the aisle like the behemoth of holy writ! Well, say--say, I tell you!"

The Captain touched the big man on the shoulder apologetically. "George, of course, if you could wait a year till the Household Horse gets going good, I could stake you for a trip to the Grand Canyon myself, but just now, 'y gory, man!"

"Grand Canyon!" laughed Brotherton. "Why, Cap, we're going to go seven times around the world and twice to the moon before we turn up in Harvey. Grand Canyon--"

"Well, at least, father," cried Martha, "we'll get her that tan traveling dress and hat she's always wanted."

"But I tell you girls to keep still," protested the bride-to-be, still in the prospective groom's arms and proud as Punch of her position. "Why, George hasn't even asked me and--"

"Neither have you asked me, Emma, ''eathen idol made of mud what she called the Great God Buhd.'" He stooped over tenderly and when his face rose, he said softly, "And a plucky lot she cared for tan traveling dresses when I kissed her where she stud!" And then and there before the Morton family assembled, he kissed his sweetheart again, a middle-aged man unashamed in his joy.

It was a tremendous event in the Morton family and the Captain felt his responsibility heavily. The excited girls, half-shocked and half-amused and wholly delighted, tried to lead the Captain away and leave the lovers alone after George had hugged them all around and kissed them again for luck. But the Captain refused to be led. He had many things to say. He had to impress upon Mr. Brotherton, now that he was about to enter the family, the great fact that the Mortons were about to come into riches. Hence a dissertation on the Household Horse and its growing popularity among makers of automobiles; Nate Perry's plans in blue print for the new factory were brought in, and a wilderness of detail spread before an ardent lover, keen for his first hour alone with the woman who had touched his bachelor heart. A hundred speeches came to his lips and dissolved--first formal and ardent love vows--while the Captain rattled on recounting familiar details of his dream.

Then Ruth and Martha rose in their might and literally dragged their father from the room and upstairs. Half an hour later the two lovers in the doorway heard a stir in the house behind them. They heard the Captain cry:

"The hash--George, she's the best girl--'Y gory, the best girl in the world. But she will forget to chop the hash over night!"

As George Brotherton, bumping his head upon the eternal stars, turned into the street, he saw the great black hulk of the Van Dorn house among the trees. He smiled as he wondered how the ceremonies were proceeding in the Temple of Love that night.

It was not a ceremony fit for smiles, but rather for the tears of gods and men, that the priest and priestess had performed. Margaret Van Dorn had taken Kenyon home, then dropped Lila at the Nesbit door as she returned from South Harvey. When she found that her husband had not reached home, she ran to her room to fortify herself for the meeting with him. And she found her fortifications in the farthest corner of the bottom drawer of her dresser. From its hiding place she brought forth a little black box and from the box a brown pellet. This fortification had been her refuge for over a year when the stress of life in the Temple of Love was about to overcome her. It gave her courage, quickened her wits and loosened her tongue. Always she retired to her fortress when the combat in the Temple threatened to strain her nerves. So she had worn a beaten path of habit to her refuge.

Then she made herself presentable; took care of her hair, smoothed her face at the mirror and behind the shield of the drug she waited. She heard the old car rattling up the street, and braced herself for the struggle. She knew--she had learned by bitter experience that the first blow in a rough and tumble was half the battle. As he came raging through the door, slamming it behind him, she faced him, and before he could speak, she sneered:

"Ah, you coward--you sneaking, cur coward--who would murder a child to win--Ach!" she cried. "You are loathsome--get away from me!"

The furious man rushed toward her with his hands clinched. She stood with her arms akimbo and said slowly:

"You try that--just try that."

He stopped. She came over and rubbed her body against his, purring, with a pause after each word:

"You are a coward--aren't you?"

She put her fingers under his jaw, and sneered, "If ever you lay hands on me--just one finger on me, Tom Van Dorn--" She did not finish her sentence.

The man uttered a shrill, insane cry of fury and whirled and would have run, but she caught him, and with a gross physical power, that he knew and dreaded, she swung him by force into a chair.

"Now," she panted, "sit down like a man and tell me what you are going to do about it? Look up--dawling!" she cried, as Van Dorn slumped in the chair.

The man gave her a look of hate. His eyes, that showed his soul, burned with rage and from his face, so mobile and expressive, a devil of malice gaped impotently at his wife, as he sat, a heap of weak vanity, before her. He pulled himself up and exclaimed:

"Well, there's one thing damn sure, I'll not live with you any more--no man would respect me if I did after to-night."

"And no man," she smiled and said in her mocking voice, "will respect you if you leave me. How Laura's friends will laugh when you go, and say that Tom Van Dorn simply can't live with any one. How the Nesbit crowd will titter when you leave me, and say Tom Van Dorn got just what he had coming! Why--go on--leave me--if you dare! You know you don't dare to. It's for better or worse, Tom, until death do us part--dawling!"

She laughed and winked indecently at him.

"I will leave you, I tell you, I will leave you," he burst forth, half rising. "All the devils of hell can't keep me here."

"Except just this one," she mocked. "Oh, you might leave me and go with your present mistress! By the way, who is our latest conquest--dawling? I'm sure that would be fine. Wouldn't they cackle--the dear old hens whose claws scratch your heart so every day?" She leaned over, caressing him devilishly, and cried, "For you know when you get loose from me, you'll pretty nearly have to marry the other lady--wouldn't that be nice? 'Through sickness and health, for good or for ill,'--isn't it nice?" she scoffed. Then she turned on him savagely, "So you will try to hide behind a child, and use him for a shield--Oh, you cur--you despicable dog," she scorned. Then she drew herself up and spoke in a passion that all but hissed at him. "I tell you, Tom Van Dorn, if you ever, in this row that's coming, harm a hair of that boy's head--you'll carry the scar of that hair to your grave. I mean it."

Van Dorn sprang up. He cried: "What business is it of yours? You she devil, what's the boy to you? Can't I run my own business? Why do you care so much for the Adams brat? Answer me, I tell you--answer me," he cried, his wrath filling his voice.

"Oh, nothing, dawling," she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: "Oh, nothing, Tom--only you see I might be his mother!"

She played with the vulgar diamonds that hid her fingers and looked down coyly as she smiled into his gray face.

"Great God," he whispered, "were you born a--" he stopped, ashamed of the word in his mouth.

The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on one side as she replied: "Whatever I am, I'm the wife of Judge Van Dorn; so I'm quite respectable now--whatever I was once. Isn't that lawvly, dawling!" She began talking in her baby manner.

Her husband was staring at her with doubt and fear and weak, footless wrath playing like scurrying clouds across his proud, shamed face.

"Oh, Margaret, tell me the truth," he moaned, as the fear of the truth baffled him--a thousand little incidents that had attracted his notice and passed to be stirred up by a puzzled consciousness came rushing into his memory--and the doubt and dread overcame even his hate for a moment and he begged. But she laughed, and scouted the idea and then called out in anguish:

"Why--why have you a child to love--to love and live for even if you cannot be with her--why can I have none?"

Her voice had broken and she felt she was losing her grip on herself, and she knew that her time was limited, that her fortifications were about to crumble. She sat down before her husband.

"Tom," she said coldly, "no matter why I'm fond of Kenyon Adams--that's my business; Lila is your business, and I don't interfere, do I? Well," she said, looking the man in the eyes with a hard, mean, significant stare, "you let the boy alone--do you understand? Do what you please with Grant or Jasper or the old man; but Kenyon--hands off!"

She rose, slipped quickly to the stairway, and as she ran up she called, "Good night, dawling." Before he was on his feet he heard the lock click in her door, and with a horrible doubt, an impotent rage, and a mantling shame stifling him, he went upstairs and from her distant room she heard the bolt click in the door of his room. And behind the bolted doors stood two ghosts--the ghosts of rejected children, calling across the years, while the smudge of the extinguished torch of life choked two angry hearts.

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