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Title: The Strength of the Strong

Author: Jack London

Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1075]
[This file was first posted on October 17, 1997]
[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE STRENGTH OF THE STRONG ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




The Strength of the Strong




Contents:

The Strength of the Strong
South of the Slot
The Unparalleled Invasion
The Enemy of All the World
The Dream of Debs
The Sea-Farmer
Samuel



THE STRENGTH OF THE STRONG



"Parables don't lie, but liars will parable."--Lip-King.


Old Long-Beard paused in his narrative, licked his greasy fingers,
and wiped them on his naked sides where his one piece of ragged
bearskin failed to cover him.  Crouched around him, on their hams,
were three young men, his grandsons, Deer-Runner, Yellow-Head, and
Afraid-of-the-Dark.  In appearance they were much the same.  Skins
of wild animals partly covered them.  They were lean and meagre of
build, narrow-hipped and crooked-legged, and at the same time deep-
chested, with heavy arms and enormous hands.  There was much hair
on their chests and shoulders, and on the outsides of their arms
and legs.  Their heads were matted with uncut hair, long locks of
which often strayed before their eyes, beady and black and
glittering like the eyes of birds.  They were narrow between the
eyes and broad between the cheeks, while their lower jaws were
projecting and massive.

It was a night of clear starlight, and below them, stretching away
remotely, lay range on range of forest-covered hills.  In the
distance the heavens were red from the glow of a volcano.  At their
backs yawned the black mouth of a cave, out of which, from time to
time, blew draughty gusts of wind.  Immediately in front of them
blazed a fire.  At one side, partly devoured, lay the carcass of a
bear, with about it, at a respectable distance, several large dogs,
shaggy and wolf-like.  Beside each man lay his bow and arrows and a
huge club.  In the cave-mouth a number of rude spears leaned
against the rock.

"So that was how we moved from the cave to the tree," old Long-
Beard spoke up.

They laughed boisterously, like big children, at recollection of a
previous story his words called up.  Long-Beard laughed, too, the
five-inch bodkin of bone, thrust midway through the cartilage of
his nose, leaping and dancing and adding to his ferocious
appearance.  He did not exactly say the words recorded, but he made
animal-like sounds with his mouth that meant the same thing.

"And that is the first I remember of the Sea Valley," Long-Beard
went on.  "We were a very foolish crowd.  We did not know the
secret of strength.  For, behold, each family lived by itself, and
took care of itself.  There were thirty families, but we got no
strength from one another.  We were in fear of each other all the
time.  No one ever paid visits.  In the top of our tree we built a
grass house, and on the platform outside was a pile of rocks, which
were for the heads of any that might chance to try to visit us.
Also, we had our spears and arrows.  We never walked under the
trees of the other families, either.  My brother did, once, under
old Boo-oogh's tree, and he got his head broken and that was the
end of him.

"Old Boo-oogh was very strong.  It was said he could pull a grown
man's head right off.  I never heard of him doing it, because no
man would give him a chance.  Father wouldn't.  One day, when
father was down on the beach, Boo-oogh took after mother.  She
couldn't run fast, for the day before she had got her leg clawed by
a bear when she was up on the mountain gathering berries.  So Boo-
oogh caught her and carried her up into his tree.  Father never got
her back.  He was afraid.  Old Boo-oogh made faces at him.

"But father did not mind.  Strong-Arm was another strong man.  He
was one of the best fishermen.  But one day, climbing after sea-
gull eggs, he had a fall from the cliff.  He was never strong after
that.  He coughed a great deal, and his shoulders drew near to each
other.  So father took Strong-Arm's wife.  When he came around and
coughed under our tree, father laughed at him and threw rocks at
him.  It was our way in those days.  We did not know how to add
strength together and become strong."

"Would a brother take a brother's wife?" Deer-Runner demanded.

"Yes, if he had gone to live in another tree by himself."

"But we do not do such things now," Afraid-of-the-Dark objected.

"It is because I have taught your fathers better."  Long-Beard
thrust his hairy paw into the bear meat and drew out a handful of
suet, which he sucked with a meditative air.  Again he wiped his
hands on his naked sides and went on.  "What I am telling you
happened in the long ago, before we knew any better."

"You must have been fools not to know better," was Deer-Runner's
comment, Yellow-Head grunting approval.

"So we were, but we became bigger fools, as you shall see.  Still,
we did learn better, and this was the way of it.  We Fish-Eaters
had not learned to add our strength until our strength was the
strength of all of us.  But the Meat-Eaters, who lived across the
divide in the Big Valley, stood together, hunted together, fished
together, and fought together.  One day they came into our valley.
Each family of us got into its own cave and tree.  There were only
ten Meat-Eaters, but they fought together, and we fought, each
family by itself."

Long-Beard counted long and perplexedly on his fingers.

"There were sixty men of us," was what he managed to say with
fingers and lips combined.  "And we were very strong, only we did
not know it.  So we watched the ten men attack Boo-oogh's tree.  He
made a good fight, but he had no chance.  We looked on.  When some
of the Meat-Eaters tried to climb the tree, Boo-oogh had to show
himself in order to drop stones on their heads, whereupon the other
Meat-Eaters, who were waiting for that very thing, shot him full of
arrows.  And that was the end of Boo-oogh.

"Next, the Meat-Eaters got One-Eye and his family in his cave.
They built a fire in the mouth and smoked him out, like we smoked
out the bear there to-day.  Then they went after Six-Fingers, up
his tree, and, while they were killing him and his grown son, the
rest of us ran away.  They caught some of our women, and killed two
old men who could not run fast and several children.  The women
they carried away with them to the Big Valley.

"After that the rest of us crept back, and, somehow, perhaps
because we were in fear and felt the need for one another, we
talked the thing over.  It was our first council--our first real
council.  And in that council we formed our first tribe.  For we
had learned the lesson.  Of the ten Meat-Eaters, each man had had
the strength of ten, for the ten had fought as one man.  They had
added their strength together.  But of the thirty families and the
sixty men of us, we had had the strength of but one man, for each
had fought alone.

"It was a great talk we had, and it was hard talk, for we did not
have the words then as now with which to talk.  The Bug made some
of the words long afterward, and so did others of us make words
from time to time.  But in the end we agreed to add our strength
together and to be as one man when the Meat-Eaters came over the
divide to steal our women.  And that was the tribe.

"We set two men on the divide, one for the day and one for the
night, to watch if the Meat-Eaters came.  These were the eyes of
the tribe.  Then, also, day and night, there were to be ten men
awake with their clubs and spears and arrows in their hands, ready
to fight.  Before, when a man went after fish, or clams, or gull-
eggs, he carried his weapons with him, and half the time he was
getting food and half the time watching for fear some other man
would get him.  Now that was all changed.  The men went out without
their weapons and spent all their time getting food.  Likewise,
when the women went into the mountains after roots and berries,
five of the ten men went with them to guard them.  While all the
time, day and night, the eyes of the tribe watched from the top of
the divide.

"But troubles came.  As usual, it was about the women.  Men without
wives wanted other men's wives, and there was much fighting between
men, and now and again one got his head smashed or a spear through
his body.  While one of the watchers was on top of the divide,
another man stole his wife, and he came down to fight.  Then the
other watcher was in fear that some one would take his wife, and he
came down likewise.  Also, there was trouble among the ten men who
carried always their weapons, and they fought five against five,
till some ran away down the coast and the others ran after them.

"So it was that the tribe was left without eyes or guards.  We had
not the strength of sixty.  We had no strength at all.  So we held
a council and made our first laws.  I was but a cub at the time,
but I remember.  We said that, in order to be strong, we must not
fight one another, and we made a law that when a man killed another
him would the tribe kill.  We made another law that whoso stole
another man's wife him would the tribe kill.  We said that whatever
man had too great strength, and by that strength hurt his brothers
in the tribe, him would we kill that his strength might hurt no
more.  For, if we let his strength hurt, the brothers would become
afraid and the tribe would fall apart, and we would be as weak as
when the Meat-Eaters first came upon us and killed Boo-oogh.

"Knuckle-Bone was a strong man, a very strong man, and he knew not
law.  He knew only his own strength, and in the fullness thereof he
went forth and took the wife of Three-Clams.  Three-Clams tried to
fight, but Knuckle-Bone clubbed out his brains.  Yet had Knuckle-
Bone forgotten that all the men of us had added our strength to
keep the law among us, and him we killed, at the foot of his tree,
and hung his body on a branch as a warning that the law was
stronger than any man.  For we were the law, all of us, and no man
was greater than the law.

"Then there were other troubles, for know, O Deer-Runner, and
Yellow-Head, and Afraid-of-the-Dark, that it is not easy to make a
tribe.  There were many things, little things, that it was a great
trouble to call all the men together to have a council about.  We
were having councils morning, noon, and night, and in the middle of
the night.  We could find little time to go out and get food,
because of the councils, for there was always some little thing to
be settled, such as naming two new watchers to take the place of
the old ones on the hill, or naming how much food should fall to
the share of the men who kept their weapons always in their hands
and got no food for themselves.

"We stood in need of a chief man to do these things, who would be
the voice of the council, and who would account to the council for
the things he did.  So we named Fith-Fith the chief man.  He was a
strong man, too, and very cunning, and when he was angry he made
noises just like that, fith-fith, like a wild-cat.

"The ten men who guarded the tribe were set to work making a wall
of stones across the narrow part of the valley.  The women and
large children helped, as did other men, until the wall was strong.
After that, all the families came down out of their caves and trees
and built grass houses behind the shelter of the wall.  These
houses were large and much better than the caves and trees, and
everybody had a better time of it because the men had added their
strength together and become a tribe.  Because of the wall and the
guards and the watchers, there was more time to hunt and fish and
pick roots and berries; there was more food, and better food, and
no one went hungry.  And Three-Legs, so named because his legs had
been smashed when a boy and who walked with a stick--Three-Legs got
the seed of the wild corn and planted it in the ground in the
valley near his house.  Also, he tried planting fat roots and other
things he found in the mountain valleys.

"Because of the safety in the Sea Valley, which was because of the
wall and the watchers and the guards, and because there was food in
plenty for all without having to fight for it, many families came
in from the coast valleys on both sides and from the high back
mountains where they had lived more like wild animals than men.
And it was not long before the Sea Valley filled up, and in it were
countless families.  But, before this happened, the land, which had
been free to all and belonged to all, was divided up.  Three-Legs
began it when he planted corn.  But most of us did not care about
the land.  We thought the marking of the boundaries with fences of
stone was a foolishness.  We had plenty to eat, and what more did
we want?  I remember that my father and I built stone fences for
Three-Legs and were given corn in return.

"So only a few got all the land, and Three-Legs got most of it.
Also, others that had taken land gave it to the few that held on,
being paid in return with corn and fat roots, and bear-skins, and
fishes which the farmers got from the fishermen in exchange for
corn.  And, the first thing we knew, all the land was gone.

"It was about this time that Fith-Fith died and Dog-Tooth, his son,
was made chief.  He demanded to be made chief anyway, because his
father had been chief before him.  Also, he looked upon himself as
a greater chief than his father.  He was a good chief at first, and
worked hard, so that the council had less and less to do.  Then
arose a new voice in the Sea Valley.  It was Twisted-Lip.  We had
never thought much of him, until he began to talk with the spirits
of the dead.  Later we called him Big-Fat, because he ate over-
much, and did no work, and grew round and large.  One day Big-Fat
told us that the secrets of the dead were his, and that he was the
voice of God.  He became great friends with Dog-Tooth, who
commanded that we should build Big-Fat a grass house.  And Big-Fat
put taboos all around this house and kept God inside.

"More and more Dog-Tooth became greater than the council, and when
the council grumbled and said it would name a new chief, Big-Fat
spoke with the voice of God and said no.  Also, Three-Legs and the
others who held the land stood behind Dog-Tooth.  Moreover, the
strongest man in the council was Sea-Lion, and him the land-owners
gave land to secretly, along with many bearskins and baskets of
corn.  So Sea-Lion said that Big-Fat's voice was truly the voice of
God and must be obeyed.  And soon afterward Sea-Lion was named the
voice of Dog-Tooth and did most of his talking for him.

"Then there was Little-Belly, a little man, so thin in the middle
that he looked as if he had never had enough to eat.  Inside the
mouth of the river, after the sand-bar had combed the strength of
the breakers, he built a big fish-trap.  No man had ever seen or
dreamed a fish-trap before.  He worked weeks on it, with his son
and his wife, while the rest of us laughed at their labours.  But,
when it was done, the first day he caught more fish in it than
could the whole tribe in a week, whereat there was great rejoicing.
There was only one other place in the river for a fish-trap, but,
when my father and I and a dozen other men started to make a very
large trap, the guards came from the big grass-house we had built
for Dog-Tooth.  And the guards poked us with their spears and told
us begone, because Little-Belly was going to build a trap there
himself on the word of Sea-Lion, who was the voice of Dog-Tooth.

"There was much grumbling, and my father called a council.  But,
when he rose to speak, him the Sea-Lion thrust through the throat
with a spear and he died.  And Dog-Tooth and Little-Belly, and
Three-Legs and all that held land said it was good.  And Big-Fat
said it was the will of God.  And after that all men were afraid to
stand up in the council, and there was no more council.

"Another man, Pig-Jaw, began to keep goats.  He had heard about it
as among the Meat-Eaters, and it was not long before he had many
flocks.  Other men, who had no land and no fish-traps, and who else
would have gone hungry, were glad to work for Pig-Jaw, caring for
his goats, guarding them from wild dogs and tigers, and driving
them to the feeding pastures in the mountains.  In return, Pig-Jaw
gave them goat-meat to eat and goat-skins to wear, and sometimes
they traded the goat-meat for fish and corn and fat roots.

"It was this time that money came to be.  Sea-Lion was the man who
first thought of it, and he talked it over with Dog-Tooth and Big-
Fat.  You see, these three were the ones that got a share of
everything in the Sea Valley.  One basket out of every three of
corn was theirs, one fish out of every three, one goat out of every
three.  In return, they fed the guards and the watchers, and kept
the rest for themselves.  Sometimes, when a big haul of fish was
made they did not know what to do with all their share.  So Sea-
Lion set the women to making money out of shell--little round
pieces, with a hole in each one, and all made smooth and fine.
These were strung on strings, and the strings were called money.

"Each string was of the value of thirty fish, or forty fish, but
the women, who made a string a day, were given two fish each.  The
fish came out of the shares of Dog-Tooth, Big-Fat, and Sea-Lion,
which they three did not eat.  So all the money belonged to them.
Then they told Three-Legs and the other land-owners that they would
take their share of corn and roots in money, Little-Belly that they
would take their share of fish in money, Pig-Jaw that they would
take their share of goats and cheese in money.  Thus, a man who had
nothing, worked for one who had, and was paid in money.  With this
money he bought corn, and fish, and meat, and cheese.  And Three-
Legs and all owners of things paid Dog-Tooth and Sea-Lion and Big-
Fat their share in money.  And they paid the guards and watchers in
money, and the guards and watchers bought their food with the
money.  And, because money was cheap, Dog-Tooth made many more men
into guards.  And, because money was cheap to make, a number of men
began to make money out of shell themselves.  But the guards stuck
spears in them and shot them full of arrows, because they were
trying to break up the tribe.  It was bad to break up the tribe,
for then the Meat-Eaters would come over the divide and kill them
all.

"Big-Fat was the voice of God, but he took Broken-Rib and made him
into a priest, so that he became the voice of Big-Fat and did most
of his talking for him.  And both had other men to be servants to
them.  So, also, did Little-Belly and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw have
other men to lie in the sun about their grass houses and carry
messages for them and give commands.  And more and more were men
taken away from work, so that those that were left worked harder
than ever before.  It seemed that men desired to do no work and
strove to seek out other ways whereby men should work for them.
Crooked-Eyes found such a way.  He made the first fire-brew out of
corn.  And thereafter he worked no more, for he talked secretly
with Dog-Tooth and Big-Fat and the other masters, and it was agreed
that he should be the only one to make fire-brew.  But Crooked-Eyes
did no work himself.  Men made the brew for him, and he paid them
in money.  Then he sold the fire-brew for money, and all men
bought.  And many strings of money did he give Dog-Tooth and Sea-
Lion and all of them.

"Big-Fat and Broken-Rib stood by Dog-Tooth when he took his second
wife, and his third wife.  They said Dog-Tooth was different from
other men and second only to God that Big-Fat kept in his taboo
house, and Dog-Tooth said so, too, and wanted to know who were they
to grumble about how many wives he took.  Dog-Tooth had a big canoe
made, and, many more men he took from work, who did nothing and lay
in the sun, save only when Dog-Tooth went in the canoe, when they
paddled for him.  And he made Tiger-Face head man over all the
guards, so that Tiger-Face became his right arm, and when he did
not like a man Tiger-Face killed that man for him.  And Tiger-Face,
also, made another man to be his right arm, and to give commands,
and to kill for him.

"But this was the strange thing:  as the days went by we who were
left worked harder and harder, and yet did we get less and less to
eat."

"But what of the goats and the corn and the fat roots and the fish-
trap?" spoke up Afraid-of-the-Dark, "what of all this?  Was there
not more food to be gained by man's work?"

"It is so," Long-Beard agreed.  "Three men on the fish-trap got
more fish than the whole tribe before there was a fish-trap.  But
have I not said we were fools?  The more food we were able to get,
the less food did we have to eat."

"But was it not plain that the many men who did not work ate it all
up?" Yellow-Head demanded.

Long-Beard nodded his head sadly.

"Dog-Tooth's dogs were stuffed with meat, and the men who lay in
the sun and did no work were rolling in fat, and, at the same time,
there were little children crying themselves to sleep with hunger
biting them with every wail."

Deer-Runner was spurred by the recital of famine to tear out a
chunk of bear-meat and broil it on a stick over the coals.  This he
devoured with smacking lips, while Long-Beard went on:

"When we grumbled Big-Fat arose, and with the voice of God said
that God had chosen the wise men to own the land and the goats and
the fish-trap, and the fire-brew, and that without these wise men
we would all be animals, as in the days when we lived in trees.

"And there arose one who became a singer of songs for the king.
Him they called the Bug, because he was small and ungainly of face
and limb and excelled not in work or deed.  He loved the fattest
marrow bones, the choicest fish, the milk warm from the goats, the
first corn that was ripe, and the snug place by the fire.  And
thus, becoming singer of songs to the king, he found a way to do
nothing and be fat.  And when the people grumbled more and more,
and some threw stones at the king's grass house, the Bug sang a
song of how good it was to be a Fish-Eater.  In his song he told
that the Fish-Eaters were the chosen of God and the finest men God
had made.  He sang of the Meat-Eaters as pigs and crows, and sang
how fine and good it was for the Fish-Eaters to fight and die doing
God's work, which was the killing of Meat-Eaters.  The words of his
song were like fire in us, and we clamoured to be led against the
Meat-Eaters.  And we forgot that we were hungry, and why we had
grumbled, and were glad to be led by Tiger-Face over the divide,
where we killed many Meat-Eaters and were content.

"But things were no better in the Sea Valley.  The only way to get
food was to work for Three-Legs or Little-Belly or Pig-Jaw; for
there was no land that a man might plant with corn for himself.
And often there were more men than Three-Legs and the others had
work for.  So these men went hungry, and so did their wives and
children and their old mothers.  Tiger-Face said they could become
guards if they wanted to, and many of them did, and thereafter they
did no work except to poke spears in the men who did work and who
grumbled at feeding so many idlers.

"And when we grumbled, ever the Bug sang new songs.  He said that
Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and the rest were strong men, and that that
was why they had so much.  He said that we should be glad to have
strong men with us, else would we perish of our own worthlessness
and the Meat-Eaters.  Therefore, we should be glad to let such
strong men have all they could lay hands on.  And Big-Fat and Pig-
Jaw and Tiger-Face and all the rest said it was true.

"'All right,' said Long-Fang, 'then will I, too, be a strong man.'
And he got himself corn, and began to make fire-brew and sell it
for strings of money.  And, when Crooked-Eyes complained, Long-Fang
said that he was himself a strong man, and that if Crooked-Eyes
made any more noise he would bash his brains out for him.  Whereat
Crooked-Eyes was afraid and went and talked with Three-Legs and
Pig-Jaw.  And all three went and talked to Dog-Tooth.  And Dog-
Tooth spoke to Sea-Lion, and Sea-Lion sent a runner with a message
to Tiger-Face.  And Tiger-Face sent his guards, who burned Long-
Fang's house along with the fire-brew he had made.  Also, they
killed him and all his family.  And Big-Fat said it was good, and
the Bug sang another song about how good it was to observe the law,
and what a fine land the Sea Valley was, and how every man who
loved the Sea Valley should go forth and kill the bad Meat-Eaters.
And again his song was as fire to us, and we forgot to grumble.

"It was very strange.  When Little-Belly caught too many fish, so
that it took a great many to sell for a little money, he threw many
of the fish back into the sea, so that more money would be paid for
what was left.  And Three-Legs often let many large fields lie idle
so as to get more money for his corn.  And the women, making so
much money out of shell that much money was needed to buy with,
Dog-Tooth stopped the making of money.  And the women had no work,
so they took the places of the men.  I worked on the fish-trap,
getting a string of money every five days.  But my sister now did
my work, getting a string of money for every ten days.  The women
worked cheaper, and there was less food, and Tiger-Face said we
should become guards.  Only I could not become a guard because I
was lame of one leg and Tiger-Face would not have me.  And there
were many like me.  We were broken men and only fit to beg for work
or to take care of the babies while the women worked."

Yellow-Head, too, was made hungry by the recital and broiled a
piece of bear-meat on the coals.

"But why didn't you rise up, all of you, and kill Three-Legs and
Pig-Jaw and Big-Fat and the rest and get enough to eat?" Afraid-in-
the-Dark demanded.

"Because we could not understand," Long-Beard answered.  "There was
too much to think about, and, also, there were the guards sticking
spears into us, and Big-Fat talking about God, and the Bug singing
new songs.  And when any man did think right, and said so, Tiger-
Face and the guards got him, and he was tied out to the rocks at
low tide so that the rising waters drowned him.

"It was a strange thing--the money.  It was like the Bug's songs.
It seemed all right, but it wasn't, and we were slow to understand.
Dog-Tooth began to gather the money in.  He put it in a big pile,
in a grass house, with guards to watch it day and night.  And the
more money he piled in the house the dearer money became, so that a
man worked a longer time for a string of money than before.  Then,
too, there was always talk of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-
Tooth and Tiger-Face filled many houses with corn, and dried fish,
and smoked goat-meat, and cheese.  And with the food, piled there
in mountains the people had not enough to eat.  But what did it
matter?  Whenever the people grumbled too loudly the Bug sang a new
song, and Big-Fat said it was God's word that we should kill Meat-
Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the divide to kill and be
killed.  I was not good enough to be a guard and lie fat in the
sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to take me along.
And when we had eaten, all the food stored in the houses we stopped
fighting and went back to work to pile up more food."

"Then were you all crazy," commented Deer-Runner.

"Then were we indeed all crazy," Long-Beard agreed.  "It was
strange, all of it.  There was Split-Nose.  He said everything was
wrong.  He said it was true that we grew strong by adding our
strength together.  And he said that, when we first formed the
tribe, it was right that the men whose strength hurt the tribe
should be shorn of their strength--men who bashed their brothers'
heads and stole their brothers' wives.  And now, he said, the tribe
was not getting stronger, but was getting weaker, because there
were men with another kind of strength that were hurting the tribe-
-men who had the strength of the land, like Three-Legs; who had the
strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly; who had the strength
of all the goat-meat, like Pig-Jaw.  The thing to do, Split-Nose
said, was to shear these men of their evil strength; to make them
go to work, all of them, and to let no man eat who did not work.

"And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who
wanted to go back, and live in trees.

"Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but
ahead; that they grew strong only as they added their strength
together; and that, if the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to
the Meat-Eaters, there would be no more fighting and no more
watchers and no more guards, and that, with all men working, there
would be so much food that each man would have to work not more
than two hours a day.

"Then the Bug sang again, and he sang that Split-Nose was lazy, and
he sang also the 'Song of the Bees.'  It was a strange song, and
those who listened were made mad, as from the drinking of strong
fire-brew.  The song was of a swarm of bees, and of a robber wasp
who had come in to live with the bees and who was stealing all
their honey.  The wasp was lazy and told them there was no need to
work; also, he told them to make friends with the bears, who were
not honey-stealers but only very good friends.  And the Bug sang in
crooked words, so that those who listened knew that the swarm was
the Sea Valley tribe, that the bears were the Meat-Eaters, and that
the lazy wasp was Split-Nose.  And when the Bug sang that the bees
listened to the wasp till the swarm was near to perishing, the
people growled and snarled, and when the Bug sang that at last the
good bees arose and stung the wasp to death, the people picked up
stones from the ground and stoned Split-Nose to death till there
was naught to be seen of him but the heap of stones they had flung
on top of him.  And there were many poor people who worked long and
hard and had not enough to eat that helped throw the stones on
Split-Nose.

"And, after the death of Split-Nose, there was but one other man
that dared rise up and speak his mind, and that man was Hair-Face.
'Where is the strength of the strong?' he asked.  'We are the
strong, all of us, and we are stronger than Dog-Tooth and Tiger-
Face and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and all the rest who do nothing and
eat much and weaken us by the hurt of their strength which is bad
strength.  Men who are slaves are not strong.  If the man who first
found the virtue and use of fire had used his strength we would
have been his slaves, as we are the slaves to-day of Little-Belly,
who found the virtue and use of the fish-trap; and of the men who
found the virtue and use of the land, and the goats, and the fire-
brew.  Before, we lived in trees, my brothers, and no man was safe.
But we fight no more with one another.  We have added our strength
together.  Then let us fight no more with the Meat-Eaters.  Let us
add our strength and their strength together.  Then will we be
indeed strong.  And then we will go out together, the Fish-Eaters
and the Meat-Eaters, and we will kill the tigers and the lions and
the wolves and the wild dogs, and we will pasture our goats on all
the hill-sides and plant our corn and fat roots in all the high
mountain valleys.  In that day we will be so strong that all the
wild animals will flee before us and perish.  And nothing will
withstand us, for the strength of each man will be the strength of
all men in the world.'

"So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was
a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree.  It was very
strange.  Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those
that stood still said he went backward and should be killed.  And
the poor people helped stone him, and were fools.  We were all
fools, except those who were fat and did no work.  The fools were
called wise, and the wise were stoned.  Men who worked did not get
enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.

"And the tribe went on losing strength.  The children were weak and
sickly.  And, because we ate not enough, strange sicknesses came
among us and we died like flies.  And then the Meat-Eaters came
upon us.  We had followed Tiger-Face too often over the divide and
killed them.  And now they came to repay in blood.  We were too
weak and sick to man the big wall.  And they killed us, all of us,
except some of the women, which they took away with them.  The Bug
and I escaped, and I hid in the wildest places, and became a hunter
of meat and went hungry no more.  I stole a wife from the Meat-
Eaters, and went to live in the caves of the high mountains where
they could not find me.  And we had three sons, and each son stole
a wife from the Meat-Eaters.  And the rest you know, for are you
not the sons of my sons?"

"But the Bug?" queried Deer-Runner.  "What became of him?"

"He went to live with the Meat-Eaters and to be a singer of songs
to the king.  He is an old man now, but he sings the same old
songs; and, when a man rises up to go forward, he sings that that
man is walking backward to live in a tree."

Long-Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless
gums at a fist of suet.

"Some day," he said, wiping his hands on his sides, "all the fools
will be dead and then all live men will go forward.  The strength
of the strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength
together, so that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight
with another.  There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls.
And all the hunting animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said,
all the hill-sides will be pastured with goats and all the high
mountain valleys will be planted with corn and fat roots.  And all
men will be brothers, and no man will lie idle in the sun and be
fed by his fellows.  And all that will come to pass in the time
when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more singers to
stand still and sing the 'Song of the Bees.'  Bees are not men."



SOUTH OF THE SLOT



Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other
day, the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market
Street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless
cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.
In truth, there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the
West time was saved by calling them, and much more that they stood
for, "The Slot."  North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and
shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business
houses.  South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries,
machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.

The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of
Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more
successfully than Freddie Drummond.  He made a practice of living
in both worlds, and in both worlds he lived signally well.  Freddie
Drummond was a professor in the Sociology Department of the
University of California, and it was as a professor of sociology
that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six mouths in the
great labour-ghetto, and wrote The Unskilled Labourer--a book that
was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature of
progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.
Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox.
Presidents of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to
give to their employees.  The Manufacturers' Association alone
distributed fifty thousand copies of it.  In a way, it was almost
as immoral as the far-famed and notorious Message to Garcia, while
in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content it ran Mr. Wiggs
of the Cabbage Patch a close second.

At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get
along among the working people.  He was not used to their ways, and
they certainly were not used to his.  They were suspicious.  He had
no antecedents.  He could talk of no previous jobs.  His hands were
soft.  His extraordinary politeness was ominous.  His first idea of
the role he would play was that of a free and independent American
who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given.  But it
wouldn't do, as he quickly discovered.  At the beginning they
accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak.  A little later, as
he began to know his way about better, he insensibly drifted into
the role that would work--namely, he was a man who had seen better
days, very much better days, but who was down on his luck, though,
to be sure, only temporarily.

He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously,
all of which can be found in the pages of The Unskilled Labourer.
He saved himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner
of his kind, by labelling his generalizations as "tentative."  One
of his first experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where he
was put on piece-work making small packing cases.  A box factory
supplied the parts, and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit
the parts into a form and drive in the wire nails with a light
hammer.

It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work.  The ordinary
labourers in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day.  Freddie
Drummond found the other men on the same job with him jogging along
and earning a dollar and seventy-five cents a day.  By the third
day he was able to earn the same.  But he was ambitious.  He did
not care to jog along and, being unusually able and fit, on the
fourth day earned two dollars.

The next day, having keyed himself up to an exhausting high-
tension, he earned two dollars and a half.  His fellow workers
favoured him with scowls and black looks, and made remarks,
slangily witty and which he did not understand, about sucking up to
the boss and pace-making and holding her down, when the rains set
in.  He was astonished at their malingering on piece-work,
generalized about the inherent laziness of the unskilled labourer,
and proceeded next day to hammer out three dollars' worth of boxes.

And that night, coming out of the cannery, he was interviewed by
his fellow workmen, who were very angry and incoherently slangy.
He failed to comprehend the motive behind their action.  The action
itself was strenuous.  When he refused to ease down his pace and
bleated about freedom of contract, independent Americanism, and the
dignity of toil, they proceeded to spoil his pace-making ability.
It was a fierce battle, for Drummond was a large man and an
athlete, but the crowd finally jumped on his ribs, walked on his
face, and stamped on his fingers, so that it was only after lying
in bed for a week that he was able to get up and look for another
job.  All of which is duly narrated in that first book of his, in
the chapter entitled "The Tyranny of Labour."

A little later, in another department of the Wilmax Cannery,
lumping as a fruit-distributor among the women, he essayed to carry
two boxes of fruit at a time, and was promptly reproached by the
other fruit-lumpers.  It was palpable malingering; but he was
there, he decided, not to change conditions, but to observe.  So he
lumped one box thereafter, and so well did he study the art of
shirking that he wrote a special chapter on it, with the last
several paragraphs devoted to tentative generalizations.

In those six months he worked at many jobs and developed into a
very good imitation of a genuine worker.  He was a natural
linguist, and he kept notebooks, making a scientific study of the
workers' slang or argot, until he could talk quite intelligibly.
This language also enabled him more intimately to follow their
mental processes, and thereby to gather much data for a projected
chapter in some future book which he planned to entitle Synthesis
of Working-Class Psychology.

Before he arose to the surface from that first plunge into the
underworld he discovered that he was a good actor and demonstrated
the plasticity of his nature.  He was himself astonished at his own
fluidity.  Once having mastered the language and conquered numerous
fastidious qualms, he found that he could flow into any nook of
working-class life and fit it so snugly as to feel comfortably at
home.  As he said, in the preface to his second book, The Toiler,
he endeavoured really to know the working people, and the only
possible way to achieve this was to work beside them, eat their
food, sleep in their beds, be amused with their amusements, think
their thoughts, and feel their feeling.

He was not a deep thinker.  He had no faith in new theories.  All
his norms and criteria were conventional.  His Thesis on the French
Revolution was noteworthy in college annals, not merely for its
painstaking and voluminous accuracy, but for the fact that it was
the dryest, deadest, most formal, and most orthodox screed ever
written on the subject.  He was a very reserved man, and his
natural inhibition was large in quantity and steel-like in quality.
He had but few friends.  He was too undemonstrative, too frigid.
He had no vices, nor had any one ever discovered any temptations.
Tobacco he detested, beer he abhorred, and he was never known to
drink anything stronger than an occasional light wine at dinner.

When a freshman he had been baptized "Ice-Box" by his warmer-
blooded fellows.  As a member of the faculty he was known as "Cold-
Storage."  He had but one grief, and that was "Freddie."  He had
earned it when he played full-back in the 'Varsity eleven, and his
formal soul had never succeeded in living it down.  "Freddie" he
would ever be, except officially, and through nightmare vistas he
looked into a future when his world would speak of him as "Old
Freddie."

For he was very young to be a doctor of sociology, only twenty-
seven, and he looked younger.  In appearance and atmosphere he was
a strapping big college man, smooth-faced and easy-mannered, clean
and simple and wholesome, with a known record of being a splendid
athlete and an implied vast possession of cold culture of the
inhibited sort.  He never talked shop out of class and committee
rooms, except later on, when his books showered him with
distasteful public notice and he yielded to the extent of reading
occasional papers before certain literary and economic societies.

He did everything right--too right; and in dress and comportment
was inevitably correct.  Not that he was a dandy.  Far from it.  He
was a college man, in dress and carriage as like as a pea to the
type that of late years is being so generously turned out of our
institutions of higher learning.  His handshake was satisfyingly
strong and stiff.  His blue eyes were coldly blue and convincingly
sincere.  His voice, firm and masculine, clean and crisp of
enunciation, was pleasant to the ear.  The one drawback to Freddie
Drummond was his inhibition.  He never unbent.  In his football
days, the higher the tension of the game, the cooler he grew.  He
was noted as a boxer, but he was regarded as an automaton, with the
inhuman precision of a machine judging distance and timing blows,
guarding, blocking, and stalling.  He was rarely punished himself,
while he rarely punished an opponent.  He was too clever and too
controlled to permit himself to put a pound more weight into a
punch than he intended.  With him it was a matter of exercise.  It
kept him fit.

As time went by, Freddie Drummond found himself more frequently
crossing the Slot and losing himself in South of Market.  His
summer and winter holidays were spent there, and, whether it was a
week or a week-end, he found the time spent there to be valuable
and enjoyable.  And there was so much material to be gathered.  His
third book, Mass and Master, became a text-book in the American
universities; and almost before he knew it, he was at work on a
fourth one, The Fallacy of the Inefficient.

Somewhere in his make-up there was a strange twist or quirk.
Perhaps it was a recoil from his environment and training, or from
the tempered seed of his ancestors, who had been book-men
generation preceding generation; but at any rate, he found
enjoyment in being down in the working-class world.  In his own
world he was "Cold-Storage," but down below he was "Big" Bill
Totts, who could drink and smoke, and slang and fight, and be an
all-round favourite.  Everybody liked Bill, and more than one
working girl made love to him.  At first he had been merely a good
actor, but as time went on, simulation became second nature.  He no
longer played a part, and he loved sausages, sausages and bacon,
than which, in his own proper sphere, there was nothing more
loathsome in the way of food.

From doing the thing for the need's sake, he came to doing the
thing for the thing's sake.  He found himself regretting as the
time drew near for him to go back to his lecture-room and his
inhibition.  And he often found himself waiting with anticipation
for the dreamy time to pass when he could cross the Slot and cut
loose and play the devil.  He was not wicked, but as "Big" Bill
Totts he did a myriad things that Freddie Drummond would never have
been permitted to do.  Moreover, Freddie Drummond never would have
wanted to do them.  That was the strangest part of his discovery.
Freddie Drummond and Bill Totts were two totally different
creatures.  The desires and tastes and impulses of each ran counter
to the other's.  Bill Totts could shirk at a job with clear
conscience, while Freddie Drummond condemned shirking as vicious,
criminal, and un-American, and devoted whole chapters to
condemnation of the vice.  Freddie Drummond did not care for
dancing, but Bill Totts never missed the nights at the various
dancing clubs, such as The Magnolia, The Western Star, and The
Elite; while he won a massive silver cup, standing thirty inches
high, for being the best-sustained character at the Butchers and
Meat Workers' annual grand masked ball.  And Bill Totts liked the
girls and the girls liked him, while Freddie Drummond enjoyed
playing the ascetic in this particular, was open in his opposition
to equal suffrage, and cynically bitter in his secret condemnation
of coeducation.

Freddie Drummond changed his manners with his dress, and without
effort.  When he entered the obscure little room used for his
transformation scenes, he carried himself just a bit too stiffly.
He was too erect, his shoulders were an inch too far back, while
his face was grave, almost harsh, and practically expressionless.
But when he emerged in Bill Totts' clothes he was another creature.
Bill Totts did not slouch, but somehow his whole form limbered up
and became graceful.  The very sound of the voice was changed, and
the laugh was loud and hearty, while loose speech and an occasional
oath were as a matter of course on his lips.  Also, Bill Totts was
a trifle inclined to late hours, and at times, in saloons, to be
good-naturedly bellicose with other workmen.  Then, too, at Sunday
picnics or when coming home from the show, either arm betrayed a
practised familiarity in stealing around girls' waists, while he
displayed a wit keen and delightful in the flirtatious badinage
that was expected of a good fellow in his class.

So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a
genuine denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-
conscious as the average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab
even exceeded that of the average loyal union man.  During the
Water Front Strike, Freddie Drummond was somehow able to stand
apart from the unique combination, and, coldly critical, watch Bill
Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen.  For Bill Totts was a
dues-paying member of the Longshoremen Union and had a right to be
indignant with the usurpers of his job.  "Big" Bill Totts was so
very big, and so very able, that it was "Big" Bill to the front
when trouble was brewing.  From acting outraged feelings, Freddie
Drummond, in the role of his other self, came to experience genuine
outrage, and it was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere
of the university that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to
generalize upon his underworld experiences and put them down on
paper as a trained sociologist should.  That Bill Totts lacked the
perspective to raise him above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond
clearly saw.  But Bill Totts could not see it.  When he saw a scab
taking his job away, he saw red at the same time, and little else
did he see.  It was Freddie Drummond, irreproachably clothed and
comported, seated at his study desk or facing his class in
Sociology 17, who saw Bill Totts, and all around Bill Totts, and
all around the whole scab and union-labour problem and its relation
to the economic welfare of the United States in the struggle for
the world market.  Bill Totts really wasn't able to see beyond the
next meal and the prize-fight the following night at the Gaiety
Athletic Club.

It was while gathering material for Women and Work that Freddie
received his first warning of the danger he was in.  He was too
successful at living in both worlds.  This strange dualism he had
developed was after all very unstable, and, as he sat in his study
and meditated, he saw that it could not endure.  It was really a
transition stage, and if he persisted he saw that he would
inevitably have to drop one world or the other.  He could not
continue in both.  And as he looked at the row of volumes that
graced the upper shelf of his revolving book-case, his volumes,
beginning with his Thesis and ending with Women and Work, he
decided that that was the world he would hold to and stick by.
Bill Totts had served his purpose, but he had become a too
dangerous accomplice.  Bill Totts would have to cease.

Freddie Drummond's fright was due to Mary Condon, President of the
International Glove Workers' Union No. 974.  He had seen her,
first, from the spectators' gallery, at the annual convention of
the Northwest Federation of Labour, and he had seen her through
Bill Totts' eyes, and that individual had been most favourably
impressed by her.  She was not Freddie Drummond's sort at all.
What if she were a royal-bodied woman, graceful and sinewy as a
panther, with amazing black eyes that could fill with fire or
laughter-love, as the mood might dictate?  He detested women with a
too exuberant vitality and a lack of . . . well, of inhibition.
Freddie Drummond accepted the doctrine of evolution because it was
quite universally accepted by college men, and he flatly believed
that man had climbed up the ladder of life out of the weltering
muck and mess of lower and monstrous organic things.  But he was a
trifle ashamed of this genealogy, and preferred not to think of it.
Wherefore, probably, he practised his iron inhibition and preached
it to others, and preferred women of his own type, who could shake
free of this bestial and regrettable ancestral line and by
discipline and control emphasize the wideness of the gulf that
separated them from what their dim forbears had been.

Bill Totts had none of these considerations.  He had liked Mary
Condon from the moment his eyes first rested on her in the
convention hall, and he had made it a point, then and there, to
find out who she was.  The next time he met her, and quite by
accident, was when he was driving an express waggon for Pat
Morrissey.  It was in a lodging-house in Mission Street, where he
had been called to take a trunk into storage.  The landlady's
daughter had called him and led him to the little bedroom, the
occupant of which, a glove-maker, had just been removed to
hospital.  But Bill did not know this.  He stooped, up-ended the
trunk, which was a large one, got it on his shoulder, and struggled
to his feet with his back toward the open door.  At that moment he
heard a woman's voice.

"Belong to the union?" was the question asked.

"Aw, what's it to you?" he retorted.  "Run along now, an' git outa
my way.  I wanta turn round."

The next he know, big as he was, he was whirled half around and
sent reeling backward, the trunk overbalancing him, till he fetched
up with a crash against the wall.  He started to swear, but at the
same instant found himself looking into Mary Condon's flashing,
angry eyes.

"Of course I b'long to the union," he said.  "I was only kiddin'
you."

"Where's your card?" she demanded in businesslike tones.

"In my pocket.  But I can't git it out now.  This trunk's too damn
heavy.  Come on down to the waggon an' I'll show it to you."

"Put that trunk down," was the command.

"What for?  I got a card, I'm tellin' you."

"Put it down, that's all.  No scab's going to handle that trunk.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you big coward, scabbing on
honest men.  Why don't you join the union and be a man?"

Mary Condon's colour had left her face, and it was apparent that
she was in a rage.

"To think of a big man like you turning traitor to his class.  I
suppose you're aching to join the militia for a chance to shoot
down union drivers the next strike.  You may belong to the militia
already, for that matter.  You're the sort--"

"Hold on, now, that's too much!"  Bill dropped the trunk to the
floor with a bang, straightened up, and thrust his hand into his
inside coat pocket.  "I told you I was only kiddin'.  There, look
at that."

It was a union card properly enough.

"All right, take it along," Mary Condon said.  "And the next time
don't kid."

Her face relaxed as she noticed the ease with which he got the big
trunk to his shoulder, and her eyes glowed as they glanced over the
graceful massiveness of the man.  But Bill did not see that.  He
was too busy with the trunk.

The next time he saw Mary Condon was during the Laundry Strike.
The Laundry Workers, but recently organized, were green at the
business, and had petitioned Mary Condon to engineer the strike.
Freddie Drummond had had an inkling of what was coming, and had
sent Bill Totts to join the union and investigate.  Bill's job was
in the wash-room, and the men had been called out first, that
morning, in order to stiffen the courage of the girls; and Bill
chanced to be near the door to the mangle-room when Mary Condon
started to enter.  The superintendent, who was both large and
stout, barred her way.  He wasn't going to have his girls called
out, and he'd teach her a lesson to mind her own business.  And as
Mary tried to squeeze past him he thrust her back with a fat hand
on her shoulder.  She glanced around and saw Bill.

"Here you, Mr. Totts," she called.  "Lend a hand.  I want to get
in."

Bill experienced a startle of warm surprise.  She had remembered
his name from his union card.  The next moment the superintendent
had been plucked from the doorway raving about rights under the
law, and the girls were deserting their machines.  During the rest
of that short and successful strike, Bill constituted himself Mary
Condon's henchman and messenger, and when it was over returned to
the University to be Freddie Drummond and to wonder what Bill Totts
could see in such a woman.

Freddie Drummond was entirely safe, but Bill had fallen in love.
There was no getting away from the fact of it, and it was this fact
that had given Freddie Drummond his warning.  Well, he had done his
work, and his adventures could cease.  There was no need for him to
cross the Slot again.  All but the last three chapters of his
latest, Labour Tactics and Strategy, was finished, and he had
sufficient material on hand adequately to supply those chapters.

Another conclusion he arrived at, was that in order to sheet-anchor
himself as Freddie Drummond, closer ties and relations in his own
social nook were necessary.  It was time that he was married,
anyway, and he was fully aware that if Freddie Drummond didn't get
married, Bill Totts assuredly would, and the complications were too
awful to contemplate.  And so, enters Catherine Van Vorst.  She was
a college woman herself, and her father, the one wealthy member of
the faculty, was the head of the Philosophy Department as well.  It
would be a wise marriage from every standpoint, Freddie Drummond
concluded when the engagement was consummated and announced.  In
appearance cold and reserved, aristocratic and wholesomely
conservative, Catherine Van Vorst, though warm in her way,
possessed an inhibition equal to Drummond's.

All seemed well with him, but Freddie Drummond could not quite
shake off the call of the underworld, the lure of the free and
open, of the unhampered, irresponsible life South of the Slot.  As
the time of his marriage approached, he felt that he had indeed
sowed wild oats, and he felt, moreover, what a good thing it would
be if he could have but one wild fling more, play the good fellow
and the wastrel one last time, ere he settled down to grey lecture-
rooms and sober matrimony.  And, further to tempt him, the very
last chapter of Labour Tactics and Strategy remained unwritten for
lack of a trifle more of essential data which he had neglected to
gather.

So Freddie Drummond went down for the last time as Bill Totts, got
his data, and, unfortunately, encountered Mary Condon.  Once more
installed in his study, it was not a pleasant thing to look back
upon.  It made his warning doubly imperative.  Bill Totts had
behaved abominably.  Not only had he met Mary Condon at the Central
Labour Council, but he had stopped at a chop-house with her, on the
way home, and treated her to oysters.  And before they parted at
her door, his arms had been about her, and he had kissed her on the
lips and kissed her repeatedly.  And her last words in his ear,
words uttered softly with a catchy sob in the throat that was
nothing more nor less than a love cry, were "Bill . . . dear, dear
Bill."

Freddie Drummond shuddered at the recollection.  He saw the pit
yawning for him.  He was not by nature a polygamist, and he was
appalled at the possibilities of the situation.  It would have to
be put an end to, and it would end in one only of two ways:  either
he must become wholly Bill Totts and be married to Mary Condon, or
he must remain wholly Freddie Drummond and be married to Catherine
Van Vorst.  Otherwise, his conduct would be beneath contempt and
horrible.

In the several months that followed, San Francisco was torn with
labour strife.  The unions and the employers' associations had
locked horns with a determination that looked as if they intended
to settle the matter, one way or the other, for all time.  But
Freddie Drummond corrected proofs, lectured classes, and did not
budge.  He devoted himself to Catherine Van Vorst, and day by day
found more to respect and admire in her--nay, even to love in her.
The Street Car Strike tempted him, but not so severely as he would
have expected; and the great Meat Strike came on and left him cold.
The ghost of Bill Totts had been successfully laid, and Freddie
Drummond with rejuvenescent zeal tackled a brochure, long-planned,
on the topic of "diminishing returns."

The wedding was two weeks off, when, one afternoon, in San
Francisco, Catherine Van Vorst picked him up and whisked him away
to see a Boys' Club, recently instituted by the settlement workers
in whom she was interested.  It was her brother's machine, but they
were alone with the exception of the chauffeur.  At the junction
with Kearny Street, Market and Geary Streets intersect like the
sides of a sharp-angled letter "V."  They, in the auto, were coming
down Market with the intention of negotiating the sharp apex and
going up Geary.  But they did not know what was coming down Geary,
timed by fate to meet them at the apex.  While aware from the
papers that the Meat Strike was on and that it was an exceedingly
bitter one, all thought of it at that moment was farthest from
Freddie Drummond's mind.  Was he not seated beside Catherine?  And
besides, he was carefully expositing to her his views on settlement
work--views that Bill Totts' adventures had played a part in
formulating.

Coming down Geary Street were six meat waggons.  Beside each scab
driver sat a policeman.  Front and rear, and along each side of
this procession, marched a protecting escort of one hundred police.
Behind the police rearguard, at a respectful distance, was an
orderly but vociferous mob, several blocks in length, that
congested the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.  The Beef Trust was
making an effort to supply the hotels, and, incidentally, to begin
the breaking of the strike.  The St. Francis had already been
supplied, at a cost of many broken windows and broken heads, and
the expedition was marching to the relief of the Palace Hotel.

All unwitting, Drummond sat beside Catherine, talking settlement
work, as the auto, honking methodically and dodging traffic, swung
in a wide curve to get around the apex.  A big coal waggon, loaded
with lump coal and drawn by four huge horses, just debouching from
Kearny Street as though to turn down Market, blocked their way.
The driver of the waggon seemed undecided, and the chauffeur,
running slow but disregarding some shouted warning from the
crossing policemen, swerved the auto to the left, violating the
traffic rules, in order to pass in front of the waggon.

At that moment Freddie Drummond discontinued his conversation.  Nor
did he resume it again, for the situation was developing with the
rapidity of a transformation scene.  He heard the roar of the mob
at the rear, and caught a glimpse of the helmeted police and the
lurching meat waggons.  At the same moment, laying on his whip, and
standing up to his task, the coal driver rushed horses and waggon
squarely in front of the advancing procession, pulled the horses up
sharply, and put on the big brake.  Then he made his lines fast to
the brake-handle and sat down with the air of one who had stopped
to stay.  The auto had been brought to a stop, too, by his big
panting leaders which had jammed against it.

Before the chauffeur could back clear, an old Irishman, driving a
rickety express waggon and lashing his one horse to a gallop, had
locked wheels with the auto.  Drummond recognized both horse and
waggon, for he had driven them often himself.  The Irishman was Pat
Morrissey.  On the other side a brewery waggon was locking with the
coal waggon, and an east-bound Kearny Street car, wildly clanging
its gong, the motorman shouting defiance at the crossing policeman,
was dashing forward to complete the blockade.  And waggon after
waggon was locking and blocking and adding to the confusion.  The
meat waggons halted.  The police were trapped.  The roar at the
rear increased as the mob came on to the attack, while the vanguard
of the police charged the obstructing waggons.

"We're in for it," Drummond remarked coolly to Catherine.

"Yes," she nodded, with equal coolness.  "What savages they are."

His admiration for her doubled on itself.  She was indeed his sort.
He would have been satisfied with her even if she had screamed, and
clung to him, but this--this was magnificent.  She sat in that
storm centre as calmly as if it had been no more than a block of
carriages at the opera.

The police were struggling to clear a passage.  The driver of the
coal waggon, a big man in shirt sleeves, lighted a pipe and sat
smoking.  He glanced down complacently at a captain of police who
was raving and cursing at him, and his only acknowledgment was a
shrug of the shoulders.  From the rear arose the rat-rat-tat of
clubs on heads and a pandemonium of cursing, yelling, and shouting.
A violent accession of noise proclaimed that the mob had broken
through and was dragging a scab from a waggon.  The police captain
reinforced from his vanguard, and the mob at the rear was repelled.
Meanwhile, window after window in the high office building on the
right had been opened, and the class-conscious clerks were raining
a shower of office furniture down on the heads of police and scabs.
Waste-baskets, ink-bottles, paper-weights, type-writers--anything
and everything that came to hand was filling the air.

A policeman, under orders from his captain, clambered to the lofty
seat of the coal waggon to arrest the driver.  And the driver,
rising leisurely and peacefully to meet him, suddenly crumpled him
in his arms and threw him down on top of the captain.  The driver
was a young giant, and when he climbed on his load and poised a
lump of coal in both hands, a policeman, who was just scaling the
waggon from the side, let go and dropped back to earth.  The
captain ordered half-a-dozen of his men to take the waggon.  The
teamster, scrambling over the load from side to side, beat them
down with huge lumps of coal.

The crowd on the sidewalks and the teamsters on the locked waggons
roared encouragement and their own delight.  The motorman, smashing
helmets with his controller bar, was beaten into insensibility and
dragged from his platform.  The captain of police, beside himself
at the repulse of his men, led the next assault on the coal waggon.
A score of police were swarming up the tall-sided fortress.  But
the teamster multiplied himself.  At times there were six or eight
policemen rolling on the pavement and under the waggon.  Engaged in
repulsing an attack on the rear end of his fortress, the teamster
turned about to see the captain just in the act of stepping on to
the seat from the front end.  He was still in the air and in most
unstable equilibrium, when the teamster hurled a thirty-pound lump
of coal.  It caught the captain fairly on the chest, and he went
over backward, striking on a wheeler's back, tumbling on to the
ground, and jamming against the rear wheel of the auto.

Catherine thought he was dead, but he picked himself up and charged
back.  She reached out her gloved hand and patted the flank of the
snorting, quivering horse.  But Drummond did not notice the action.
He had eyes for nothing save the battle of the coal waggon, while
somewhere in his complicated psychology, one Bill Totts was heaving
and straining in an effort to come to life.  Drummond believed in
law and order and the maintenance of the established, but this
riotous savage within him would have none of it.  Then, if ever,
did Freddie Drummond call upon his iron inhibition to save him.
But it is written that the house divided against itself must fall.
And Freddie Drummond found that he had divided all the will and
force of him with Bill Totts, and between them the entity that
constituted the pair of them was being wrenched in twain.

Freddie Drummond sat in the auto, quite composed, alongside
Catherine Van Vorst; but looking out of Freddie Drummond's eyes was
Bill Totts, and somewhere behind those eyes, battling for the
control of their mutual body, were Freddie Drummond the sane and
conservative sociologist, and Bill Totts, the class-conscious and
bellicose union working man.  It was Bill Totts, looking out of
those eyes, who saw the inevitable end of the battle on the coal
waggon.  He saw a policeman gain the top of the load, a second, and
a third.  They lurched clumsily on the loose footing, but their
long riot-clubs were out and swinging.  One blow caught the
teamster on the head.  A second he dodged, receiving it on the
shoulder.  For him the game was plainly up.  He dashed in suddenly,
clutched two policemen in his arms, and hurled himself a prisoner
to the pavement, his hold never relaxing on his two captors.

Catherine Van Vorst was sick and faint at sight of the blood and
brutal fighting.  But her qualms were vanquished by the sensational
and most unexpected happening that followed.  The man beside her
emitted an unearthly and uncultured yell and rose to his feet.  She
saw him spring over the front seat, leap to the broad rump of the
wheeler, and from there gain the waggon.  His onslaught was like a
whirlwind.  Before the bewildered officer on the load could guess
the errand of this conventionally clad but excited-seeming
gentleman, he was the recipient of a punch that arched him back
through the air to the pavement.  A kick in the face led an
ascending policeman to follow his example.  A rush of three more
gained the top and locked with Bill Totts in a gigantic clinch,
during which his scalp was opened up by a club, and coat, vest, and
half his starched shirt were torn from him.  But the three
policemen were flung far and wide, and Bill Totts, raining down
lumps of coal, held the fort.

The captain led gallantly to the attack, but was bowled over by a
chunk of coal that burst on his head in black baptism.  The need of
the police was to break the blockade in front before the mob could
break in at the rear, and Bill Totts' need was to hold the waggon
till the mob did break through.  So the battle of the coal went on.

The crowd had recognized its champion.  "Big" Bill, as usual, had
come to the front, and Catherine Van Vorst was bewildered by the
cries of "Bill!  O you Bill!" that arose on every hand.  Pat
Morrissey, on his waggon seat, was jumping and screaming in an
ecstasy, "Eat 'em, Bill!  Eat 'em!  Eat 'em alive!"  From the
sidewalk she heard a woman's voice cry out, "Look out, Bill--front
end!"  Bill took the warning and with well-directed coal cleared
the front end of the waggon of assailants.  Catherine Van Vorst
turned her head and saw on the curb of the sidewalk a woman with
vivid colouring and flashing black eyes who was staring with all
her soul at the man who had been Freddie Drummond a few minutes
before.

The windows of the office building became vociferous with applause.
A fresh shower of office chairs and filing cabinets descended.  The
mob had broken through on one side the line of waggons, and was
advancing, each segregated policeman the centre of a fighting
group.  The scabs were torn from their seats, the traces of the
horses cut, and the frightened animals put in flight.  Many
policemen crawled under the coal waggon for safety, while the loose
horses, with here and there a policeman on their backs or
struggling at their heads to hold them, surged across the sidewalk
opposite the jam and broke into Market Street.

Catherine Van Vorst heard the woman's voice calling in warning.
She was back on the curb again, and crying out--

"Beat it, Bill!  Now's your time!  Beat it!"

The police for the moment had been swept away.  Bill Totts leaped
to the pavement and made his way to the woman on the sidewalk.
Catherine Van Vorst saw her throw her arms around him and kiss him
on the lips; and Catherine Van Vorst watched him curiously as he
went on down the sidewalk, one arm around the woman, both talking
and laughing, and he with a volubility and abandon she could never
have dreamed possible.

The police were back again and clearing the jam while waiting for
reinforcements and new drivers and horses.  The mob had done its
work and was scattering, and Catherine Van Vorst, still watching,
could see the man she had known as Freddie Drummond.  He towered a
head above the crowd.  His arm was still about the woman.  And she
in the motor-car, watching, saw the pair cross Market Street, cross
the Slot, and disappear down Third Street into the labour ghetto.


In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the
University of California by one Freddie Drummond, and no more books
on economics and the labour question appeared over the name of
Frederick A. Drummond.  On the other hand there arose a new labour
leader, William Totts by name.  He it was who married Mary Condon,
President of the International Glove Workers' Union No. 974; and he
it was who called the notorious Cooks and Waiters' Strike, which,
before its successful termination, brought out with it scores of
other unions, among which, of the more remotely allied, were the
Chicken Pickers and the Undertakers.



THE UNPARALLELED INVASION



It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and
China reached its culmination.  It was because of this that the
celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was
deferred.  Many other plans of the nations of the earth were
twisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason.  The world
awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years,
unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.

The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development
that, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole
world.  The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the
historians of the time gravely noted it down that that event marked
the entrance of Japan into the comity of nations.  What it really
did mark was the awakening of China.  This awakening, long
expected, had finally been given up.  The Western nations had tried
to arouse China, and they had failed.  Out of their native optimism
and race-egotism they had therefore concluded that the task was
impossible, that China would never awaken.

What they had failed to take into account was this:  that between
them and China was no common psychological speech.  Their thought-
processes were radically dissimilar.  There was no intimate
vocabulary.  The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a
short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze.  The
Chinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance
when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall.  It was
all a matter of language.  There was no way to communicate Western
ideas to the Chinese mind.  China remained asleep.  The material
achievement and progress of the West was a closed book to her; nor
could the West open the book.  Back and deep down on the tie-ribs
of consciousness, in the mind, say, of the English-speaking race,
was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words; back and deep down
on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind was a capacity
to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind could not
thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking mind
thrill to hieroglyphics.  The fabrics of their minds were woven
from totally different stuffs.  They were mental aliens.  And so it
was that Western material achievement and progress made no dent on
the rounded sleep of China.

Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904.  Now the Japanese
race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples.  In some
strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer.
Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and
so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-
panoplied, a world-power.  There is no explaining this peculiar
openness of Japan to the alien culture of the West.  As well might
be explained any biological sport in the animal kingdom.

Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly
set about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself.  Korea
she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and
vulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria.  But Japan
was not satisfied.  She turned her eyes upon China.  There lay a
vast territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits in
the world of iron and coal--the backbone of industrial
civilization.  Given natural resources, the other great factor in
industry is labour.  In that territory was a population of
400,000,000 souls--one quarter of the then total population of the
earth.  Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while
their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous
organization constituted them splendid soldiers--if they were
properly managed.  Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish
that management.

But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was a
kindred race.  The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to the
West was no baffling enigma to the Japanese.  The Japanese
understood as we could never school ourselves or hope to
understand.  Their mental processes were the same.  The Japanese
thought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese, and they
thought in the same peculiar grooves.  Into the Chinese mind the
Japanese went on where we were balked by the obstacle of
incomprehension.  They took the turning which we could not
perceive, twisted around the obstacle, and were out of sight in the
ramifications of the Chinese mind where we could not follow.  They
were brothers.  Long ago one had borrowed the other's written
language, and, untold generations before that, they had diverged
from the common Mongol stock.  There had been changes,
differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusions
of other blood; but down at the bottom of their beings, twisted
into the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a sameness in
kind that time had not obliterated.

And so Japan took upon herself the management of China.  In the
years immediately following the war with Russia, her agents swarmed
over the Chinese Empire.  A thousand miles beyond the last mission
station toiled her engineers and spies, clad as coolies, under the
guise of itinerant merchants or proselytizing Buddhist priests,
noting down the horse-power of every waterfall, the likely sites
for factories, the heights of mountains and passes, the strategic
advantages and weaknesses, the wealth of the farming valleys, the
number of bullocks in a district or the number of labourers that
could be collected by forced levies.  Never was there such a
census, and it could have been taken by no other people than the
dogged, patient, patriotic Japanese.

But in a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds.  Japan's
officers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the
mediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed
to all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average of
marksmanship than the soldiers of any Western nation.  The
engineers of Japan deepened and widened the intricate system of
canals, built factories and foundries, netted the empire with
telegraphs and telephones, and inaugurated the era of railroad-
building.  It was these same protagonists of machine-civilization
that discovered the great oil deposits of Chunsan, the iron
mountains of Whang-Sing, the copper ranges of Chinchi, and they
sank the gas wells of Wow-Wee, that most marvellous reservoir of
natural gas in all the world.

In China's councils of empire were the Japanese emissaries.  In the
ears of the statesmen whispered the Japanese statesmen.  The
political reconstruction of the Empire was due to them.  They
evicted the scholar class, which was violently reactionary, and put
into office progressive officials.  And in every town and city of
the Empire newspapers were started.  Of course, Japanese editors
ran the policy of these papers, which policy they got direct from
Tokio.  It was these papers that educated and made progressive the
great mass of the population.

China was at last awake.  Where the West had failed, Japan
succeeded.  She had transmuted Western culture and achievement into
terms that were intelligible to the Chinese understanding.  Japan
herself, when she so suddenly awakened, had astounded the world.
But at the time she was only forty millions strong.  China's
awakening, with her four hundred millions and the scientific
advance of the world, was frightfully astounding.  She was the
colossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in no
uncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations.  Japan
egged her on, and the proud Western peoples listened with
respectful ears.

China's swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than to
anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour.  The
Chinese was the perfect type of industry.  He had always been that.
For sheer ability to work no worker in the world could compare with
him.  Work was the breath of his nostrils.  It was to him what
wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure had
been to other peoples.  Liberty, to him, epitomized itself in
access to the means of toil.  To till the soil and labour
interminably was all he asked of life and the powers that be.  And
the awakening of China had given its vast population not merely
free and unlimited access to the means of toil, but access to the
highest and most scientific machine-means of toil.

China rejuvenescent!  It was but a step to China rampant.  She
discovered a new pride in herself and a will of her own.  She began
to chafe under the guidance of Japan, but she did not chafe long.
On Japan's advice, in the beginning, she had expelled from the
Empire all Western missionaries, engineers, drill sergeants,
merchants, and teachers.  She now began to expel the similar
representatives of Japan.  The latter's advisory statesmen were
showered with honours and decorations, and sent home.  The West had
awakened Japan, and, as Japan had then requited the West, Japan was
not requited by China.  Japan was thanked for her kindly aid and
flung out bag and baggage by her gigantic protege.  The Western
nations chuckled.  Japan's rainbow dream had gone glimmering.  She
grew angry.  China laughed at her.  The blood and the swords of the
Samurai would out, and Japan rashly went to war.  This occurred in
1922, and in seven bloody months Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa were
taken away from her and she was hurled back, bankrupt, to stifle in
her tiny, crowded islands.  Exit Japan from the world drama.
Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and her task became to
please the world greatly with her creations of wonder and beauty.

Contrary to expectation, China did not prove warlike.  She had no
Napoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts of
peace.  After a time of disquiet, the idea was accepted that China
was to be feared, not in war, but in commerce.  It will be seen
that the real danger was not apprehended.  China went on
consummating her machine-civilization.  Instead of a large standing
army, she developed an immensely larger and splendidly efficient
militia.  Her navy was so small that it was the laughing stock of
the world; nor did she attempt to strengthen her navy.  The treaty
ports of the world were never entered by her visiting battleships.

The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in
1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised.  For some time all
territories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese
immigration; but now it suddenly came home to the world that
China's population was 500,000,000.  She had increased by a hundred
millions since her awakening.  Burchaldter called attention to the
fact that there were more Chinese in existence than white-skinned
people.  He performed a simple sum in arithmetic.  He added
together the populations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, South Africa, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria,
European Russia, and all Scandinavia.  The result was 495,000,000.
And the population of China overtopped this tremendous total by
5,000,000.  Burchaldter's figures went round the world, and the
world shivered.

For many centuries China's population had been constant.  Her
territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her
territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported
the maximum limit of population.  But when she awoke and
inaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had been
enormously increased.  Thus, on the same territory, she was able to
support a far larger population.  At once the birth rate began to
rise and the death rate to fall.  Before, when population pressed
against the means of subsistence, the excess population had been
swept away by famine.  But now, thanks to the machine-civilization,
China's means of subsistence had been enormously extended, and
there were no famines; her population followed on the heels of the
increase in the means of subsistence.

During this time of transition and development of power, China had
entertained no dreams of conquest.  The Chinese was not an imperial
race.  It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving.  War was
looked upon as an unpleasant but necessary task that at times must
be performed.  And so, while the Western races had squabbled and
fought, and world-adventured against one another, China had calmly
gone on working at her machines and growing.  Now she was spilling
over the boundaries of her Empire--that was all, just spilling over
into the adjacent territories with all the certainty and terrifying
slow momentum of a glacier.

Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter's figures, in 1970
France made a long-threatened stand.  French Indo-China had been
overrun, filled up, by Chinese immigrants.  France called a halt.
The Chinese wave flowed on.  France assembled a force of a hundred
thousand on the boundary between her unfortunate colony and China,
and China sent down an army of militia-soldiers a million strong.
Behind came the wives and sons and daughters and relatives, with
their personal household luggage, in a second army.  The French
force was brushed aside like a fly.  The Chinese militia-soldiers,
along with their families, over five millions all told, coolly took
possession of French Indo-China and settled down to stay for a few
thousand years.

Outraged France was in arms.  She hurled fleet after fleet against
the coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort.
China had no navy.  She withdrew like a turtle into her shell.  For
a year the French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposed
towns and villages.  China did not mind.  She did not depend upon
the rest of the world for anything.  She calmly kept out of range
of the French guns and went on working.  France wept and wailed,
wrung her impotent hands and appealed to the dumfounded nations.
Then she landed a punitive expedition to march to Peking.  It was
two hundred and fifty thousand strong, and it was the flower of
France.  It landed without opposition and marched into the
interior.  And that was the last ever seen of it.  The line of
communication was snapped on the second day.  Not a survivor came
back to tell what had happened.  It had been swallowed up in
China's cavernous maw, that was all.

In the five years that followed, China's expansion, in all land
directions, went on apace.  Siam was made part of the Empire, and,
in spite of all that England could do, Burma and the Malay
Peninsula were overrun; while all along the long south boundary of
Siberia, Russia was pressed severely by China's advancing hordes.
The process was simple.  First came the Chinese immigration (or,
rather, it was already there, having come there slowly and
insidiously during the previous years).  Next came the clash of
arms and the brushing away of all opposition by a monster army of
militia-soldiers, followed by their families and household baggage.
And finally came their settling down as colonists in the conquered
territory.  Never was there so strange and effective a method of
world conquest.

Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary of
India pressed against by this fearful tide of life.  To the west,
Bokhara, and, even to the south and west, Afghanistan, were
swallowed up.  Persia, Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt the
pressure of the flood.  It was at this time that Burchaldter
revised his figures.  He had been mistaken.  China's population
must be seven hundred millions, eight hundred millions, nobody knew
how many millions, but at any rate it would soon be a billion.
There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world,
Burchaldter announced, and the world trembled.  China's increase
must have begun immediately, in 1904.  It was remembered that since
that date there had not been a single famine.  At 5,000,000 a year
increase, her total increase in the intervening seventy years must
be 350,000,000.  But who was to know?  It might be more.  Who was
to know anything of this strange new menace of the twentieth
century--China, old China, rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!

The Convention of 1975 was called at Philadelphia.  All the Western
nations, and some few of the Eastern, were represented.  Nothing
was accomplished.  There was talk of all countries putting bounties
on children to increase the birth rate, but it was laughed to scorn
by the arithmeticians, who pointed out that China was too far in
the lead in that direction.  No feasible way of coping with China
was suggested.  China was appealed to and threatened by the United
Powers, and that was all the Convention of Philadelphia came to;
and the Convention and the Powers were laughed at by China.  Li
Tang Fwung, the power behind the Dragon Throne, deigned to reply.

"What does China care for the comity of nations?" said Li Tang
Fwung.  "We are the most ancient, honourable, and royal of races.
We have our own destiny to accomplish.  It is unpleasant that our
destiny does not tally with the destiny of the rest of the world,
but what would you?  You have talked windily about the royal races
and the heritage of the earth, and we can only reply that that
remains to be seen.  You cannot invade us.  Never mind about your
navies.  Don't shout.  We know our navy is small.  You see we use
it for police purposes.  We do not care for the sea.  Our strength
is in our population, which will soon be a billion.  Thanks to you,
we are equipped with all modern war-machinery.  Send your navies.
We will not notice them.  Send your punitive expeditions, but first
remember France.  To land half a million soldiers on our shores
would strain the resources of any of you.  And our thousand
millions would swallow them down in a mouthful.  Send a million;
send five millions, and we will swallow them down just as readily.
Pouf!  A mere nothing, a meagre morsel.  Destroy, as you have
threatened, you United States, the ten million coolies we have
forced upon your shores--why, the amount scarcely equals half of
our excess birth rate for a year."

So spoke Li Tang Fwung.  The world was nonplussed, helpless,
terrified.  Truly had he spoken.  There was no combating China's
amazing birth rate.  If her population was a billion, and was
increasing twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would be
a billion and a half--equal to the total population of the world in
1904.  And nothing could be done.  There was no way to dam up the
over-spilling monstrous flood of life.  War was futile.  China
laughed at a blockade of her coasts.  She welcomed invasion.  In
her capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could be
hurled at her.  And in the meantime her flood of yellow life poured
out and on over Asia.  China laughed and read in their magazines
the learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.

But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on--Jacobus
Laningdale.  Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense.
Primarily, Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to that
time, a very obscure scientist, a professor employed in the
laboratories of the Health Office of New York City.  Jacobus
Laningdale's head was very like any other head, but in that head
was evolved an idea.  Also, in that head was the wisdom to keep
that idea secret.  He did not write an article for the magazines.
Instead, he asked for a vacation.  On September 19, 1975, he
arrived in Washington.  It was evening, but he proceeded straight
to the White House, for he had already arranged an audience with
the President.  He was closeted with President Moyer for three
hours.  What passed between them was not learned by the rest of the
world until long after; in fact, at that time the world was not
interested in Jacobus Laningdale.  Next day the President called in
his Cabinet.  Jacobus Laningdale was present.  The proceedings were
kept secret.  But that very afternoon Rufus Cowdery, Secretary of
State, left Washington, and early the following morning sailed for
England.  The secret that he carried began to spread, but it spread
only among the heads of Governments.  Possibly half-a-dozen men in
a nation were entrusted with the idea that had formed in Jacobus
Laningdale's head.  Following the spread of the secret, sprang up
great activity in all the dockyards, arsenals, and navy-yards.  The
people of France and Austria became suspicious, but so sincere were
their Governments' calls for confidence that they acquiesced in the
unknown project that was afoot.

This was the time of the Great Truce.  All countries pledged
themselves solemnly not to go to war with any other country.  The
first definite action was the gradual mobilization of the armies of
Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.  Then began
the eastward movement.  All railroads into Asia were glutted with
troop trains.  China was the objective, that was all that was
known.  A little later began the great sea movement.  Expeditions
of warships were launched from all countries.  Fleet followed
fleet, and all proceeded to the coast of China.  The nations
cleaned out their navy-yards.  They sent their revenue cutters and
dispatch boots and lighthouse tenders, and they sent their last
antiquated cruisers and battleships.  Not content with this, they
impressed the merchant marine.  The statistics show that 58,640
merchant steamers, equipped with searchlights and rapid-fire guns,
were despatched by the various nations to China.

And China smiled and waited.  On her land side, along her
boundaries, were millions of the warriors of Europe.  She mobilized
five times as many millions of her militia and awaited the
invasion.  On her sea coasts she did the same.  But China was
puzzled.  After all this enormous preparation, there was no
invasion.  She could not understand.  Along the great Siberian
frontier all was quiet.  Along her coasts the towns and villages
were not even shelled.  Never, in the history of the world, had
there been so mighty a gathering of war fleets.  The fleets of all
the world were there, and day and night millions of tons of
battleships ploughed the brine of her coasts, and nothing happened.
Nothing was attempted.  Did they think to make her emerge from her
shell?  China smiled.  Did they think to tire her out, or starve
her out?  China smiled again.

But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of
Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have
witnessed a curious sight.  He would have seen the streets filled
with the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back,
every slant eye turned skyward.  And high up in the blue he would
have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly
evolutions, he would have identified as an airship.  From this
airship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell
missiles--strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that
shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house-
tops.  But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass.
Nothing happened.  There were no explosions.  It is true, three
Chinese were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from so
enormous a height; but what were three Chinese against an excess
birth rate of twenty millions?  One tube struck perpendicularly in
a fish-pond in a garden and was not broken.  It was dragged ashore
by the master of the house.  He did not dare to open it, but,
accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasing
crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of the
district.  The latter was a brave man.  With all eyes upon him, he
shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe.  Nothing
happened.  Of those who were very near, one or two thought they saw
some mosquitoes fly out.  That was all.  The crowd set up a great
laugh and dispersed.

As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China.  The tiny
airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each,
and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved,
one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass
tubes.

Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have
looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants.  Some few of
them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their
carcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and
piled high on the abandoned death-waggons.  But for the rest he
would have had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire.
And not all would he have found fleeing from plague-stricken
Peking, for behind them, by hundreds of thousands of unburied
corpses by the wayside, he could have marked their flight.  And as
it was with Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, and
villages of the Empire.  The plague smote them all.  Nor was it one
plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues.  Every virulent
form of infectious death stalked through the land.  Too late the
Chinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossal
preparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights of
the tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass.  The
proclamations of the government were vain.  They could not stop the
eleven million plague-stricken wretches, fleeing from the one city
of Peking to spread disease through all the land.  The physicians
and health officers died at their posts; and death, the all-
conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang Fwung.
It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the second
week, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died in
the fourth week.

Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it.  But
from a score of plagues no creature was immune.  The man who
escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever.  The man who was
immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were
immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague,
swept him away.  For it was these bacteria, and germs, and
microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West,
that had come down upon China in the rain of glass.

All organization vanished.  The government crumbled away.  Decrees
and proclamations were useless when the men who made them and
signed them one moment were dead the next.  Nor could the maddened
millions, spurred on to flight by death, pause to heed anything.
They fled from the cities to infect the country, and wherever they
fled they carried the plagues with them.  The hot summer was on--
Jacobus Laningdale had selected the time shrewdly--and the plague
festered everywhere.  Much is conjectured of what occurred, and
much has been learned from the stories of the few survivors.  The
wretched creatures stormed across the Empire in many-millioned
flight.  The vast armies China had collected on her frontiers
melted away.  The farms were ravaged for food, and no more crops
were planted, while the crops already in were left unattended and
never came to harvest.  The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the
flights.  Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds of
the Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of the
West.  The slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries was
stupendous.  Time and again the guarding line was drawn back twenty
or thirty miles to escape the contagion of the multitudinous dead.

Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German and
Austrian soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan.
Preparations had been made for such a happening, and though sixty
thousand soldiers of Europe were carried off, the international
corps of physicians isolated the contagion and dammed it back.  It
was during this struggle that it was suggested that a new plague-
germ had originated, that in some way or other a sort of
hybridization between plague-germs had taken place, producing a new
and frightfully virulent germ.  First suspected by Vomberg, who
became infected with it and died, it was later isolated and studied
by Stevens, Hazenfelt, Norman, and Landers.

Such was the unparalleled invasion of China.  For that billion of
people there was no hope.  Pent in their vast and festering
charnel-house, all organization and cohesion lost, they could do
naught but die.  They could not escape.  As they were flung back
from their land frontiers, so were they flung back from the sea.
Seventy-five thousand vessels patrolled the coasts.  By day their
smoking funnels dimmed the sea-rim, and by night their flashing
searchlights ploughed the dark and harrowed it for the tiniest
escaping junk.  The attempts of the immense fleets of junks were
pitiful.  Not one ever got by the guarding sea-hounds.  Modern war-
machinery held back the disorganized mass of China, while the
plagues did the work.

But old War was made a thing of laughter.  Naught remained to him
but patrol duty.  China had laughed at war, and war she was
getting, but it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the
war of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus
Laningdale.  Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro-
organic projectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of
death, the destroying angels that stalked through the empire of a
billion souls.

During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno.  There
was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the
remotest hiding-places.  The hundreds of millions of dead remained
unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last,
millions died daily of starvation.  Besides, starvation weakened
the victims and destroyed their natural defences against the
plagues.  Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned.  And so
perished China.

Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the
first expeditions made.  These expeditions were small, composed of
scientists and bodies of troops; but they entered China from every
side.  In spite of the most elaborate precautions against
infection, numbers of soldiers and a few of the physicians were
stricken.  But the exploration went bravely on.  They found China
devastated, a howling wilderness through which wandered bands of
wild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived.  All survivors
were put to death wherever found.  And then began the great task,
the sanitation of China.  Five years and hundreds of millions of
treasure were consumed, and then the world moved in--not in zones,
as was the idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, according
to the democratic American programme.  It was a vast and happy
intermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982
and the years that followed--a tremendous and successful experiment
in cross-fertilization.  We know to-day the splendid mechanical,
intellectual, and art output that followed.

It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that the
ancient quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine
recrudesced.  The war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April, and
on April 17 the Convention of Copenhagen was called.  The
representatives of the nations of the world, being present, all
nations solemnly pledged themselves never to use against one
another the laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the
invasion of China.

--Excerpt from Walt Mervin's "Certain Essays in History."



THE ENEMY OF ALL THE WORLD



It was Silas Bannerman who finally ran down that scientific wizard
and arch-enemy of mankind, Emil Gluck.  Gluck's confession, before
he went to the electric chair, threw much light upon the series of
mysterious events, many apparently unrelated, that so perturbed the
world between the years 1933 and 1941.  It was not until that
remarkable document was made public that the world dreamed of there
being any connection between the assassination of the King and
Queen of Portugal and the murders of the New York City police
officers.  While the deeds of Emil Gluck were all that was
abominable, we cannot but feel, to a certain extent, pity for the
unfortunate, malformed, and maltreated genius.  This side of his
story has never been told before, and from his confession and from
the great mass of evidence and the documents and records of the
time we are able to construct a fairly accurate portrait of him,
and to discern the factors and pressures that moulded him into the
human monster he became and that drove him onward and downward
along the fearful path he trod.

Emil Gluck was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895.  His father,
Josephus Gluck, was a special policeman and night watchman, who, in
the year 1900, died suddenly of pneumonia.  The mother, a pretty,
fragile creature, who, before her marriage, had been a milliner,
grieved herself to death over the loss of her husband.  This
sensitiveness of the mother was the heritage that in the boy became
morbid and horrible.

In 1901, the boy, Emil, then six years of age, went to live with
his aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell.  She was his mother's sister, but in
her breast was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking boy.
Ann Bartell was a vain, shallow, and heartless woman.  Also, she
was cursed with poverty and burdened with a husband who was a lazy,
erratic ne'er-do-well.  Young Emil Gluck was not wanted, and Ann
Bartell could be trusted to impress this fact sufficiently upon
him.  As an illustration of the treatment he received in that
early, formative period, the following instance is given.

When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than a
year, he broke his leg.  He sustained the injury through playing on
the forbidden roof--as all boys have done and will continue to do
to the end of time.  The leg was broken in two places between the
knee and thigh.  Emil, helped by his frightened playmates, managed
to drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted.  The
children of the neighbourhood were afraid of the hard-featured
shrew who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning their
resolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of the
accident.  She did not even look at the little lad who lay stricken
on the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her wash-
tub.  The time passed.  A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out of
his faint, lay sobbing in the rain.  The leg should have been set
immediately.  As it was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made a
nasty case of it.  At the end of two hours, the indignant women of
the neighbourhood protested to Ann Bartell.  This time she came out
and looked at the lad.  Also she kicked him in the side as he lay
helpless at her feet, and she hysterically disowned him.  He was
not her child, she said, and recommended that the ambulance be
called to take him to the city receiving hospital.  Then she went
back into the house.

It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned the
situation, and had the boy placed on a shutter.  It was she who
called the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boy
carried into the house.  When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartell
promptly warned him that she would not pay him for his services.
For two months the little Emil lay in bed, the first month on his
back without once being turned over; and he lay neglected and
alone, save for the occasional visits of the unremunerated and
over-worked physician.  He had no toys, nothing with which to
beguile the long and tedious hours.  No kind word was spoken to
him, no soothing hand laid upon his brow, no single touch or act of
loving tenderness--naught but the reproaches and harshness of Ann
Bartell, and the continually reiterated information that he was not
wanted.  And it can well be understood, in such environment, how
there was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much of the
bitterness and hostility for his kind that later was to express
itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world.

It would seem strange that, from the hands of Ann Bartell, Emil
Gluck should have received a college education; but the explanation
is simple.  Her ne'er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strike
in the Nevada goldfields, and returned to her a many-times
millionaire.  Ann Bartell hated the boy, and immediately she sent
him to the Farristown Academy, a hundred miles away.  Shy and
sensitive, a lonely and misunderstood little soul, he was more
lonely than ever at Farristown.  He never came home, at vacation,
and holidays, as the other boys did.  Instead, he wandered about
the deserted buildings and grounds, befriended and misunderstood by
the servants and gardeners, reading much, it is remembered,
spending his days in the fields or before the fire-place with his
nose poked always in the pages of some book.  It was at this time
that he over-used his eyes and was compelled to take up the wearing
of glasses, which same were so prominent in the photographs of him
published in the newspapers in 1941.

He was a remarkable student.  Application such as his would have
taken him far; but he did not need application.  A glance at a text
meant mastery for him.  The result was that he did an immense
amount of collateral reading and acquired more in half a year than
did the average student in half-a-dozen years.  In 1909, barely
fourteen years of age, he was ready--"more than ready" the
headmaster of the academy said--to enter Yale or Harvard.  His
juvenility prevented him from entering those universities, and so,
in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin College.  In
1913 he graduated with highest honours, and immediately afterward
followed Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California.  The one
friend that Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was Professor
Bradlough.  The latter's weak lungs had led him to exchange Maine
for California, the removal being facilitated by the offer of a
professorship in the State University.  Throughout the year 1914,
Emil Gluck resided in Berkeley and took special scientific courses.
Toward the end of that year two deaths changed his prospects and
his relations with life.  The death of Professor Bradlough took
from him the one friend he was ever to know, and the death of Ann
Bartell left him penniless.  Hating the unfortunate lad to the
last, she cut him off with one hundred dollars.

The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled
as an instructor of chemistry in the University of California.
Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery
that brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-
dozen degrees.  He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology,
of Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, in
later days, only as Professor Gluck.

He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence
in the newspapers through the publication of his book, Sex and
Progress.  The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and
philosophy of marriage.  It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred
pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original.
It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a
stir.  But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for
it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages.  At
once the newspapers seized these three lines, "played them up
yellow," as the slang was in those days, and set the whole world
laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of twenty-
seven.  Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by reporters,
women's clubs throughout the land passed resolutions condemning him
and his immoral theories; and on the floor of the California
Assembly, while discussing the state appropriation to the
University, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was made
under threat of withholding the appropriation--of course, none of
his persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version of
only three lines of it was enough for them.  Here began Emil
Gluck's hatred for newspaper men.  By them his serious and
intrinsically valuable work of six years had been made a laughing-
stock and a notoriety.  To his dying day, and to their everlasting
regret, he never forgave them.

It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disaster
that befell him.  For the five years following the publication of
his book he had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man is
not good.  One can conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude of
Emil Gluck in that populous University; for he was without friends
and without sympathy.  His only recourse was books, and he went on
reading and studying enormously.  But in 1927 he accepted an
invitation to appear before the Human Interest Society of
Emeryville.  He did not trust himself to speak, and as we write we
have before us a copy of his learned paper.  It is sober,
scholarly, and scientific, and, it must also be added,
conservative.  But in one place he dealt with, and I quote his
words, "the industrial and social revolution that is taking place
in society."  A reporter present seized upon the word "revolution,"
divorced it from the text, and wrote a garbled account that made
Emil Gluck appear an anarchist.  At once, "Professor Gluck,
anarchist," flamed over the wires and was appropriately "featured"
in all the newspapers in the land.

He had attempted to reply to the previous newspaper attack, but now
he remained silent.  Bitterness had already corroded his soul.  The
University faculty appealed to him to defend himself, but he
sullenly declined, even refusing to enter in defence a copy of his
paper to save himself from expulsion.  He refused to resign, and
was discharged from the University faculty.  It must be added that
political pressure had been put upon the University Regents and the
President.

Persecuted, maligned, and misunderstood, the forlorn and lonely man
made no attempt at retaliation.  All his life he had been sinned
against, and all his life he had sinned against no one.  But his
cup of bitterness was not yet full to overflowing.  Having lost his
position, and being without any income, he had to find work.  His
first place was at the Union Iron Works, in San Francisco, where he
proved a most able draughtsman.  It was here that he obtained his
firsthand knowledge of battleships and their construction.  But the
reporters discovered him and featured him in his new vocation.  He
immediately resigned and found another place; but after the
reporters had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, he
steeled himself to brazen out the newspaper persecution.  This
occurred when he started his electroplating establishment--in
Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue.  It was a small shop, employing three
men and two boys.  Gluck himself worked long hours.  Night after
night, as Policeman Carew testified on the stand, he did not leave
the shop till one and two in the morning.  It was during this
period that he perfected the improved ignition device for gas-
engines, the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy.

He started his electroplating establishment early in the spring of
1928, and it was in the same year that he formed the disastrous
love attachment for Irene Tackley.  Now it is not to be imagined
that an extraordinary creature such as Emil Gluck could be any
other than an extraordinary lover.  In addition to his genius, his
loneliness, and his morbidness, it must be taken into consideration
that he knew nothing about women.  Whatever tides of desire flooded
his being, he was unschooled in the conventional expression of
them; while his excessive timidity was bound to make his love-
making unusual.  Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young woman, but
shallow and light-headed.  At the time she worked in a small candy
store across the street from Gluck's shop.  He used to come in and
drink ice-cream sodas and lemon-squashes, and stare at her.  It
seems the girl did not care for him, and merely played with him.
He was "queer," she said; and at another time she called him a
crank when describing how he sat at the counter and peered at her
through his spectacles, blushing and stammering when she took
notice of him, and often leaving the shop in precipitate confusion.

Gluck made her the most amazing presents--a silver tea-service, a
diamond ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous History of
the World in many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated in
his own shop.  Enters now the girl's lover, putting his foot down,
showing great anger, compelling her to return Gluck's strange
assortment of presents.  This man, William Sherbourne, was a gross
and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed man of the working class who had
become a successful building-contractor in a small way.  Gluck did
not understand.  He tried to get an explanation, attempting to
speak with the girl when she went home from work in the evening.
She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave Gluck a
beating.  It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records of
the Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that
night and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.

Still Gluck did not understand.  He continued to seek an
explanation from the girl.  In fear of Sherbourne, he applied to
the Chief of Police for permission to carry a revolver, which
permission was refused, the newspapers as usual playing it up
sensationally.  Then came the murder of Irene Tackley, six days
before her contemplated marriage with Sherbourne.  It was on a
Saturday night.  She had worked late in the candy store, departing
after eleven o'clock with her week's wages in her purse.  She rode
on a San Pablo Avenue surface car to Thirty-fourth Street, where
she alighted and started to walk the three blocks to her home.
That was the last seen of her alive.  Next morning she was found,
strangled, in a vacant lot.

Emil Gluck was immediately arrested.  Nothing that he could do
could save him.  He was convicted, not merely on circumstantial
evidence, but on evidence "cooked up" by the Oakland police.  There
is no discussion but that a large portion of the evidence was
manufactured.  The testimony of Captain Shehan was the sheerest
perjury, it being proved long afterward that on the night in
question he had not only not been in the vicinity of the murder,
but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San Leandro
Road.  The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in San
Quentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was a
miscarriage of justice--that the death penalty should have been
visited upon him.

Gluck entered San Quentin prison on April 17, 1929.  He was then
thirty-four years of age.  And for three years and a half, much of
the time in solitary confinement, he was left to meditate upon the
injustice of man.  It was during that period that his bitterness
corroded home and he became a hater of all his kind.  Three other
things he did during the same period:  he wrote his famous
treatise, Human Morals, his remarkable brochure, The Criminal Sane,
and he worked out his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge.  It
was an episode that had occurred in his electroplating
establishment that suggested to him his unique weapon of revenge.
As stated in his confession, he worked every detail out
theoretically during his imprisonment, and was able, on his
release, immediately to embark on his career of vengeance.

His release was sensational.  Also it was miserably and criminally
delayed by the soulless legal red tape then in vogue.  On the night
of February 1, 1932, Tim Haswell, a hold-up man, was shot during an
attempted robbery by a citizen of Piedmont Heights.  Tim Haswell
lingered three days, during which time he not only confessed to the
murder of Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of the
same.  Bert Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in Folsom
Prison, was implicated as accessory, and his confession followed.
It is inconceivable to us of to-day--the bungling, dilatory
processes of justice a generation ago.  Emil Gluck was proved in
February to be an innocent man, yet he was not released until the
following October.  For eight months, a greatly wronged man, he was
compelled to undergo his unmerited punishment.  This was not
conducive to sweetness and light, and we can well imagine how he
ate his soul with bitterness during those dreary eight months.

He came back to the world in the fall of 1932, as usual a "feature"
topic in all the newspapers.  The papers, instead of expressing
heartfelt regret, continued their old sensational persecution.  One
paper did more--the San Francisco Intelligencer.  John Hartwell,
its editor, elaborated an ingenious theory that got around the
confessions of the two criminals and went to show that Gluck was
responsible, after all, for the murder of Irene Tackley.  Hartwell
died.  And Sherbourne died too, while Policeman Phillipps was shot
in the leg and discharged from the Oakland police force.

The murder of Hartwell was long a mystery.  He was alone in his
editorial office at the time.  The reports of the revolver were
heard by the office boy, who rushed in to find Hartwell expiring in
his chair.  What puzzled the police was the fact, not merely that
he had been shot with his own revolver, but that the revolver had
been exploded in the drawer of his desk.  The bullets had torn
through the front of the drawer and entered his body.  The police
scouted the theory of suicide, murder was dismissed as absurd, and
the blame was thrown upon the Eureka Smokeless Cartridge Company.
Spontaneous explosion was the police explanation, and the chemists
of the cartridge company were well bullied at the inquest.  But
what the police did not know was that across the street, in the
Mercer Building, Room 633, rented by Emil Gluck, had been occupied
by Emil Gluck at the very moment Hartwell's revolver so
mysteriously exploded.

At the time, no connection was made between Hartwell's death and
the death of William Sherbourne.  Sherbourne had continued to live
in the home he had built for Irene Tackley, and one morning in
January, 1933, he was found dead.  Suicide was the verdict of the
coroner's inquest, for he had been shot by his own revolver.  The
curious thing that happened that night was the shooting of
Policeman Phillipps on the sidewalk in front of Sherbourne's house.
The policeman crawled to a police telephone on the corner and rang
up for an ambulance.  He claimed that some one had shot him from
behind in the leg.  The leg in question was so badly shattered by
three '38 calibre bullets that amputation was necessary.  But when
the police discovered that the damage had been done by his own
revolver, a great laugh went up, and he was charged with having
been drunk.  In spite of his denial of having touched a drop, and
of his persistent assertion that the revolver had been in his hip
pocket and that he had not laid a finger to it, he was discharged
from the force.  Emil Gluck's confession, six years later, cleared
the unfortunate policeman of disgrace, and he is alive to-day and
in good health, the recipient of a handsome pension from the city.

Emil Gluck, having disposed of his immediate enemies, now sought a
wider field, though his enmity for newspaper men and for the police
remained always active.  The royalties on his ignition device for
gasolene-engines had mounted up while he lay in prison, and year by
year the earning power of his invention increased.  He was
independent, able to travel wherever he willed over the earth and
to glut his monstrous appetite for revenge.  He had become a
monomaniac and an anarchist--not a philosophic anarchist, merely,
but a violent anarchist.  Perhaps the word is misused, and he is
better described as a nihilist, or an annihilist.  It is known that
he affiliated with none of the groups of terrorists.  He operated
wholly alone, but he created a thousandfold more terror and
achieved a thousandfold more destruction than all the terrorist
groups added together.

He signalized his departure from California by blowing up Fort
Mason.  In his confession he spoke of it as a little experiment--he
was merely trying his hand.  For eight years he wandered over the
earth, a mysterious terror, destroying property to the tune of
hundreds of millions of dollars, and destroying countless lives.
One good result of his awful deeds was the destruction he wrought
among the terrorists themselves.  Every time he did anything the
terrorists in the vicinity were gathered in by the police dragnet,
and many of them were executed.  Seventeen were executed at Rome
alone, following the assassination of the Italian King.

Perhaps the most world-amazing achievement of his was the
assassination of the King and Queen of Portugal.  It was their
wedding day.  All possible precautions had been taken against the
terrorists, and the way from the cathedral, through Lisbon's
streets, was double-banked with troops, while a squad of two
hundred mounted troopers surrounded the carriage.  Suddenly the
amazing thing happened.  The automatic rifles of the troopers began
to go off, as well as the rifles, in the immediate vicinity, of the
double-banked infantry.  In the excitement the muzzles of the
exploding rifles were turned in all directions.  The slaughter was
terrible--horses, troops, spectators, and the King and Queen, were
riddled with bullets.  To complicate the affair, in different parts
of the crowd behind the foot-soldiers, two terrorists had bombs
explode on their persons.  These bombs they had intended to throw
if they got the opportunity.  But who was to know this?  The
frightful havoc wrought by the bursting bombs but added to the
confusion; it was considered part of the general attack.

One puzzling thing that could not be explained away was the conduct
of the troopers with their exploding rifles.  It seemed impossible
that they should be in the plot, yet there were the hundreds their
flying bullets had slain, including the King and Queen.  On the
other hand, more baffling than ever was the fact that seventy per
cent. of the troopers themselves had been killed or wounded.  Some
explained this on the ground that the loyal foot-soldiers,
witnessing the attack on the royal carriage, had opened fire on the
traitors.  Yet not one bit of evidence to verify this could be
drawn from the survivors, though many were put to the torture.
They contended stubbornly that they had not discharged their rifles
at all, but that their rifles had discharged themselves.  They were
laughed at by the chemists, who held that, while it was just barely
probable that a single cartridge, charged with the new smokeless
powder, might spontaneously explode, it was beyond all probability
and possibility for all the cartridges in a given area, so charged,
spontaneously to explode.  And so, in the end, no explanation of
the amazing occurrence was reached.  The general opinion of the
rest of the world was that the whole affair was a blind panic of
the feverish Latins, precipitated, it was true, by the bursting of
two terrorist bombs; and in this connection was recalled the
laughable encounter of long years before between the Russian fleet
and the English fishing boats.

And Emil Gluck chuckled and went his way.  He knew.  But how was
the world to know?  He had stumbled upon the secret in his old
electroplating shop on Telegraph Avenue in the city of Oakland.  It
happened, at that time, that a wireless telegraph station was
established by the Thurston Power Company close to his shop.  In a
short time his electroplating vat was put out of order.  The vat-
wiring had many bad joints, and, on investigation, Gluck discovered
minute welds at the joints in the wiring.  These, by lowering the
resistance, had caused an excessive current to pass through the
solution, "boiling" it and spoiling the work.  But what had caused
the welds? was the question in Gluck's mind.  His reasoning was
simple.  Before the establishment of the wireless station, the vat
had worked well.  Not until after the establishment of the wireless
station had the vat been ruined.  Therefore the wireless station
had been the cause.  But how?  He quickly answered the question.
If an electric discharge was capable of operating a coherer across
three thousand miles of ocean, then, certainly, the electric
discharges from the wireless station four hundred feet away could
produce coherer effects on the bad joints in the vat-wiring.

Gluck thought no more about it at the time.  He merely re-wired his
vat and went on electroplating.  But afterwards, in prison, he
remembered the incident, and like a flash there came into his mind
the full significance of it.  He saw in it the silent, secret
weapon with which to revenge himself on the world.  His great
discovery, which died with him, was control over the direction and
scope of the electric discharge.  At the time, this was the
unsolved problem of wireless telegraphy--as it still is to-day--but
Emil Gluck, in his prison cell, mastered it.  And, when he was
released, he applied it.  It was fairly simple, given the directing
power that was his, to introduce a spark into the powder-magazines
of a fort, a battleship, or a revolver.  And not alone could he
thus explode powder at a distance, but he could ignite
conflagrations.  The great Boston fire was started by him--quite by
accident, however, as he stated in his confession, adding that it
was a pleasing accident and that he had never had any reason to
regret it.

It was Emil Gluck that caused the terrible German-American War,
with the loss of 800,000 lives and the consumption of almost
incalculable treasure.  It will be remembered that in 1939, because
of the Pickard incident, strained relations existed between the two
countries.  Germany, though aggrieved, was not anxious for war,
and, as a peace token, sent the Crown Prince and seven battleships
on a friendly visit to the United States.  On the night of February
15, the seven warships lay at anchor in the Hudson opposite New
York City.  And on that night Emil Gluck, alone, with all his
apparatus on board, was out in a launch.  This launch, it was
afterwards proved, was bought by him from the Ross Turner Company,
while much of the apparatus he used that night had been purchased
from the Columbia Electric Works.  But this was not known at the
time.  All that was known was that the seven battleships blew up,
one after another, at regular four-minute intervals.  Ninety per
cent. of the crews and officers, along with the Crown Prince,
perished.  Many years before, the American battleship Maine had
been blown up in the harbour of Havana, and war with Spain had
immediately followed--though there has always existed a reasonable
doubt as to whether the explosion was due to conspiracy or
accident.  But accident could not explain the blowing up of the
seven battleships on the Hudson at four-minute intervals.  Germany
believed that it had been done by a submarine, and immediately
declared war.  It was six months after Gluck's confession that she
returned the Philippines and Hawaii to the United States.

In the meanwhile Emil Gluck, the malevolent wizard and arch-hater,
travelled his whirlwind path of destruction.  He left no traces.
Scientifically thorough, he always cleaned up after himself.  His
method was to rent a room or a house, and secretly to install his
apparatus--which apparatus, by the way, he so perfected and
simplified that it occupied little space.  After he had
accomplished his purpose he carefully removed the apparatus.  He
bade fair to live out a long life of horrible crime.

The epidemic of shooting of New York City policemen was a
remarkable affair.  It became one of the horror mysteries of the
time.  In two short weeks over a hundred policemen were shot in the
legs by their own revolvers.  Inspector Jones did not solve the
mystery, but it was his idea that finally outwitted Gluck.  On his
recommendation the policemen ceased carrying revolvers, and no more
accidental shootings occurred.

It was in the early spring of 1940 that Gluck destroyed the Mare
Island navy-yard.  From a room in Vallejo he sent his electric
discharges across the Vallejo Straits to Mare Island.  He first
played his flashes on the battleship Maryland.  She lay at the dock
of one of the mine-magazines.  On her forward deck, on a huge
temporary platform of timbers, were disposed over a hundred mines.
These mines were for the defence of the Golden Gate.  Any one of
these mines was capable of destroying a dozen battleships, and
there were over a hundred mines.  The destruction was terrific, but
it was only Gluck's overture.  He played his flashes down the Mare
Island shore, blowing up five torpedo boats, the torpedo station,
and the great magazine at the eastern end of the island.  Returning
westward again, and scooping in occasional isolated magazines on
the high ground back from the shore, he blew up three cruisers and
the battleships Oregon, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Florida--the
latter had just gone into dry-dock, and the magnificent dry-dock
was destroyed along with her.

It was a frightful catastrophe, and a shiver of horror passed
through the land.  But it was nothing to what was to follow.  In
the late fall of that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the
Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Florida.  Nothing escaped.  Forts,
mines, coast defences of all sorts, torpedo stations, magazines--
everything went up.  Three months afterward, in midwinter, he smote
the north shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece in
the same stupefying manner.  A wail went up from the nations.  It
was clear that human agency was behind all this destruction, and it
was equally clear, through Emil Gluck's impartiality, that the
destruction was not the work of any particular nation.  One thing
was patent, namely, that whoever was the human behind it all, that
human was a menace to the world.  No nation was safe.  There was no
defence against this unknown and all-powerful foe.  Warfare was
futile--nay, not merely futile but itself the very essence of the
peril.  For a twelve-month the manufacture of powder ceased, and
all soldiers and sailors were withdrawn from all fortifications and
war vessels.  And even a world-disarmament was seriously considered
at the Convention of the Powers, held at The Hague at that time.

And then Silas Bannerman, a secret service agent of the United
States, leaped into world-fame by arresting Emil Gluck.  At first
Bannerman was laughed at, but he had prepared his case well, and in
a few weeks the most sceptical were convinced of Emil Gluck's
guilt.  The one thing, however, that Silas Bannerman never
succeeded in explaining, even to his own satisfaction, was how
first he came to connect Gluck with the atrocious crimes.  It is
true, Bannerman was in Vallejo, on secret government business, at
the time of the destruction of Mare Island; and it is true that on
the streets of Vallejo Emil Gluck was pointed out to him as a queer
crank; but no impression was made at the time.  It was not until
afterward, when on a vacation in the Rocky Mountains and when
reading the first published reports of the destruction along the
Atlantic Coast, that suddenly Bannerman thought of Emil Gluck.  And
on the instant there flashed into his mind the connection between
Gluck and the destruction.  It was only an hypothesis, but it was
sufficient.  The great thing was the conception of the hypothesis,
in itself an act of unconscious cerebration--a thing as
unaccountable as the flashing, for instance, into Newton's mind of
the principle of gravitation.

The rest was easy.  Where was Gluck at the time of the destruction
along the Atlantic sea-board? was the question that formed in
Bannerman's mind.  By his own request he was put upon the case.  In
no time he ascertained that Gluck had himself been up and down the
Atlantic Coast in the late fall of 1940.  Also he ascertained that
Gluck had been in New York City during the epidemic of the shooting
of police officers.  Where was Gluck now? was Bannerman's next
query.  And, as if in answer, came the wholesale destruction along
the Mediterranean.  Gluck had sailed for Europe a month before--
Bannerman knew that.  It was not necessary for Bannerman to go to
Europe.  By means of cable messages and the co-operation of the
European secret services, he traced Gluck's course along the
Mediterranean and found that in every instance it coincided with
the blowing up of coast defences and ships.  Also, he learned that
Gluck had just sailed on the Green Star liner Plutonic for the
United States.

The case was complete in Bannerman's mind, though in the interval
of waiting he worked up the details.  In this he was ably assisted
by George Brown, an operator employed by the Wood's System of
Wireless Telegraphy.  When the Plutonic arrived off Sandy Hook she
was boarded by Bannerman from a Government tug, and Emil Gluck was
made a prisoner.  The trial and the confession followed.  In the
confession Gluck professed regret only for one thing, namely, that
he had taken his time.  As he said, had he dreamed that he was ever
to be discovered he would have worked more rapidly and accomplished
a thousand times the destruction he did.  His secret died with him,
though it is now known that the French Government managed to get
access to him and offered him a billion francs for his invention
wherewith he was able to direct and closely to confine electric
discharges.  "What!" was Gluck's reply--"to sell to you that which
would enable you to enslave and maltreat suffering Humanity?"  And
though the war departments of the nations have continued to
experiment in their secret laboratories, they have so far failed to
light upon the slightest trace of the secret.  Emil Gluck was
executed on December 4, 1941, and so died, at the age of forty-six,
one of the world's most unfortunate geniuses, a man of tremendous
intellect, but whose mighty powers, instead of making toward good,
were so twisted and warped that he became the most amazing of
criminals.

--Culled from Mr. A. G. Burnside's "Eccentricitics of Crime," by
kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday and Whitsund.



THE DREAM OF DEBS



I awoke fully an hour before my customary time.  This in itself was
remarkable, and I lay very wide awake, pondering over it.
Something was the matter, something was wrong--I knew not what.  I
was oppressed by a premonition of something terrible that had
happened or was about to happen.  But what was it?  I strove to
orient myself.  I remembered that at the time of the Great
Earthquake of 1906 many claimed they awakened some moments before
the first shock and that during these moments they experienced
strange feelings of dread.  Was San Francisco again to be visited
by earthquake?

I lay for a full minute, numbly expectant, but there occurred no
reeling of walls nor shock and grind of falling masonry.  All was
quiet.  That was it!  The silence!  No wonder I had been perturbed.
The hum of the great live city was strangely absent.  The surface
cars passed along my street, at that time of day, on an average of
one every three minutes; but in the ten succeeding minutes not a
car passed.  Perhaps it was a street-railway strike, was my
thought; or perhaps there had been an accident and the power was
shut off.  But no, the silence was too profound.  I heard no jar
and rattle of waggon wheels, nor stamp of iron-shod hoofs straining
up the steep cobble-stones.

Pressing the push-button beside my bed, I strove to hear the sound
of the bell, though I well knew it was impossible for the sound to
rise three stories to me even if the bell did ring.  It rang all
right, for a few minutes later Brown entered with the tray and
morning paper.  Though his features were impassive as ever, I noted
a startled, apprehensive light in his eyes.  I noted, also, that
there was no cream on the tray.

"The Creamery did not deliver this morning," he explained; "nor did
the bakery."

I glanced again at the tray.  There were no fresh French rolls--
only slices of stale graham bread from yesterday, the most
detestable of bread so far as I was concerned.

"Nothing was delivered this morning, sir," Brown started to explain
apologetically; but I interrupted him.

"The paper?"

"Yes, sir, it was delivered, but it was the only thing, and it is
the last time, too.  There won't be any paper to-morrow.  The paper
says so.  Can I send out and get you some condensed milk?"

I shook my head, accepted the coffee black, and spread open the
paper.  The headlines explained everything--explained too much, in
fact, for the lengths of pessimism to which the journal went were
ridiculous.  A general strike, it said, had been called all over
the United States; and most foreboding anxieties were expressed
concerning the provisioning of the great cities.

I read on hastily, skimming much and remembering much of labour
troubles in the past.  For a generation the general strike had been
the dream of organized labour, which dream had arisen originally in
the mind of Debs, one of the great labour leaders of thirty years
before.  I recollected that in my young college-settlement days I
had even written an article on the subject for one of the magazines
and that I had entitled it "The Dream of Debs."  And I must confess
that I had treated the idea very cavalierly and academically as a
dream and nothing more.  Time and the world had rolled on, Gompers
was gone, the American Federation of Labour was gone, and gone was
Debs with all his wild revolutionary ideas; but the dream had
persisted, and here it was at last realized in fact.  But I
laughed, as I read, at the journal's gloomy outlook.  I knew
better.  I had seen organized labour worsted in too many conflicts.
It would be a matter only of days when the thing would be settled.
This was a national strike, and it wouldn't take the Government
long to break it.

I threw the paper down and proceeded to dress.  It would certainly
be interesting to be out in the streets of San Francisco when not a
wheel was turning and the whole city was taking an enforced
vacation.

"I beg your pardon, sir," Brown said, as he handed me my cigar-
case, "but Mr. Harmmed has asked to see you before you go out."

"Send him in right away," I answered.

Harmmed was the butler.  When he entered I could see he was
labouring under controlled excitement.  He came at once to the
point.

"What shall I do, sir?  There will be needed provisions, and the
delivery drivers are on strike.  And the electricity is shut off--I
guess they're on strike, too."

"Are the shops open?" I asked.

"Only the small ones, sir.  The retail clerks are out, and the big
ones can't open; but the owners and their families are running the
little ones themselves."

"Then take the machine," I said, "and go the rounds and make your
purchases.  Buy plenty of everything you need or may need.  Get a
box of candles--no, get half-a-dozen boxes.  And, when you're done,
tell Harrison to bring the machine around to the club for me--not
later than eleven."

Harmmed shook his head gravely.  "Mr. Harrison has struck along
with the Chauffeurs' Union, and I don't know how to run the machine
myself."

"Oh, ho, he has, has he?" said.  "Well, when next Mister Harrison
happens around you tell him that he can look elsewhere for a
position."

"Yes, sir."

"You don't happen to belong to a Butlers' Union, do you, Harmmed?"

"No, sir," was the answer.  "And even if I did I'd not desert my
employer in a crisis like this.  No, sir, I would--"

"All right, thank you," I said.  "Now you get ready to accompany
me.  I'll run the machine myself, and we'll lay in a stock of
provisions to stand a siege."

It was a beautiful first of May, even as May days go.  The sky was
cloudless, there was no wind, and the air was warm--almost balmy.
Many autos were out, but the owners were driving them themselves.
The streets were crowded but quiet.  The working class, dressed in
its Sunday best, was out taking the air and observing the effects
of the strike.  It was all so unusual, and withal so peaceful, that
I found myself enjoying it.  My nerves were tingling with mild
excitement.  It was a sort of placid adventure.  I passed Miss
Chickering.  She was at the helm of her little runabout.  She swung
around and came after me, catching me at the corner.

"Oh, Mr. Corf!"' she hailed.  "Do you know where I can buy candles?
I've been to a dozen shops, and they're all sold out.  It's
dreadfully awful, isn't it?"

But her sparkling eyes gave the lie to her words.  Like the rest of
us, she was enjoying it hugely.  Quite an adventure it was, getting
those candles.  It was not until we went across the city and down
into the working-class quarter south of Market Street that we found
small corner groceries that had not yet sold out.  Miss Chickering
thought one box was sufficient, but I persuaded her into taking
four.  My car was large, and I laid in a dozen boxes.  There was no
telling what delays might arise in the settlement of the strike.
Also, I filled the car with sacks of flour, baking-powder, tinned
goods, and all the ordinary necessaries of life suggested by
Harmmed, who fussed around and clucked over the purchases like an
anxious old hen.

The remarkable thing, that first day of the strike, was that no one
really apprehended anything serious.  The announcement of organized
labour in the morning papers that it was prepared to stay out a
month or three months was laughed at.  And yet that very first day
we might have guessed as much from the fact that the working class
took practically no part in the great rush to buy provisions.  Of
course not.  For weeks and months, craftily and secretly, the whole
working class had been laying in private stocks of provisions.
That was why we were permitted to go down and buy out the little
groceries in the working-class neighbourhoods.

It was not until I arrived at the club that afternoon that I began
to feel the first alarm.  Everything was in confusion.  There were
no olives for the cocktails, and the service was by hitches and
jerks.  Most of the men were angry, and all were worried.  A babel
of voices greeted me as I entered.  General Folsom, nursing his
capacious paunch in a window-seat in the smoking-room was defending
himself against half-a-dozen excited gentlemen who were demanding
that he should do something.

"What can I do more than I have done?" he was saying.  "There are
no orders from Washington.  If you gentlemen will get a wire
through I'll do anything I am commanded to do.  But I don't see
what can be done.  The first thing I did this morning, as soon as I
learned of the strike, was to order in the troops from the
Presidio--three thousand of them.  They're guarding the banks, the
Mint, the post office, and all the public buildings.  There is no
disorder whatever.  The strikers are keeping the peace perfectly.
You can't expect me to shoot them down as they walk along the
streets with wives and children all in their best bib and tucker."

"I'd like to know what's happening on Wall Street," I heard Jimmy
Wombold say as I passed along.  I could imagine his anxiety, for I
knew that he was deep in the big Consolidated-Western deal.

"Say, Corf," Atkinson bustled up to me, "is your machine running?"

"Yes," I answered, "but what's the matter with your own?"

"Broken down, and the garages are all closed.  And my wife's
somewhere around Truckee, I think, stalled on the overland.  Can't
get a wire to her for love or money.  She should have arrived this
evening.  She may be starving.  Lend me your machine."

"Can't get it across the bay," Halstead spoke up.  "The ferries
aren't running.  But I tell you what you can do.  There's
Rollinson--oh, Rollinson, come here a moment.  Atkinson wants to
get a machine across the bay.  His wife is stuck on the overland at
Truckee.  Can't you bring the Lurlette across from Tiburon and
carry the machine over for him?"

The Lurlette was a two-hundred-ton, ocean-going schooner-yacht.

Rollinson shook his head.  "You couldn't get a longshoreman to land
the machine on board, even if I could get the Lurlette over, which
I can't, for the crew are members of the Coast Seamen's Union, and
they're on strike along with the rest."

"But my wife may be starving," I could hear Atkinson wailing as I
moved on.

At the other end of the smoking-room I ran into a group of men
bunched excitedly and angrily around Bertie Messener.  And Bertie
was stirring them up and prodding them in his cool, cynical way.
Bertie didn't care about the strike.  He didn't care much about
anything.  He was blase--at least in all the clean things of life;
the nasty things had no attraction for him.  He was worth twenty
millions, all of it in safe investments, and he had never done a
tap of productive work in his life--inherited it all from his
father and two uncles.  He had been everywhere, seen everything,
and done everything but get married, and this last in the face of
the grim and determined attack of a few hundred ambitious mammas.
For years he had been the greatest catch, and as yet he had avoided
being caught.  He was disgracefully eligible.  On top of his wealth
he was young, handsome, and, as I said before, clean.  He was a
great athlete, a young blond god that did everything perfectly and
admirably with the solitary exception of matrimony.  And he didn't
care about anything, had no ambitions, no passions, no desire to do
the very things he did so much better than other men.

"This is sedition!" one man in the group was crying.  Another
called it revolt and revolution, and another called it anarchy.

"I can't see it," Bertie said.  "I have been out in the streets all
morning.  Perfect order reigns.  I never saw a more law-abiding
populace.  There's no use calling it names.  It's not any of those
things.  It's just what it claims to be, a general strike, and it's
your turn to play, gentlemen."

"And we'll play all right!" cried Garfield, one of the traction
millionaires.  "We'll show this dirt where its place is--the
beasts!  Wait till the Government takes a hand."

"But where is the Government?" Bertie interposed.  "It might as
well be at the bottom of the sea so far as you're concerned.  You
don't know what's happening at Washington.  You don't know whether
you've got a Government or not."

"Don't you worry about that," Garfield blurted out.

"I assure you I'm not worrying," Bertie smiled languidly.  "But it
seems to me it's what you fellows are doing.  Look in the glass,
Garfield."

Garfield did not look, but had he looked he would have seen a very
excited gentleman with rumpled, iron-grey hair, a flushed face,
mouth sullen and vindictive, and eyes wildly gleaming.

"It's not right, I tell you," little Hanover said; and from his
tone I was sure that he had already said it a number of times.

"Now that's going too far, Hanover," Bertie replied.  "You fellows
make me tired.  You're all open-shop men.  You've eroded my
eardrums with your endless gabble for the open shop and the right
of a man to work.  You've harangued along those lines for years.
Labour is doing nothing wrong in going out on this general strike.
It is violating no law of God nor man.  Don't you talk, Hanover.
You've been ringing the changes too long on the God-given right to
work . . . or not to work; you can't escape the corollary.  It's a
dirty little sordid scrap, that's all the whole thing is.  You've
got labour down and gouged it, and now labour's got you down and is
gouging you, that's all, and you're squealing."

Every man in the group broke out in indignant denials that labour
had ever been gouged.

"No, sir!" Garfield was shouting.  "We've done the best for labour.
Instead of gouging it, we've given it a chance to live.  We've made
work for it.  Where would labour be if it hadn't been for us?"

"A whole lot better off," Bertie sneered.  "You've got labour down
and gouged it every time you got a chance, and you went out of your
way to make chances."

"No!  No!" were the cries.

"There was the teamsters' strike, right here in San Francisco,"
Bertie went on imperturbably.  "The Employers' Association
precipitated that strike.  You know that.  And you know I know it,
too, for I've sat in these very rooms and heard the inside talk and
news of the fight.  First you precipitated the strike, then you
bought the Mayor and the Chief of Police and broke the strike.  A
pretty spectacle, you philanthropists getting the teamsters down
and gouging them.

"Hold on, I'm not through with you.  It's only last year that the
labour ticket of Colorado elected a governor.  He was never seated.
You know why.  You know how your brother philanthropists and
capitalists of Colorado worked it.  It was a case of getting labour
down and gouging it.  You kept the president of the South-western
Amalgamated Association of Miners in jail for three years on
trumped-up murder charges, and with him out of the way you broke up
the association.  That was gouging labour, you'll admit.  The third
time the graduated income tax was declared unconstitutional was a
gouge.  So was the eight-hour Bill you killed in the last Congress.

"And of all unmitigated immoral gouges, your destruction of the
closed-shop principle was the limit.  You know how it was done. You
bought out Farburg, the last president of the old American
Federation of Labour.  He was your creature--or the creature of all
the trusts and employers' associations, which is the same thing.
You precipitated the big closed-shop strike.  Farburg betrayed that
strike.  You won, and the old American Federation of Labour
crumbled to pieces.  You follows destroyed it, and by so doing
undid yourselves; for right on top of it began the organization of
the I.L.W.--the biggest and solidest organization of labour the
United States has ever seen, and you are responsible for its
existence and for the present general strike.  You smashed all the
old federations and drove labour into the I.L.W., and the I.L.W.
called the general strike--still fighting for the closed shop.  And
then you have the effrontery to stand here face to face and tell me
that you never got labour down and gouged it.  Bah!"

This time there were no denials.  Garfield broke out in self-
defence--

"We've done nothing we were not compelled to do, if we were to
win."

"I'm not saying anything about that," Bertie answered.  "What I am
complaining about is your squealing now that you're getting a taste
of your own medicine.  How many strikes have you won by starving
labour into submission?  Well, labour's worked out a scheme whereby
to starve you into submission.  It wants the closed shop, and, if
it can get it by starving you, why, starve you shall."

"I notice that you have profited in the past by those very labour
gouges you mention," insinuated Brentwood, one of the wiliest and
most astute of our corporation lawyers.  "The receiver is as bad as
the thief," he sneered.  "You had no hand in the gouging, but you
took your whack out of the gouge."

"That is quite beside the question, Brentwood," Bertie drawled.
"You're as bad as Hanover, intruding the moral element.  I haven't
said that anything is right or wrong.  It's all a rotten game, I
know; and my sole kick is that you fellows are squealing now that
you're down and labour's taking a gouge out of you.  Of course I've
taken the profits from the gouging and, thanks to you, gentlemen,
without having personally to do the dirty work.  You did that for
me--oh, believe me, not because I am more virtuous than you, but
because my good father and his various brothers left me a lot of
money with which to pay for the dirty work."

"If you mean to insinuate--" Brentwood began hotly.

"Hold on, don't get all-ruffled up," Bertie interposed insolently.
"There's no use in playing hypocrites in this thieves' den.  The
high and lofty is all right for the newspapers, boys' clubs, and
Sunday schools--that's part of the game; but for heaven's sake
don't let's play it on one another.  You know, and you know that I
know just what jobbery was done in the building trades' strike last
fall, who put up the money, who did the work, and who profited by
it."  (Brentwood flushed darkly.)  "But we are all tarred with the
same brush, and the best thing for us to do is to leave morality
out of it.  Again I repeat, play the game, play it to the last
finish, but for goodness' sake don't squeal when you get hurt."

When I left the group Bertie was off on a new tack tormenting them
with the more serious aspects of the situation, pointing out the
shortage of supplies that was already making itself felt, and
asking them what they were going to do about it.  A little later I
met him in the cloak-room, leaving, and gave him a lift home in my
machine.

"It's a great stroke, this general strike," he said, as we bowled
along through the crowded but orderly streets.  "It's a smashing
body-blow.  Labour caught us napping and struck at our weakest
place, the stomach.  I'm going to get out of San Francisco, Corf.
Take my advice and get out, too.  Head for the country, anywhere.
You'll have more chance.  Buy up a stock of supplies and get into a
tent or a cabin somewhere.  Soon there'll be nothing but starvation
in this city for such as we."

How correct Bertie Messener was I never dreamed.  I decided that he
was an alarmist.  As for myself, I was content to remain and watch
the fun.  After I dropped him, instead of going directly home, I
went on in a hunt for more food.  To my surprise, I learned that
the small groceries where I had bought in the morning were sold
out.  I extended my search to the Potrero, and by good luck managed
to pick up another box of candles, two sacks of wheat flour, ten
pounds of graham flour (which would do for the servants), a case of
tinned corn, and two cases of tinned tomatoes.  It did look as
though there was going to be at least a temporary food shortage,
and I hugged myself over the goodly stock of provisions I had laid
in.

The next morning I had my coffee in bed as usual, and, more than
the cream, I missed the daily paper.  It was this absence of
knowledge of what was going on in the world that I found the chief
hardship.  Down at the club there was little news.  Rider had
crossed from Oakland in his launch, and Halstead had been down to
San Jose and back in his machine.  They reported the same
conditions in those places as in San Francisco.  Everything was
tied up by the strike.  All grocery stocks had been bought out by
the upper classes.  And perfect order reigned.  But what was
happening over the rest of the country--in Chicago?  New York?
Washington?  Most probably the same things that were happening with
us, we concluded; but the fact that we did not know with absolute
surety was irritating.

General Folsom had a bit of news.  An attempt had been made to
place army telegraphers in the telegraph offices, but the wires had
been cut in every direction.  This was, so far, the one unlawful
act committed by labour, and that it was a concerted act he was
fully convinced.  He had communicated by wireless with the army
post at Benicia, the telegraph lines were even then being patrolled
by soldiers all the way to Sacramento.  Once, for one short
instant, they had got the Sacramento call, then the wires,
somewhere, were cut again.  General Folsom reasoned that similar
attempts to open communication were being made by the authorities
all the way across the continent, but he was non-committal as to
whether or not he thought the attempt would succeed.  What worried
him was the wire-cutting; he could not but believe that it was an
important part of the deep-laid labour conspiracy.  Also, he
regretted that the Government had not long since established its
projected chain of wireless stations.

The days came and went, and for a while it was a humdrum time.
Nothing happened.  The edge of excitement had become blunted.  The
streets were not so crowded.  The working class did not come uptown
any more to see how we were taking the strike.  And there were not
so many automobiles running around.  The repair-shops and garages
were closed, and whenever a machine broke down it went out of
commission.  The clutch on mine broke, and neither love nor money
could get it repaired.  Like the rest, I was now walking.  San
Francisco lay dead, and we did not know what was happening over the
rest of the country.  But from the very fact that we did not know
we could conclude only that the rest of the country lay as dead as
San Francisco.  From time to time the city was placarded with the
proclamations of organized labour--these had been printed months
before, and evidenced how thoroughly the I.L.W. had prepared for
the strike.  Every detail had been worked out long in advance.  No
violence had occurred as yet, with the exception of the shooting of
a few wire-cutters by the soldiers, but the people of the slums
were starving and growing ominously restless.

The business men, the millionaires, and the professional class held
meetings and passed resolutions, but there was no way of making the
proclamations public.  They could not even get them printed.  One
result of these meetings, however, was that General Folsom was
persuaded into taking military possession of the wholesale houses
and of all the flour, grain, and food warehouses.  It was high
time, for suffering was becoming acute in the homes of the rich,
and bread-lines were necessary.  I knew that my servants were
beginning to draw long faces, and it was amazing--the hole they
made in my stock of provisions.  In fact, as I afterward surmised,
each servant was stealing from me and secreting a private stock of
provisions for himself.

But with the formation of the bread-lines came new troubles.  There
was only so much of a food reserve in San Francisco, and at the
best it could not last long.  Organized labour, we knew, had its
private supplies; nevertheless, the whole working class joined the
bread-lines.  As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken
possession of diminished with perilous rapidity.  How were the
soldiers to distinguish between a shabby middle-class man, a member
of the I.L.W., or a slum dweller?  The first and the last had to be
fed, but the soldiers did not know all the I.L.W. men in the city,
much less the wives and sons and daughters of the I.L.W. men.  The
employers helping, a few of the known union men were flung out of
the bread-lines; but that amounted to nothing.  To make matters
worse, the Government tugs that had been hauling food from the army
depots on Mare Island to Angel Island found no more food to haul.
The soldiers now received their rations from the confiscated
provisions, and they received them first.

The beginning of the end was in sight.  Violence was beginning to
show its face.  Law and order were passing away, and passing away,
I must confess, among the slum people and the upper classes.
Organized labour still maintained perfect order.  It could well
afford to--it had plenty to eat.  I remember the afternoon at the
club when I caught Halstead and Brentwood whispering in a corner.
They took me in on the venture.  Brentwood's machine was still in
running order, and they were going out cow-stealing.  Halstead had
a long butcher knife and a cleaver.  We went out to the outskirts
of the city.  Here and there were cows grazing, but always they
were guarded by their owners.  We pursued our quest, following
along the fringe of the city to the east, and on the hills near
Hunter's Point we came upon a cow guarded by a little girl.  There
was also a young calf with the cow.  We wasted no time on
preliminaries.  The little girl ran away screaming, while we
slaughtered the cow.  I omit the details, for they are not nice--we
were unaccustomed to such work, and we bungled it.

But in the midst of it, working with the haste of fear, we heard
cries, and we saw a number of men running toward us.  We abandoned
the spoils and took to our heels.  To our surprise we were not
pursued.  Looking back, we saw the men hurriedly cutting up the
cow.  They had been on the same lay as ourselves.  We argued that
there was plenty for all, and ran back.  The scene that followed
beggars description.  We fought and squabbled over the division
like savages.  Brentwood, I remember, was a perfect brute, snarling
and snapping and threatening that murder would be done if we did
not get our proper share.

And we were getting our share when there occurred a new irruption
on the scene.  This time it was the dreaded peace officers of the
I.L.W.  The little girl had brought them.  They were armed with
whips and clubs, and there were a score of them.  The little girl
danced up and down in anger, the tears streaming down her cheeks,
crying:  "Give it to 'em!  Give it to 'em!  That guy with the
specs--he did it!  Mash his face for him!  Mash his face!"  That
guy with the specs was I, and I got my face mashed, too, though I
had the presence of mind to take off my glasses at the first.  My!
but we did receive a trouncing as we scattered in all directions.
Brentwood, Halstead, and I fled away for the machine.  Brentwood's
nose was bleeding, while Halstead's cheek was cut across with the
scarlet slash of a black-snake whip.

And, lo, when the pursuit ceased and we had gained the machine,
there, hiding behind it, was the frightened calf.  Brentwood warned
us to be cautious, and crept up on it like a wolf or tiger.  Knife
and cleaver had been left behind, but Brentwood still had his
hands, and over and over on the ground he rolled with the poor
little calf as he throttled it.  We threw the carcass into the
machine, covered it over with a robe, and started for home.  But
our misfortunes had only begun.  We blew out a tyre.  There was no
way of fixing it, and twilight was coming on.  We abandoned the
machine, Brentwood pulling and staggering along in advance, the
calf, covered by the robe, slung across his shoulders.  We took
turn about carrying that calf, and it nearly killed us.  Also, we
lost our way.  And then, after hours of wandering and toil, we
encountered a gang of hoodlums.  They were not I.L.W. men, and I
guess they were as hungry as we.  At any rate, they got the calf
and we got the thrashing.  Brentwood raged like a madman the rest
of the way home, and he looked like one, with his torn clothes,
swollen nose, and blackened eyes.

There wasn't any more cow-stealing after that.  General Folsom sent
his troopers out and confiscated all the cows, and his troopers,
aided by the militia, ate most of the meat.  General Folsom was not
to be blamed; it was his duty to maintain law and order, and he
maintained it by means of the soldiers, wherefore he was compelled
to feed them first of all.

It was about this time that the great panic occurred.  The wealthy
classes precipitated the flight, and then the slum people caught
the contagion and stampeded wildly out of the city.  General Folsom
was pleased.  It was estimated that at least 200,000 had deserted
San Francisco, and by that much was his food problem solved.  Well
do I remember that day.  In the morning I had eaten a crust of
bread.  Half of the afternoon I had stood in the bread-line; and
after dark I returned home, tired and miserable, carrying a quart
of rice and a slice of bacon.  Brown met me at the door.  His face
was worn and terrified.  All the servants had fled, he informed me.
He alone remained.  I was touched by his faithfulness and, when I
learned that he had eaten nothing all day, I divided my food with
him.  We cooked half the rice and half the bacon, sharing it
equally and reserving the other half for morning.  I went to bed
with my hunger, and tossed restlessly all night.  In the morning I
found Brown had deserted me, and, greater misfortune still, he had
stolen what remained of the rice and bacon.

It was a gloomy handful of men that came together at the club that
morning.  There was no service at all.  The last servant was gone.
I noticed, too, that the silver was gone, and I learned where it
had gone.  The servants had not taken it, for the reason, I
presume, that the club members got to it first.  Their method of
disposing of it was simple.  Down south of Market Street, in the
dwellings of the I.L.W., the housewives had given square meals in
exchange for it.  I went back to my house.  Yes, my silver was
gone--all but a massive pitcher.  This I wrapped up and carried
down south of Market Street.

I felt better after the meal, and returned to the club to learn if
there was anything new in the situation.  Hanover, Collins, and
Dakon were just leaving.  There was no one inside, they told me,
and they invited me to come along with them.  They were leaving the
city, they said, on Dakon's horses, and there was a spare one for
me. Dakon had four magnificent carriage horses that he wanted to
save, and General Folsom had given him the tip that next morning
all the horses that remained in the city were to be confiscated for
food.  There were not many horses left, for tens of thousands of
them had been turned loose into the country when the hay and grain
gave out during the first days.  Birdall, I remember, who had great
draying interests, had turned loose three hundred dray horses.  At
an average value of five hundred dollars, this had amounted to
$150,000.  He had hoped, at first, to recover most of the horses
after the strike was over, but in the end he never recovered one of
them.  They were all eaten by the people that fled from San
Francisco.  For that matter, the killing of the army mules and
horses for food had already begun.

Fortunately for Dakon, he had had a plentiful supply of hay and
grain stored in his stable.  We managed to raise four saddles, and
we found the animals in good condition and spirited, withal unused
to being ridden.  I remembered the San Francisco of the great
earthquake as we rode through the streets, but this San Francisco
was vastly more pitiable.  No cataclysm of nature had caused this,
but, rather, the tyranny of the labour unions.  We rode down past
Union Square and through the theatre, hotel, and shopping
districts.  The streets were deserted.  Here and there stood
automobiles, abandoned where they had broken down or when the
gasolene had given out.  There was no sign of life, save for the
occasional policemen and the soldiers guarding the banks and public
buildings.  Once we came upon an I.L.W. man pasting up the latest
proclamation.  We stopped to read.  "We have maintained an orderly
strike," it ran; "and we shall maintain order to the end.  The end
will come when our demands are satisfied, and our demands will be
satisfied when we have starved our employers into submission, as we
ourselves in the past have often been starved into submission."

"Messener's very words," Collins said.  "And I, for one, am ready
to submit, only they won't give me a chance to submit.  I haven't
had a full meal in an age.  I wonder what horse-meat tastes like?"

We stopped to read another proclamation:  "When we think our
employers are ready to submit we shall open up the telegraphs and
place the employers' associations of the United States in
communication.  But only messages relating to peace terms shall be
permitted over the wires."

We rode on, crossed Market Street, and a little later were passing
through the working-class district.  Here the streets were not
deserted.  Leaning over the gates or standing in groups were the
I.L.W. men.  Happy, well-fed children were playing games, and stout
housewives sat on the front steps gossiping.  One and all cast
amused glances at us.  Little children ran after us, crying:  "Hey,
mister, ain't you hungry?"  And one woman, nursing a child at her
breast, called to Dakon:  "Say, Fatty, I'll give you a meal for
your skate--ham and potatoes, currant jelly, white bread, canned
butter, and two cups of coffee."

"Have you noticed, the last few days," Hanover remarked to me,
"that there's not been a stray dog in the streets?"

I had noticed, but I had not thought about it before.  It was high
time to leave the unfortunate city.  We at last managed to connect
with the San Bruno Road, along which we headed south.  I had a
country place near Menlo, and it was our objective.  But soon we
began to discover that the country was worse off and far more
dangerous than the city.  There the soldiers and the I.L.W. kept
order; but the country had been turned over to anarchy.  Two
hundred thousand people had fled from San Francisco, and we had
countless evidences that their flight had been like that of an army
of locusts.

They had swept everything clean.  There had been robbery and
fighting.  Here and there we passed bodies by the roadside and saw
the blackened ruins of farm-houses.  The fences were down, and the
crops had been trampled by the feet of a multitude.  All the
vegetable patches had been rooted up by the famished hordes.  All
the chickens and farm animals had been slaughtered.  This was true
of all the main roads that led out of San Francisco.  Here and
there, away from the roads, farmers had held their own with
shotguns and revolvers, and were still holding their own.  They
warned us away and refused to parley with us.  And all the
destruction and violence had been done by the slum-dwellers and the
upper classes.  The I.L.W. men, with plentiful food supplies,
remained quietly in their homes in the cities.

Early in the ride we received concrete proof of how desperate was
the situation.  To the right of us we heard cries and rifle-shots.
Bullets whistled dangerously near.  There was a crashing in the
underbrush; then a magnificent black truck-horse broke across the
road in front of us and was gone.  We had barely time to notice
that he was bleeding and lame.  He was followed by three soldiers.
The chase went on among the trees on the left.  We could hear the
soldiers calling to one another.  A fourth soldier limped out upon
the road from the right, sat down on a boulder, and mopped the
sweat from his face.

"Militia," Dakon whispered.  "Deserters."

The man grinned up at us and asked for a match.  In reply to
Dakon's "What's the word?" he informed us that the militiamen were
deserting.  "No grub," he explained.  "They're feedin' it all to
the regulars."  We also learned from him that the military
prisoners had been released from Alcatraz Island because they could
no longer be fed.

I shall never forget the next sight we encountered.  We came upon
it abruptly around a turn of the road.  Overhead arched the trees.
The sunshine was filtering down through the branches.  Butterflies
were fluttering by, and from the fields came the song of larks.
And there it stood, a powerful touring car.  About it and in it lay
a number of corpses.  It told its own tale.  Its occupants, fleeing
from the city, had been attacked and dragged down by a gang of slum
dwellers--hoodlums.  The thing had occurred within twenty-four
hours.  Freshly opened meat and fruit tins explained the reason for
the attack.  Dakon examined the bodies.

"I thought so," he reported.  "I've ridden in that car.  It was
Perriton--the whole family.  We've got to watch out for ourselves
from now on."

"But we have no food with which to invite attack," I objected.

Dakon pointed to the horse I rode, and I understood.

Early in the day Dakon's horse had cast a shoe.  The delicate hoof
had split, and by noon the animal was limping.  Dakon refused to
ride it farther, and refused to desert it.  So, on his
solicitation, we went on.  He would lead the horse and join us at
my place.  That was the last we saw of him; nor did we ever learn
his end.

By one o'clock we arrived at the town of Menlo, or, rather, at the
site of Menlo, for it was in ruins.  Corpses lay everywhere.  The
business part of the town, as well as part of the residences, had
been gutted by fire.  Here and there a residence still held out;
but there was no getting near them.  When we approached too closely
we were fired upon.  We met a woman who was poking about in the
smoking ruins of her cottage.  The first attack, she told us had
been on the stores, and as she talked we could picture that raging,
roaring, hungry mob flinging itself on the handful of townspeople.
Millionaires and paupers had fought side by side for the food, and
then fought with one another after they got it.  The town of Palo
Alto and Stanford University had been sacked in similar fashion, we
learned.  Ahead of us lay a desolate, wasted land; and we thought
we were wise in turning off to my place.  It lay three miles to the
west, snuggling among the first rolling swells of the foothills.

But as we rode along we saw that the devastation was not confined
to the main roads.  The van of the flight had kept to the roads,
sacking the small towns as it went; while those that followed had
scattered out and swept the whole countryside like a great broom.
My place was built of concrete, masonry, and tiles, and so had
escaped being burned, but it was gutted clean.  We found the
gardener's body in the windmill, littered around with empty shot-
gun shells.  He had put up a good fight.  But no trace could we
find of the two Italian labourers, nor of the house-keeper and her
husband.  Not a live thing remained.  The calves, the colts, all
the fancy poultry and thoroughbred stock, everything, was gone.
The kitchen and the fireplaces, where the mob had cooked, were a
mess, while many camp-fires outside bore witness to the large
number that had fed and spent the night.  What they had not eaten
they had carried away.  There was not a bite for us.

We spent the rest of the night vainly waiting for Dakon, and in the
morning, with our revolvers, fought off half-a-dozen marauders.
Then we killed one of Dakon's horses, hiding for the future what
meat we did not immediately eat.  In the afternoon Collins went out
for a walk, but failed to return.  This was the last straw to
Hanover.  He was for flight there and then, and I had great
difficulty in persuading him to wait for daylight.  As for myself,
I was convinced that the end of the general strike was near, and I
was resolved to return to San Francisco.  So, in the morning, we
parted company, Hanover heading south, fifty pounds of horse-meat
strapped to his saddle, while I, similarly loaded, headed north.
Little Hanover pulled through all right, and to the end of his life
he will persist, I know, in boring everybody with the narrative of
his subsequent adventures.

I got as far as Belmont, on the main road back, when I was robbed
of my horse-meat by three militiamen.  There was no change in the
situation, they said, except that it was going from bad to worse.
The I.L.W. had plenty of provisions hidden away and could last out
for months.  I managed to get as far as Baden, when my horse was
taken away from me by a dozen men.  Two of them were San Francisco
policemen, and the remainder were regular soldiers.  This was
ominous.  The situation was certainly extreme when the regulars
were beginning to desert.  When I continued my way on foot, they
already had the fire started, and the last of Dakon's horses lay
slaughtered on the ground.

As luck would have it, I sprained my ankle, and succeeded in
getting no farther than South San Francisco.  I lay there that
night in an out-house, shivering with the cold and at the same time
burning with fever.  Two days I lay there, too sick to move, and on
the third, reeling and giddy, supporting myself on an extemporized
crutch, I tottered on toward San Francisco.  I was weak as well,
for it was the third day since food had passed my lips.  It was a
day of nightmare and torment.  As in a dream I passed hundreds of
regular soldiers drifting along in the opposite direction, and many
policemen, with their families, organized in large groups for
mutual protection.

As I entered the city I remembered the workman's house at which I
had traded the silver pitcher, and in that direction my hunger
drove me.  Twilight was falling when I came to the place.  I passed
around by the alleyway and crawled up the black steps, on which I
collapsed.  I managed to reach out with the crutch and knock on the
door.  Then I must have fainted, for I came to in the kitchen, my
face wet with water, and whisky being poured down my throat.  I
choked and spluttered and tried to talk.  I began saying something
about not having any more silver pitchers, but that I would make it
up to them afterward if they would only give me something to eat.
But the housewife interrupted me.

"Why, you poor man," she said, "haven't you heard?  The strike was
called off this afternoon.  Of course we'll give you something to
eat."

She bustled around, opening a tin of breakfast bacon and preparing
to fry it.

"Let me have some now, please," I begged; and I ate the raw bacon
on a slice of bread, while her husband explained that the demands
of the I.L.W. had been granted.  The wires had been opened up in
the early afternoon, and everywhere the employers' associations had
given in.  There hadn't been any employers left in San Francisco,
but General Folsom had spoken for them.  The trains and steamers
would start running in the morning, and so would everything else
just as soon as system could be established.

And that was the end of the general strike.  I never want to see
another one.  It was worse than a war.  A general strike is a cruel
and immoral thing, and the brain of man should be capable of
running industry in a more rational way.  Harrison is still my
chauffeur.  It was part of the conditions of the I.L.W. that all of
its members should be reinstated in their old positions.  Brown
never came back, but the rest of the servants are with me.  I
hadn't the heart to discharge them--poor creatures, they were
pretty hard-pressed when they deserted with the food and silver.
And now I can't discharge them.  They have all been unionized by
the I.L.W.  The tyranny of organized labour is getting beyond human
endurance.  Something must be done.



THE SEA-FARMER



"That wull be the doctor's launch," said Captain MacElrath.

The pilot grunted, while the skipper swept on with his glass from
the launch to the strip of beach and to Kingston beyond, and then
slowly across the entrance to Howth Head on the northern side.

"The tide's right, and we'll have you docked in two hours," the
pilot vouchsafed, with an effort at cheeriness.  "Ring's End Basin,
is it?"

This time the skipper grunted.

"A dirty Dublin day."

Again the skipper grunted.  He was weary with the night of wind in
the Irish Channel behind him, the unbroken hours of which he had
spent on the bridge.  And he was weary with all the voyage behind
him--two years and four months between home port and home port,
eight hundred and fifty days by his log.

"Proper wunter weather," he answered, after a silence.  "The town
is undistinct.  Ut wull be rainun' guid an' hearty for the day."

Captain MacElrath was a small man, just comfortably able to peep
over the canvas dodger of the bridge.  The pilot and third officer
loomed above him, as did the man at the wheel, a bulky German,
deserted from a warship, whom he had signed on in Rangoon.  But his
lack of inches made Captain MacElrath a no less able man.  At least
so the Company reckoned, and so would he have reckoned could he
have had access to the carefully and minutely compiled record of
him filed away in the office archives.  But the Company had never
given him a hint of its faith in him.  It was not the way of the
Company, for the Company went on the principle of never allowing an
employee to think himself indispensable or even exceedingly useful;
wherefore, while quick to censure, it never praised.  What was
Captain MacElrath, anyway, save a skipper, one skipper of the
eighty-odd skippers that commanded the Company's eighty-odd
freighters on all the highways and byways of the sea?

Beneath them, on the main deck, two Chinese stokers were carrying
breakfast for'ard across the rusty iron plates that told their own
grim story of weight and wash of sea.  A sailor was taking down the
life-line that stretched from the forecastle, past the hatches and
cargo-winches, to the bridge-deck ladder.

"A rough voyage," suggested the pilot.

"Aye, she was fair smokin' ot times, but not thot I minded thot so
much as the lossin' of time.  I hate like onythun' tull loss time."

So saying, Captain MacElrath turned and glanced aft, aloft and
alow, and the pilot, following his gaze, saw the mute but
convincing explanation of that loss of time.  The smoke-stack,
buff-coloured underneath, was white with salt, while the whistle-
pipe glittered crystalline in the random sunlight that broke for
the instant through a cloud-rift.  The port lifeboat was missing,
its iron davits, twisted and wrenched, testifying to the mightiness
of the blow that had been struck the old Tryapsic.  The starboard
davits were also empty.  The shattered wreck of the lifeboat they
had held lay on the fiddley beside the smashed engine-room
skylight, which was covered by a tarpaulin.  Below, to star-board,
on the bridge deck, the pilot saw the crushed mess-room door,
roughly bulkheaded against the pounding seas.  Abreast of it, on
the smokestack guys, and being taken down by the bos'n and a
sailor, hung the huge square of rope netting which had failed to
break those seas of their force.

"Twice afore I mentioned thot door tull the owners," said Captain
MacElrath.  "But they said ut would do.  There was bug seas thot
time.  They was uncreditable bug.  And thot buggest one dud the
domage.  Ut fair carried away the door an' laid ut flat on the mess
table an' smashed out the chief's room.  He was a but sore about
ut."

"It must 'a' been a big un," the pilot remarked sympathetically.

"Aye, ut was thot.  Thungs was lively for a but.  Ut finished the
mate.  He was on the brudge wuth me, an' I told hum tull take a
look tull the wedges o' number one hatch.  She was takin' watter
freely an' I was no sure o' number one.  I dudna like the look o'
ut, an' I was fuggerin' maybe tull heave to tull the marn, when she
took ut over abaft the brudge.  My word, she was a bug one.  We got
a but of ut ourselves on the brudge.  I dudna miss the mate ot the
first, what o' routin' out Chips an' bulkheadun' thot door an'
stretchun' the tarpaulin over the sky-light.  Then he was nowhere
to be found.  The men ot the wheel said as he seen hum goin' down
the lodder just afore she hut us.  We looked for'ard, we looked
tull hus room, aye looked tull the engine-room, an' we looked along
aft on the lower deck, and there he was, on both sides the cover to
the steam-pipe runnun' tull the after-wunches."

The pilot ejaculated an oath of amazement and horror.

"Aye," the skipper went on wearily, "an' on both sides the steam-
pipe uz well.  I tell ye he was in two pieces, splut clean uz a
herrin'.  The sea must a-caught hum on the upper brudge deck,
carried hum clean across the fiddley, an' banged hum head-on tull
the pipe cover.  It sheered through hum like so much butter, down
atween the eyes, an' along the middle of hum, so that one leg an'
arm was fast tull the one piece of hum, an' one leg an' arm fast
tull the other piece of hum.  I tull ye ut was fair grewsome.  We
putt hum together an' rolled hum in canvas uz we pulled hum out."

The pilot swore again.

"Oh, ut wasna onythun' tull greet about," Captain MacElrath assured
him.  "'Twas a guid ruddance.  He was no a sailor, thot mate-
fellow.  He was only fut for a pugsty, an' a dom puir apology for
thot same."

It is said that there are three kinds of Irish--Catholic,
Protestant, and North-of-Ireland--and that the North-of-Ireland
Irishman is a transplanted Scotchman.  Captain MacElrath was a
North-of-Ireland man, and, talking for much of the world like a
Scotchman, nothing aroused his ire quicker than being mistaken for
a Scotchman.  Irish he stoutly was, and Irish he stoutly abided,
though it was with a faint lip-lift of scorn that he mentioned mere
South-of-Ireland men, or even Orange-men.  Himself he was
Presbyterian, while in his own community five men were all that
ever mustered at a meeting in the Orange Men's Hall.  His community
was the Island McGill, where seven thousand of his kind lived in
such amity and sobriety that in the whole island there was but one
policeman and never a public-house at all.

Captain MacElrath did not like the sea, and had never liked it.  He
wrung his livelihood from it, and that was all the sea was, the
place where he worked, as the mill, the shop, and the counting-
house were the places where other men worked.  Romance never sang
to him her siren song, and Adventure had never shouted in his
sluggish blood.  He lacked imagination.  The wonders of the deep
were without significance to him.  Tornadoes, hurricanes,
waterspouts, and tidal waves were so many obstacles to the way of a
ship on the sea and of a master on the bridge--they were that to
him, and nothing more.  He had seen, and yet not seen, the many
marvels and wonders of far lands.  Under his eyelids burned the
brazen glories of the tropic seas, or ached the bitter gales of the
North Atlantic or far South Pacific; but his memory of them was of
mess-room doors stove in, of decks awash and hatches threatened, of
undue coal consumption, of long passages, and of fresh paint-work
spoiled by unexpected squalls of rain.

"I know my buzz'ness," was the way he often put it, and beyond his
business was all that he did not know, all that he had seen with
the mortal eyes of him and yet that he never dreamed existed.  That
he knew his business his owners were convinced, or at forty he
would not have held command of the Tryapsic, three thousand tons
net register, with a cargo capacity of nine thousand tons and
valued at fifty-thousand pounds.

He had taken up seafaring through no love of it, but because it had
been his destiny, because he had been the second son of his father
instead of the first.  Island McGill was only so large, and the
land could support but a certain definite proportion of those that
dwelt upon it.  The balance, and a large balance it was, was driven
to the sea to seek its bread.  It had been so for generations.  The
eldest sons took the farms from their fathers; to the other sons
remained the sea and its salt-ploughing.  So it was that Donald
MacElrath, farmer's son and farm-boy himself, had shifted from the
soil he loved to the sea he hated and which it was his destiny to
farm.  And farmed it he had, for twenty years, shrewd, cool-headed,
sober, industrious, and thrifty, rising from ship's boy and
forecastle hand to mate and master of sailing-ships and thence into
steam, second officer, first, and master, from small command to
larger, and at last to the bridge of the old Tryapsic--old, to be
sure, but worth her fifty thousand pounds and still able to bear up
in all seas, and weather her nine thousand tons of freight.

From the bridge of the Tryapsic, the high place he had gained in
the competition of men, he stared at Dublin harbour opening out, at
the town obscured by the dark sky of the dreary wind-driven day,
and at the tangled tracery of spars and rigging of the harbour
shipping.  Back from twice around the world he was, and from
interminable junketings up and down on far stretches, home-coming
to the wife he had not seen in eight-and-twenty months, and to the
child he had never seen and that was already walking and talking.
He saw the watch below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the
forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way
aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor.  They
were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they
walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the
clumsy brogans were too heavy for their lean shanks.

He saw them and he did not see them, as he passed his hand beneath
his visored cap and scratched reflectively his mop of sandy hair.
For the scene before him was but the background in his brain for
the vision of peace that was his--a vision that was his often
during long nights on the bridge when the old Tryapsic wallowed on
the vexed ocean floor, her decks awash, her rigging thrumming in
the gale gusts or snow squalls or driving tropic rain.  And the
vision he saw was of farm and farm-house and straw-thatched
outbuildings, of children playing in the sun, and the good wife at
the door, of lowing kine, and clucking fowls, and the stamp of
horses in the stable, of his father's farm next to him, with,
beyond, the woodless, rolling land and the hedged fields, neat and
orderly, extending to the crest of the smooth, soft hills.  It was
his vision and his dream, his Romance and Adventure, the goal of
all his effort, the high reward for the salt-ploughing and the
long, long furrows he ran up and down the whole world around in his
farming of the sea.

In simple taste and homely inclination this much-travelled map was
more simple and homely than the veriest yokel.  Seventy-one years
his father was, and had never slept a night out of his own bed in
his own house on Island McGill.  That was the life ideal, so
Captain MacElrath considered, and he was prone to marvel that any
man, not under compulsion, should leave a farm to go to sea.  To
this much-travelled man the whole world was as familiar as the
village to the cobbler sitting in his shop.  To Captain MacElrath
the world was a village.  In his mind's eye he saw its streets a
thousand leagues long, aye, and longer; turnings that doubled
earth's stormiest headlands or were the way to quiet inland ponds;
cross-roads, taken one way, that led to flower-lands and summer
seas, and that led the other way to bitter, ceaseless gales and the
perilous bergs of the great west wind drift.  And the cities,
bright with lights, were as shops on these long streets--shops
where business was transacted, where bunkers were replenished,
cargoes taken or shifted, and orders received from the owners in
London town to go elsewhere and beyond, ever along the long sea-
lanes, seeking new cargoes here, carrying new cargoes there,
running freights wherever shillings and pence beckoned and
underwriters did not forbid.  But it was all a weariness to
contemplate, and, save that he wrung from it his bread, it was
without profit under the sun.

The last good-bye to the wife had been at Cardiff, twenty-eight
months before, when he sailed for Valparaiso with coals--nine
thousand tons and down to his marks.  From Valparaiso he had gone
to Australia, light, a matter of six thousand miles on end with a
stormy passage and running short of bunker coal.  Coals again to
Oregon, seven thousand miles, and nigh as many more with general
cargo for Japan and China.  Thence to Java, loading sugar for
Marseilles, and back along the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and
on to Baltimore, down to her marks with crome ore, buffeted by
hurricanes, short again of bunker coal and calling at Bermuda to
replenish.  Then a time charter, Norfolk, Virginia, loading
mysterious contraband coal and sailing for South Africa under
orders of the mysterious German supercargo put on board by the
charterers.  On to Madagascar, steaming four knots by the
supercargo's orders, and the suspicion forming that the Russian
fleet might want the coal.  Confusion and delays, long waits at
sea, international complications, the whole world excited over the
old Tryapsic and her cargo of contraband, and then on to Japan and
the naval port of Sassebo.  Back to Australia, another time charter
and general merchandise picked up at Sydney, Melbourne, and
Adelaide, and carried on to Mauritius, Lourenco Marques, Durban,
Algoa Bay, and Cape Town.  To Ceylon for orders, and from Ceylon to
Rangoon to load rice for Rio Janeiro.  Thence to Buenos Aires and
loading maize for the United Kingdom or the Continent, stopping at
St. Vincent, to receive orders to proceed to Dublin.  Two years and
four months, eight hundred and fifty days by the log, steaming up
and down the thousand-league-long sea-lanes and back again to
Dublin town.  And he was well aweary.

A little tug had laid hold of the Tryapsic, and with clang and
clatter and shouted command, with engines half-ahead, slow-speed,
or half-astern, the battered old sea-tramp was nudged and nosed and
shouldered through the dock-gates into Ring's End Basin.  Lines
were flung ashore, fore and aft, and a 'midship spring got out.
Already a small group of the happy shore-staying folk had clustered
on the dock.

"Ring off," Captain MacElrath commanded in his slow thick voice;
and the third officer worked the lever of the engine-room
telegraph.

"Gangway out!" called the second officer; and when this was
accomplished, "That will do."

It was the last task of all, gangway out.  "That will do" was the
dismissal.  The voyage was ended, and the crew shambled eagerly
forward across the rusty decks to where their sea-bags were packed
and ready for the shore.  The taste of the land was strong in the
men's mouths, and strong it was in the skipper's mouth as he
muttered a gruff good day to the departing pilot, and himself went
down to his cabin.  Up the gangway were trooping the customs
officers, the surveyor, the agent's clerk, and the stevedores.
Quick work disposed of these and cleared his cabin, the agent
waiting to take him to the office.

"Dud ye send word tull the wife?" had been his greeting to the
clerk.

"Yes, a telegram, as soon as you were reported."

"She'll likely be comin' down on the marnin' train," the skipper
had soliloquized, and gone inside to change his clothes and wash.

He took a last glance about the room and at two photographs on the
wall, one of the wife the other of an infant--the child he had
never seen.  He stepped out into the cabin, with its panelled walls
of cedar and maple, and with its long table that seated ten, and at
which he had eaten by himself through all the weary time.  No
laughter and clatter and wordy argument of the mess-room had been
his.  He had eaten silently, almost morosely, his silence emulated
by the noiseless Asiatic who had served him.  It came to him
suddenly, the overwhelming realization of the loneliness of those
two years and more.  All his vexations and anxieties had been his
own.  He had shared them with no one.  His two young officers were
too young and flighty, the mate too stupid.  There was no
consulting with them.  One tenant had shared the cabin with him,
that tenant his responsibility.  They had dined and supped
together, walked the bridge together, and together they had bedded.

"Och!" he muttered to that grim companion, "I'm quit of you, an'
wull quit . . . for a wee."

Ashore he passed the last of the seamen with their bags, and, at
the agent's, with the usual delays, put through his ship business.
When asked out by them to drink he took milk and soda.

"I am no teetotaler," he explained; "but for the life o' me I canna
bide beer or whusky."

In the early afternoon, when he finished paying off his crew, he
hurried to the private office where he had been told his wife was
waiting.

His eyes were for her first, though the temptation was great to
have more than a hurried glimpse of the child in the chair beside
her.  He held her off from him after the long embrace, and looked
into her face long and steadily, drinking in every feature of it
and wondering that he could mark no changes of time.  A warm man,
his wife thought him, though had the opinion of his officers been
asked it would have been:  a harsh man and a bitter one.

"Wull, Annie, how is ut wi' ye?" he queried, and drew her to him
again.

And again he held her away from him, this wife of ten years and of
whom he knew so little.  She was almost a stranger--more a stranger
than his Chinese steward, and certainly far more a stranger than
his own officers whom he had seen every day, day and day, for eight
hundred and fifty days.  Married ten years, and in that time he had
been with her nine weeks--scarcely a honeymoon.  Each time home had
been a getting acquainted again with her.  It was the fate of the
men who went out to the salt-ploughing.  Little they knew of their
wives and less of their children.  There was his chief engineer--
old, near-sighted MacPherson--who told the story of returning home
to be locked out of his house by his four-year kiddie that never
had laid eyes on him before.

"An' thus 'ull be the loddie," the skipper said, reaching out a
hesitant hand to the child's cheek.

But the boy drew away from him, sheltering against the mother's
side.

"Och!" she cried, "and he doesna know his own father."

"Nor I hum.  Heaven knows I could no a-picked hum out of a crowd,
though he'll be havin' your nose I'm thunkun'."

"An' your own eyes, Donald.  Look ut them.  He's your own father,
laddie.  Kiss hum like the little mon ye are."

But the child drew closer to her, his expression of fear and
distrust growing stronger, and when the father attempted to take
him in his arms he threatened to cry.

The skipper straightened up, and to conceal the pang at his heart
he drew out his watch and looked at it.

"Ut's time to go, Annie," he said.  "Thot train 'ull be startun'."

He was silent on the train at first, divided between watching the
wife with the child going to sleep in her arms and looking out of
the window at the tilled fields and green unforested hills vague
and indistinct in the driving drizzle that had set in.  They had
the compartment to themselves.  When the boy slept she laid him out
on the seat and wrapped him warmly.  And when the health of
relatives and friends had been inquired after, and the gossip of
Island McGill narrated, along with the weather and the price of
land and crops, there was little left to talk about save
themselves, and Captain MacElrath took up the tale brought home for
the good wife from all his world's-end wandering.  But it was not a
tale of marvels he told, nor of beautiful flower-lands nor
mysterious Eastern cities.

"What like is Java?" she asked once.

"Full o' fever.  Half the crew down wuth ut an' luttle work.  Ut
was quinine an' quinine the whole blessed time.  Each marnun' 'twas
quinine an' gin for all hands on an empty stomach.  An' they who
was no sick made ut out to be hovun' ut bad uz the rest."

Another time she asked about Newcastle.

"Coals an' coal-dust--thot's all.  No a nice sutty.  I lost two
Chinks there, stokers the both of them.  An' the owners paid a fine
tull the Government of a hundred pounds each for them.  'We regret
tull note,' they wrut me--I got the letter tull Oregon--'We regret
tull note the loss o' two Chinese members o' yer crew ot Newcastle,
an' we recommend greater carefulness un the future.'  Greater
carefulness!  And I could no a-been more careful.  The Chinks hod
forty-five pounds each comun' tull them in wages, an' I was no a-
thunkun' they 'ud run.

"But thot's their way--'we regret tull note,' 'we beg tull advise,'
'we recommend,' 'we canna understand'--an' the like o' thot.
Domned cargo tank!  An' they would thunk I could drive her like a
Lucania, an' wi'out burnun' coals.  There was thot propeller.  I
was after them a guid while for ut.  The old one was iron, thuck on
the edges, an' we couldna make our speed.  An' the new one was
bronze--nine hundred pounds ut cost, an' then wantun' their returns
out o' ut, an' me wuth a bod passage an' lossin' time every day.
'We regret tull note your long passage from Voloparaiso tull Sydney
wuth an average daily run o' only one hundred an' suxty-seven.  We
hod expected better results wuth the new propeller.  You should a-
made an average daily run o' two hundred and suxteen.'

"An' me on a wunter passage, blowin' a luvin' gale half the time,
wuth hurricane force in atweenwhiles, an' hove to sux days, wuth
engines stopped an' bunker coal runnun' short, an' me wuth a mate
thot stupid he could no pass a shup's light ot night wi'out callun'
me tull the brudge.  I wrut an' told 'em so.  An' then:  'Our
nautical adviser suggests you kept too far south,' an' 'We are
lookun' for better results from thot propeller.'  Nautical
adviser!--shore pilot!  Ut was the regular latitude for a wunter
passage from Voloparaiso tull Sydney.

"An' when I come un tull Auckland short o' coal, after lettun' her
druft sux days wuth the fires out tull save the coal, an' wuth only
twenty tons in my bunkers, I was thunkun' o' the lossin' o' time
an' the expense, an' tull save the owners I took her un an' out
wi'out pilotage.  Pilotage was no compulsory.  An' un Yokohama, who
should I meet but Captun Robinson o' the Dyapsic.  We got a-talkun'
about ports an' places down Australia-way, an' first thing he says:
'Speakun' o' Auckland--of course, Captun, you was never un
Auckland?'  'Yus,' I says, 'I was un there very recent.'  'Oh, ho,'
he says, very angry-like, 'so you was the smart Aleck thot fetched
me thot letter from the owners:  "We note item of fufteen pounds
for pilotage ot Auckland.  A shup o' ours was un tull Auckland
recently an' uncurred no such charge.  We beg tull advise you thot
we conseeder thus pilotage an onnecessary expense which should no
be uncurred un the future.'"

"But dud they say a word tull me for the fufteen pounds I saved
tull them?  No a word.  They send a letter tull Captun Robinson for
no savun' them the fufteen pounds, an' tull me:  'We note item of
two guineas doctor's fee at Auckland for crew.  Please explain thus
onusual expunditure.'  Ut was two o' the Chinks.  I was thunkun'
they hod beri-beri, an' thot was the why o' sendun' for the doctor.
I buried the two of them ot sea not a week after.  But ut was:
'Please explain thus onusual expunditure,' an' tull Captun
Robinson, 'We beg tull advise you thot we conseeder thus pilotage
an onnecessary expense.'

"Dudna I cable them from Newcastle, tellun' them the old tank was
thot foul she needed dry-dock?  Seven months out o' drydock, an'
the West Coast the quickest place for foulun' un the world.  But
freights was up, an' they hod a charter o' coals for Portland.  The
Arrata, one o' the Woor Line, left port the same day uz us, bound
for Portland, an' the old Tryapsic makun' sux knots, seven ot the
best.  An' ut was ot Comox, takun' un bunker coal, I got the letter
from the owners.  The boss humself hod signed ut, an' ot the bottom
he wrut un hus own bond:  'The Arrata beat you by four an' a half
days.  Am dusappointed.'  Dusappointed!  When I had cabled them
from Newcastle.  When she drydocked ot Portland, there was whuskers
on her a foot long, barnacles the size o' me fust, oysters like
young sauce plates.  Ut took them two days afterward tull clean the
dock o' shells an' muck.

"An' there was the motter o' them fire-bars ot Newcastle.  The firm
ashore made them heavier than the engineer's speecifications, an'
then forgot tull charge for the dufference.  Ot the last moment,
wuth me ashore gettun' me clearance, they come wuth the bill:
'Tull error on fire-bars, sux pounds.'  They'd been tull the shup
an' MacPherson hod O.K.'d ut.  I said ut was strange an' would no
pay.  'Then you are dootun' the chief engineer,' says they.  'I'm
no dootun',' says I, 'but I canna see my way tull sign.  Come wuth
me tull the shup.  The launch wull cost ye naught an' ut 'ull brung
ye back.  An' we wull see what MacPherson says.'

"But they would no come.  Ot Portland I got the bill un a letter.
I took no notice.  Ot Hong-Kong I got a letter from the owners.
The bill hod been sent tull them.  I wrut them from Java
explainun'.  At Marseilles the owners wrut me:  'Tull extra work un
engine-room, sux pounds.  The engineer has O.K.'d ut, an' you have
no O.K.'d ut.  Are you dootun' the engineer's honesty?'  I wrut an'
told them I was no dootun' his honesty; thot the bill was for extra
weight o' fire-bars; an' thot ut was O.K.  Dud they pay ut?  They
no dud.  They must unvestigate.  An' some clerk un the office took
sick, an' the bill was lost.  An' there was more letters.  I got
letters from the owners an' the firm--'Tull error on fire-bars, sux
pounds'--ot Baltimore, ot Delagoa Bay, ot Moji, ot Rangoon, ot Rio,
an' ot Montevuddio.  Ut uz no settled yut.  I tell ye, Annie, the
owners are hard tull please."

He communed with himself for a moment, and then muttered
indignantly:  "Tull error on fire-bars, sux pounds."

"Hov ye heard of Jamie?" his wife asked in the pause.

Captain MacElrath shook his head.

"He was washed off the poop wuth three seamen."

"Whereabouts?"

"Off the Horn.  'Twas on the Thornsby."

"They would be runnun' homeward bound?"

"Aye," she nodded.  "We only got the word three days gone.  His
wife is greetin' like tull die."

"A good lod, Jamie," he commented, "but a stiff one ot carryun' on.
I mind me when we was mates together un the Abion.  An' so Jamie's
gone."

Again a pause fell, to be broken by the wife.

"An' ye will no a-heard o' the Bankshire?  MacDougall lost her in
Magellan Straits.  'Twas only yesterday ut was in the paper."

"A cruel place, them Magellan Straits," he said.  "Dudna thot
domned mate-fellow nigh putt me ashore twice on the one passage
through?  He was a eediot, a lunatuc.  I wouldna have hum on the
brudge a munut.  Comun' tull Narrow Reach, thuck weather, wuth snow
squalls, me un the chart-room, dudna I guv hum the changed course?
'South-east-by-east,' I told hum.  'South-east-by-east, sir,' says
he.  Fufteen munuts after I comes on tull the brudge.  'Funny,'
says thot mate-fellow, 'I'm no rememberun' ony islands un the mouth
o' Narrow Reach.  I took one look ot the islands an' yells, 'Putt
your wheel hard a-starboard,' tull the mon ot the wheel.  An' ye
should a-seen the old Tryapsic turnun' the sharpest circle she ever
turned.  I waited for the snow tull clear, an' there was Narrow
Reach, nice uz ye please, tull the east'ard an' the islands un the
mouth o' False Bay tull the south'ard.  'What course was ye
steerun'?' I says tull the mon ot the wheel.  'South-by-east, sir,'
says he.  I looked tull the mate-fellow.  What could I say?  I was
thot wroth I could a-kult hum.  Four points dufference.  Five
munuts more an' the old Tryapsic would a-been funushed.

"An' was ut no the same when we cleared the Straits tull the
east'ard?  Four hours would a-seen us guid an' clear.  I was forty
hours then on the brudge.  I guv the mate his course, an' the
bearun' o' the Askthar Light astern.  'Don't let her bear more tull
the north'ard than west-by-north,' I said tull hum, 'an' ye wull be
all right.'  An' I went below an' turned un.  But I couldna sleep
for worryun'.  After forty hours on the brudge, what was four hours
more? I thought.  An' for them four hours wull ye be lettun' the
mate loss her on ye?  'No,' I says to myself.  An' wuth thot I got
up, hod a wash an' a cup o' coffee, an' went tull the brudge.  I
took one look ot the bearun' o' Askthar Light.  'Twas nor'west-by-
west, and the old Tryapsic down on the shoals.  He was a eediot,
thot mate-fellow.  Ye could look overside an' see the duscoloration
of the watter.  'Twas a close call for the old Tryapsic I'm tellun'
ye.  Twice un thirty hours he'd a-hod her ashore uf ut hod no been
for me."

Captain MacElrath fell to gazing at the sleeping child with mild
wonder in his small blue eyes, and his wife sought to divert him
from his woes.

"Ye remember Jummy MacCaul?" she asked.  "Ye went tull school wuth
hus two boys.  Old Jummy MacCaul thot hoz the farm beyond Doctor
Haythorn's place."

"Oh, aye, an' what o' hum?  Uz he dead?"

"No, but he was after askun' your father, when he sailed last time
for Voloparaiso, uf ye'd been there afore.  An' when your father
says no, then Jummy says, 'An' how wull he be knowun a' tull find
hus way?'  An' with thot your father says:  'Verry sumple ut uz,
Jummy.  Supposun' you was goin' tull the mainland tull a mon who
luved un Belfast.  Belfast uz a bug sutty, Jummy, an' how would ye
be findun' your way?'  'By way o' me tongue,' says Jummy; 'I'd be
askun' the folk I met.'  'I told ye ut was sumple,' says your
father.  'Ut's the very same way my Donald finds the road tull
Voloparaiso.  He asks every shup he meets upon the sea tull ot last
he meets wuth a shup thot's been tull Voloparaiso, an' the captun
o' thot shup tells hum the way.'  An' Jummy scratches hus head an'
says he understands an' thot ut's a very sumple motter after all."

The skipper chuckled at the joke, and his tired blue eyes were
merry for the moment.

"He was a thun chap, thot mate-fellow, oz thun oz you an' me putt
together," he remarked after a time, a slight twinkle in his eye of
appreciation of the bull.  But the twinkle quickly disappeared and
the blue eyes took on a bleak and wintry look.  "What dud he do ot
Voloparaiso but land sux hundred fathom o' chain cable an' take
never a receipt from the lighter-mon.  I was gettun' my clearance
ot the time.  When we got tull sea, I found he hod no receipt for
the cable.

"'An' ye no took a receipt for ut?' says I.

"'No,' says he.  'Wasna ut goin' direct tull the agents?'

"'How long ha' ye been goin' tull sea,' says I, 'not tull be
knowin' the mate's duty uz tull deluver no cargo wuthout receipt
for same?  An' on the West Coast ot thot.  What's tull stop the
lighter-mon from stealun' a few lengths o' ut?'

"An' ut come out uz I said.  Sux hundred hundred went over the
side, but four hundred an' ninety-five was all the agents received.
The lighter-mon swore ut was all he received from the mate--four
hundred an' ninety-five fathom.  I got a letter from the owners ot
Portland.  They no blamed the mate for ut, but me, an' me ashore ot
the time on shup's buzz'ness.  I could no be in the two places ot
the one time.  An' the letters from the owners an' the agents uz
still comun' tull me.

"Thot mate-fellow was no a proper sailor, an' no a mon tull work
for owners.  Dudna he want tull break me wuth the Board of Trade
for bein' below my marks?  He said as much tull the bos'n.  An' he
told me tull my face homeward bound thot I'd been half an inch
under my marks.  'Twas at Portland, loadun' cargo un fresh watter
an' goin' tull Comox tull load bunker coal un salt watter.  I tell
ye, Annie, ut takes close fuggerin', an' I WAS half an inch under
the load-line when the bunker coal was un.  But I'm no tellun' any
other body but you.  An' thot mate-fellow untendun' tull report me
tull the Board o' Trade, only for thot he saw fut tull be sliced un
two pieces on the steam-pipe cover.

"He was a fool.  After loadun' ot Portland I hod tull take on suxty
tons o' coal tull last me tull Comox.  The charges for lighterun'
was heavy, an' no room ot the coal dock.  A French barque was lyin'
alongside the dock an' I spoke tull the captun, askun' hum what he
would charge when work for the day was done, tull haul clear for a
couple o' hours an' let me un.  'Twenty dollars,' said he.  Ut was
savun' money on lighters tull the owner, an' I gave ut tull hum.
An' thot night, after dark, I hauled un an' took on the coal.  Then
I started tull go out un the stream an' drop anchor--under me own
steam, of course.

"We hod tull go out stern first, an' somethun' went wrong wuth the
reversun' gear.  Old MacPherson said he could work ut by hond, but
very slow ot thot.  An' I said 'All right.'  We started.  The pilot
was on board.  The tide was ebbun' stuffly, an' right abreast an' a
but below was a shup lyin' wuth a lighter on each side.  I saw the
shup's ridun' lights, but never a light on the lighters.  Ut was
close quarters to shuft a bug vessel onder steam, wuth MacPherson
workun' the reversun' gear by hond.  We hod to come close down upon
the shup afore I could go ahead an' clear o' the shups on the dock-
ends.  An' we struck the lighter stern-on, just uz I rung tull
MacPherson half ahead.

"'What was thot?' says the pilot, when we struck the lighter.

"'I dunna know,' says I, 'an' I'm wonderun'.'

"The pilot was no keen, ye see, tull hus job.  I went on tull a
guid place an' dropped anchor, an' ut would all a-been well but for
thot domned eediot mate.

"'We smashed thot lighter,' says he, comun' up the lodder tull the
brudge--an' the pilot stondun' there wuth his ears cocked tull
hear.

"'What lighter?' says I.

"'Thot lighter alongside the shup,' says the mate.

"'I dudna see no lighter,' says I, and wuth thot I steps on hus fut
guid an' hard.

"After the pilot was gone I says tull the mate:  'Uf you dunna know
onythun', old mon, for Heaven's sake keep your mouth shut.'

"'But ye dud smash thot lighter, dudn't ye?' says he.

"'Uf we dud,' says I, 'ut's no your buzz'ness tull be tellun' the
pilot--though, mind ye, I'm no admuttun' there was ony lighter.'

"An' next marnun', just uz I'm after dressun', the steward says, 'A
mon tull see ye, sir.'  'Fetch hum un,' says I.  An' un he come.
'Sut down,' says I.  An' he sot down.

"He was the owner of the lighter, an' when he hod told hus story, I
says, 'I dudna see ony lighter.'

"'What, mon?' says he.  'No see a two-hundred-ton lighter, bug oz a
house, alongside thot shup?'

"'I was goin' by the shup's lights,' says I, 'an' I dudna touch the
shup, thot I know.'

"'But ye dud touch the lighter,' says he.  'Ye smashed her.
There's a thousand dollars' domage done, an' I'll see ye pay for
ut.'

'Look here, muster,' says I, 'when I'm shuftun' a shup ot night I
follow the law, an' the law dustunctly says I must regulate me
actions by the lights o' the shuppun'.  Your lighter never hod no
ridun' light, nor dud I look for ony lighter wuthout lights tull
show ut.'

"'The mate says--' he beguns.

"'Domn the mate,' says I.  'Dud your lighter hov a ridun' light?'

"'No, ut dud not,' says he, 'but ut was a clear night wuth the moon
a-showun'.'

"'Ye seem tull know your buzz'ness,' says I.  'But let me tell ye
thot I know my buzz'ness uz well, an' thot I'm no a-lookun' for
lighters wuthout lights.  Uf ye thunk ye hov a case, go ahead.  The
steward will show ye out.  Guid day.'

"An' thot was the end o' ut.  But ut wull show ye what a puir
fellow thot mate was.  I call ut a blessun' for all masters thot he
was sliced un two on thot steam-pipe cover.  He had a pull un the
office an' thot was the why he was kept on."

"The Wekley farm wull soon be for sale, so the agents be tellun'
me," his wife remarked, slyly watching what effect her announcement
would have upon him.

His eyes flashed eagerly on the instant, and he straightened up as
might a man about to engage in some agreeable task.  It was the
farm of his vision, adjoining his father's, and her own people
farmed not a mile away.

"We wull be buyun' ut," he said, "though we wull be no tellun' a
soul of ut ontul ut's bought an' the money paid down.  I've savun'
consuderable these days, though pickun's uz no what they used to
be, an' we hov a tidy nest-egg laid by.  I wull see the father an'
hove the money ready tull hus hond, so uf I'm ot sea he can buy
whenever the land offers."

He rubbed the frosted moisture from the inside of the window and
peered out at the pouring rain, through which he could discern
nothing.

"When I was a young men I used tull be afeard thot the owners would
guv me the sack.  Stull afeard I am of the sack.  But once thot
farm is mine I wull no be afeard ony longer.  Ut's a puir job thus
sea-farmun'.  Me managin' un all seas an' weather an' perils o' the
deep a shup worth fufty thousand pounds, wuth cargoes ot times
worth fufty thousand more--a hundred thousand pounds, half a
million dollars uz the Yankees say, an' me wuth all the
responsubility gettun' a screw o' twenty pounds a month.  What mon
ashore, managin' a buz'ness worth a hundred thousand pounds wull be
gettun' uz small a screw uz twenty pounds?  An' wuth such masters
uz a captun serves--the owners, the underwriters, an' the Board o'
Trade, all pullun' an wantun' dufferent thungs--the owners wantun'
quick passages an' domn the rusk, the underwriters wantun' safe
passages an' domn the delay, an' the Board o' Trade wantun'
cautious passages an' caution always meanun' delay.  Three
dufferent masters, an' all three able an' wullun' to break ye uf ye
don't serve their dufferent wushes."

He felt the train slackening speed, and peered again through the
misty window.  He stood up, buttoned his overcoat, turned up the
collar, and awkwardly gathered the child, still asleep, in his
arms.

"I wull see the father," he said, "an' hov the money ready tull hus
hond so uf I'm ot sea when the land offers he wull no muss the
chance tull buy.  An' then the owners can guv me the sack uz soon
uz they like.  Ut will be all night un, an' I wull be wuth you,
Annie, an' the sea can go tull hell."

Happiness was in both their faces at the prospect, and for a moment
both saw the same vision of peace.  Annie leaned toward him, and as
the train stopped they kissed each other across the sleeping child.



SAMUEL



Margaret Henan would have been a striking figure under any
circumstances, but never more so than when I first chanced upon
her, a sack of grain of fully a hundredweight on her shoulder, as
she walked with sure though tottering stride from the cart-tail to
the stable, pausing for an instant to gather strength at the foot
of the steep steps that led to the grain-bin.  There were four of
these steps, and she went up them, a step at a time, slowly,
unwaveringly, and with so dogged certitude that it never entered my
mind that her strength could fail her and let that hundred-weight
sack fall from the lean and withered frame that wellnigh doubled
under it.  For she was patently an old woman, and it was her age
that made me linger by the cart and watch.

Six times she went between the cart and the stable, each time with
a full sack on her back, and beyond passing the time of day with me
she took no notice of my presence.  Then, the cart empty, she
fumbled for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down
the burning surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently
nerveless thumb.  The hands were noteworthy.  They were large-
knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the
nails blunt and broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises,
healed and healing, such as are common to the hands of hard-working
men.  On the back were huge, upstanding veins, eloquent of age and
toil.  Looking at them, it was hard to believe that they were the
hands of the woman who had once been the belle of Island McGill.
This last, of course, I learned later.  At the time I knew neither
her history nor her identity.

She wore heavy man's brogans.  Her legs were stockingless, and I
had noticed when she walked that her bare feet were thrust into the
crinkly, iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at
every step.  Her figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a
rough man's shirt and in a ragged flannel petticoat that had once
been red.  But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weather-
beaten, surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of
greyish hair, that caught and held me.  Neither drifted hair nor
serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a forehead, high
and broad without verging in the slightest on the abnormal.

The sunken cheeks and pinched nose told little of the quality of
the life that flickered behind those clear blue eyes of hers.
Despite the minutiae of wrinkle-work that somehow failed to weazen
them, her eyes were clear as a girl's--clear, out-looking, and far-
seeing, and with an open and unblinking steadfastness of gaze that
was disconcerting.  The remarkable thing was the distance between
them.  It is a lucky man or woman who has the width of an eye
between, but with Margaret Henan the width between her eyes was
fully that of an eye and a half.  Yet so symmetrically moulded was
her face that this remarkable feature produced no uncanny effect,
and, for that matter, would have escaped the casual observer's
notice.  The mouth, shapeless and toothless, with down-turned
corners and lips dry and parchment-like, nevertheless lacked the
muscular slackness so usual with age.  The lips might have been
those of a mummy, save for that impression of rigid firmness they
gave.  Not that they were atrophied.  On the contrary, they seemed
tense and set with a muscular and spiritual determination.  There,
and in the eyes, was the secret of the certitude with which she
carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps, with never a false step
or overbalance, and emptied them in the grain-bin.

"You are an old woman to be working like this," I ventured.

She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she
thought and spoke with the slow deliberateness that characterized
everything about her, as if well aware of an eternity that was hers
and in which there was no need for haste.  Again I was impressed by
the enormous certitude of her.  In this eternity that seemed so
indubitably hers, there was time and to spare for safe-footing and
stable equilibrium--for certitude, in short.  No more in her
spiritual life than in carrying the hundredweights of grain was
there a possibility of a misstep or an overbalancing.  The feeling
produced in me was uncanny.  Here was a human soul that, save for
the most glimmering of contacts, was beyond the humanness of me.
And the more I learned of Margaret Henan in the weeks that followed
the more mysteriously remote she became.  She was as alien as a
far-journeyer from some other star, and no hint could she nor all
the countryside give me of what forms of living, what heats of
feeling, or rules of philosophic contemplation actuated her in all
that she had been and was.

"I wull be suvunty-two come Guid Friday a fortnight," she said in
reply to my question.

"But you are an old woman to be doing this man's work, and a strong
man's work at that," I insisted.

Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of
contemplative eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I
should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so later
and found her just beginning to enunciate her reply--

"The work hoz tull be done, an' I am beholden tull no one."

"But have you no children, no family, relations?"

"Oh, aye, a-plenty o' them, but they no see fut tull be helpun'
me."

She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her
head toward the house, "I luv' wuth meself."

I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large
stable, and at the large array of fields I knew must belong with
the place.

"It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself."

"Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres.  Ut kept me old mon buzzy,
along wuth a son an' a hired mon, tull say naught o' extra honds un
the harvest an' a maid-servant un the house."

She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and
quizzed me with her keen, shrewd eyes.

"Belike ye hail from over the watter--Ameruky, I'm meanun'?"

"Yes, I'm a Yankee," I answered.

"Ye wull no be findun' mony Island McGill folk stoppun' un
Ameruky?"

"No; I don't remember ever meeting one, in the States."

She nodded her head.

"They are home-luvun' bodies, though I wull no be sayin' they are
no fair-travelled.  Yet they come home ot the last, them oz are no
lost ot sea or kult by fevers an' such-like un foreign parts."

"Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?" I
queried.

"Oh, aye, all savun' Samuel oz was drownded."

At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in
her eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I
divined in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning.  It
seemed to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue
that if followed properly would make all her strangeness plain.  It
came to me that here was a contact and that for the moment I was
glimpsing into the soul of her.  The question was tickling on my
tongue, but she forestalled me.

She tchk'd to the horse, and with a "Guid day tull you, sir," drove
off.


A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt
if a more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in
all the world.  Meeting them abroad--and to meet them abroad one
must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed
are they--one would never take them to be Irish.  Irish they claim
to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride and sneering at
their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are,
transplanted Scotch of long ago, it is true, but none the less
Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their tricks of
speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their Scotch
clannishness could have preserved to this late day.

A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill
from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds
himself in an entirely different country.  The Scotch impression is
strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians.  When
it is considered that there is no public-house in all the island
and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some idea may be
gained of the temperateness of the community.  Wedded to old ways,
public opinion and the ministers are powerful influences, while
fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as in few other places
in this modern world.  Courting lasts never later than ten at
night, and no girl walks out with her young man without her
parents' knowledge and consent.

The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the
wicked ports, returning periodically, between voyages, to live the
old intensive morality, to court till ten o'clock, to sit under the
minister each Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern
precepts that the elders preached to them from the time they were
laddies.  Much they learned of women in the ends of the earth,
these seafaring sons, yet a canny wisdom was theirs and they never
brought wives home with them.  The one solitary exception to this
had been the schoolmaster, who had been guilty of bringing a wife
from half a mile the other side of the loch.  For this he had never
been forgiven, and he rested under a cloud for the remainder of his
days.  At his death the wife went back across the loch to her own
people, and the blot on the escutcheon of Island McGill was erased.
In the end the sailor-men married girls of their own homeland and
settled down to become exemplars of all the virtues for which the
island was noted.

Island McGill was without a history.  She boasted none of the
events that go to make history.  There had never been any wearing
of the green, any Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances.
There had been but one eviction, and that purely technical--a test
case, and on advice of the tenant's lawyer.  So Island McGill was
without annals.  History had passed her by.   She paid her taxes,
acknowledged her crowned rulers, and left the world alone; all she
asked in return was that the world should leave her alone.  The
world was composed of two parts--Island McGill and the rest of it.
And whatever was not Island McGill was outlandish and barbarian;
and well she knew, for did not her seafaring sons bring home report
of that world and its ungodly ways?


It was from the skipper of a Glasgow tramp, as passenger from
Colombo to Rangoon, that I had first learned of the existence of
Island McGill; and it was from him that I had carried the letter
that gave me entrance to the house of Mrs. Ross, widow of a master
mariner, with a daughter living with her and with two sons, master
mariners themselves and out upon the sea.  Mrs. Ross did not take
in boarders, and it was Captain Ross's letter alone that had
enabled me to get from her bed and board.  In the evening, after my
encounter with Margaret Henan, I questioned Mrs. Ross, and I knew
on the instant that I had in truth stumbled upon mystery.

Like all Island McGill folk, as I was soon to discover, Mrs. Ross
was at first averse to discussing Margaret Henan at all.  Yet it
was from her I learned that evening that Margaret Henan had once
been one of the island belles.  Herself the daughter of a well-to-
do farmer, she had married Thomas Henan, equally well-to-do.
Beyond the usual housewife's tasks she had never been accustomed to
work.  Unlike many of the island women, she had never lent a hand
in the fields.

"But what of her children?" I asked.

"Two o' the sons, Jamie an' Timothy uz married an' be goun' tull
sea.  Thot bug house close tull the post office uz Jamie's.  The
daughters thot ha' no married be luvun' wuth them as dud marry.
An' the rest be dead."

"The Samuels," Clara interpolated, with what I suspected was a
giggle.

She was Mrs. Ross's daughter, a strapping young woman with handsome
features and remarkably handsome black eyes.

"'Tuz naught to be smuckerun' ot," her mother reproved her.

"The Samuels?" I intervened.  "I don't understand."

"Her four sons thot died."

"And were they all named Samuel?"

"Aye."

"Strange," I commented in the lagging silence.

"Very strange," Mrs. Ross affirmed, proceeding stolidly with the
knitting of the woollen singlet on her knees--one of the countless
under-garments that she interminably knitted for her skipper sons.

"And it was only the Samuels that died?" I queried, in further
attempt.

"The others luved," was the answer.  "A fine fomuly--no finer on
the island.  No better lods ever sailed out of Island McGill.  The
munuster held them up oz models tull pottern after.  Nor was ever a
whusper breathed again' the girls."

"But why is she left alone now in her old age?" I persisted.  "Why
don't her own flesh and blood look after her?  Why does she live
alone?  Don't they ever go to see her or care for her?"

"Never a one un twenty years an' more now.  She fetched ut on tull
herself.  She drove them from the house just oz she drove old Tom
Henan, thot was her husband, tull hus death."

"Drink?" I ventured.

Mrs. Ross shook her head scornfully, as if drink was a weakness
beneath the weakest of Island McGill.

A long pause followed, during which Mrs. Ross knitted stolidly on,
only nodding permission when Clara's young man, mate on one of the
Shire Line sailing ships, came to walk out with her.  I studied the
half-dozen ostrich eggs, hanging in the corner against the wall
like a cluster of some monstrous fruit.  On each shell were painted
precipitous and impossible seas through which full-rigged ships
foamed with a lack of perspective only equalled by their sharp
technical perfection.  On the mantelpiece stood two large pearl
shells, obviously a pair, intricately carved by the patient hands
of New Caledonian convicts.  In the centre of the mantel was a
stuffed bird-of-paradise, while about the room were scattered
gorgeous shells from the southern seas, delicate sprays of coral
sprouting from barnacled pi-pi shells and cased in glass, assegais
from South Africa, stone axes from New Guinea, huge Alaskan
tobacco-pouches beaded with heraldic totem designs, a boomerang
from Australia, divers ships in glass bottles, a cannibal kai-kai
bowl from the Marquesas, and fragile cabinets from China and the
Indies and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious woods.

I gazed at this varied trove brought home by sailor sons, and
pondered the mystery of Margaret Henan, who had driven her husband
to his death and been forsaken by all her kin.  It was not the
drink.  Then what was it?--some shocking cruelty? some amazing
infidelity? or some fearful, old-world peasant-crime?

I broached my theories, but to all Mrs. Ross shook her head.

"Ut was no thot," she said.  "Margaret was a guid wife an' a guid
mother, an' I doubt she would harm a fly.  She brought up her
fomuly God-fearin' an' decent-minded.  Her trouble was thot she
took lunatic--turned eediot."

Mrs. Ross tapped significantly on her forehead to indicate a state
of addlement.

"But I talked with her this afternoon," I objected, "and I found
her a sensible woman--remarkably bright for one of her years."

"Aye, an' I'm grantun' all thot you say," she went on calmly.  "But
I am no referrun' tull thot.  I am referrun' tull her wucked-headed
an' vucious stubbornness.  No more stubborn woman ever luv'd than
Margaret Henan.  Ut was all on account o' Samuel, which was the
name o' her youngest an' they do say her favourut brother--hum oz
died by hus own hond all through the munuster's mustake un no
registerun' the new church ot Dublin.  Ut was a lesson thot the
name was musfortunate, but she would no take ut, an' there was talk
when she called her first child Samuel--hum thot died o' the croup.
An' wuth thot what does she do but call the next one Samuel, an'
hum only three when he fell un tull the tub o' hot watter an' was
plain cooked tull death.  Ut all come, I tell you, o' her wucked-
headed an' foolush stubbornness.  For a Samuel she must hov; an' ut
was the death of the four of her sons.  After the first, dudna her
own mother go down un the dirt tull her feet, a-beggun' an'
pleadun' wuth her no tull name her next one Samuel?  But she was no
tull be turned from her purpose.  Margaret Henan was always set on
her ways, an' never more so thon on thot name Samuel.

"She was fair lunatuc on Samuel.  Dudna her neighbours' an' all
kuth an' kun savun' them thot luv'd un the house wuth her, get up
an' walk out ot the christenun' of the second--hum thot was cooked?
Thot they dud, an' ot the very moment the munuster asked what would
the bairn's name be.  'Samuel,' says she; an' wuth thot they got up
an' walked out an' left the house.  An' ot the door dudna her Aunt
Fannie, her mother's suster, turn an' say loud for all tull hear:
'What for wull she be wantun' tull murder the wee thing?'  The
munuster heard fine, an' dudna like ut, but, oz he told my Larry
afterward, what could he do?  Ut was the woman's wush, an' there
was no law again' a mother callun' her child accordun' tull her
wush.

"An' then was there no the third Samuel?  An' when he was lost ot
sea off the Cape, dudna she break all laws o' nature tull hov a
fourth?  She was forty-seven, I'm tellun' ye, an' she hod a child
ot forty-seven.  Thunk on ut!  Ot forty-seven!  Ut was fair
scand'lous."


From Clara, next morning, I got the tale of Margaret Henan's
favourite brother; and from here and there, in the week that
followed, I pieced together the tragedy of Margaret Henan.  Samuel
Dundee had been the youngest of Margaret's four brothers, and, as
Clara told me, she had well-nigh worshipped him.  He was going to
sea at the time, skipper of one of the sailing ships of the Bank
Line, when he married Agnes Hewitt.  She was described as a slender
wisp of a girl, delicately featured and with a nervous organization
of the supersensitive order.  Theirs had been the first marriage in
the "new" church, and after a two-weeks' honeymoon Samuel had
kissed his bride good-bye and sailed in command of the Loughbank, a
big four-masted barque.

And it was because of the "new" church that the minister's blunder
occurred.  Nor was it the blunder of the minister alone, as one of
the elders later explained; for it was equally the blunder of the
whole Presbytery of Coughleen, which included fifteen churches on
Island McGill and the mainland.  The old church, beyond repair, had
been torn down and the new one built on the original foundation.
Looking upon the foundation-stones as similar to a ship's keel, it
never entered the minister's nor the Presbytery's head that the new
church was legally any other than the old church.

"An' three couples was married the first week un the new church,"
Clara said.  "First of all, Samuel Dundee an' Agnes Hewitt; the
next day Albert Mahan an' Minnie Duncan; an' by the week-end Eddie
Troy and Flo Mackintosh--all sailor-men, an' un sux weeks' time the
last of them back tull their ships an' awa', an' no one o' them
dreamin' of the wuckedness they'd been ot."

The Imp of the Perverse must have chuckled at the situation.  All
things favoured.  The marriages had taken place in the first week
of May, and it was not till three months later that the minister,
as required by law, made his quarterly report to the civil
authorities in Dublin.  Promptly came back the announcement that
his church had no legal existence, not being registered according
to the law's demands.  This was overcome by prompt registration;
but the marriages were not to be so easily remedied.  The three
sailor husbands were away, and their wives, in short, were not
their wives.

"But the munuster was no for alarmin' the bodies," said Clara.  "He
kept hus council an' bided hus time, waitun' for the lods tull be
back from sea.  Oz luck would have ut, he was away across the
island tull a christenun' when Albert Mahan arrives home
onexpected, hus shup just docked ot Dublin.  Ut's nine o'clock ot
night when the munuster, un hus sluppers an' dressun'-gown, gets
the news.  Up he jumps an' calls for horse an' saddle, an' awa' he
goes like the wund for Albert Mahan's.  Albert uz just goun' tull
bed an' hoz one shoe off when the munuster arrives.

"'Come wuth me, the pair o' ye,' says he, breathless-like.  'What
for, an' me dead weary an' goun' tull bed?' says Albert.  'Yull be
lawful married,' says the munuster.  Albert looks black an' says,
'Now, munuster, ye wull be jokun',' but tull humself, oz I've heard
hum tell mony a time, he uz wonderun' thot the munuster should a-
took tull whusky ot hus time o' life.

"'We be no married?' says Minnie.  He shook his head.  'An' I om no
Mussus Mahan?'  'No,' says he, 'ye are no Mussus Mahan.  Ye are
plain Muss Duncan.'  'But ye married 'us yoursel',' says she.  'I
dud an' I dudna,' says he.  An' wuth thot he tells them the whole
upshot, an' Albert puts on hus shoe, an' they go wuth the munuster
an' are married proper an' lawful, an' oz Albert Mahan says
afterward mony's the time, ''Tus no every mon thot hoz two weddun'
nights on Island McGill.'"

Six months later Eddie Troy came home and was promptly remarried.
But Samuel Dundee was away on a three-years' voyage and his ship
fell overdue.  Further to complicate the situation, a baby boy,
past two years old, was waiting for him in the arms of his wife.
The months passed, and the wife grew thin with worrying.  "Ut's no
meself I'm thunkun' on," she is reported to have said many times,
"but ut's the puir fatherless bairn.  Uf aught happened tull Samuel
where wull the bairn stond?"

Lloyd's posted the Loughbank as missing, and the owners ceased the
monthly remittance of Samuel's half-pay to his wife.  It was the
question of the child's legitimacy that preyed on her mind, and,
when all hope of Samuel's return was abandoned, she drowned herself
and the child in the loch.  And here enters the greater tragedy.
The Loughbank was not lost.  By a series of sea disasters and
delays too interminable to relate, she had made one of those long,
unsighted passages such as occur once or twice in half a century.
How the Imp must have held both his sides!  Back from the sea came
Samuel, and when they broke the news to him something else broke
somewhere in his heart or head.  Next morning they found him where
he had tried to kill himself across the grave of his wife and
child.  Never in the history of Island McGill was there so fearful
a death-bed.  He spat in the minister's face and reviled him, and
died blaspheming so terribly that those that tended on him did so
with averted gaze and trembling hands.

And, in the face of all this, Margaret Henan named her first child
Samuel.


How account for the woman's stubbornness?  Or was it a morbid
obsession that demanded a child of hers should be named Samuel?
Her third child was a girl, named after herself, and the fourth was
a boy again.  Despite the strokes of fate that had already bereft
her, and despite the loss of friends and relatives, she persisted
in her resolve to name the child after her brother.  She was
shunned at church by those who had grown up with her.  Her mother,
after a final appeal, left her house with the warning that if the
child were so named she would never speak to her again.  And though
the old lady lived thirty-odd years longer she kept her word.  The
minister agreed to christen the child any name but Samuel, and
every other minister on Island McGill refused to christen it by the
name she had chosen.  There was talk on the part of Margaret Henan
of going to law at the time, but in the end she carried the child
to Belfast and there had it christened Samuel.

And then nothing happened.  The whole island was confuted.  The boy
grew and prospered.  The schoolmaster never ceased averring that it
was the brightest lad he had ever seen.  Samuel had a splendid
constitution, a tremendous grip on life.  To everybody's amazement
he escaped the usual run of childish afflictions.  Measles,
whooping-cough and mumps knew him not.  He was armour-clad against
germs, immune to all disease.  Headaches and earaches were things
unknown.  "Never so much oz a boil or a pumple," as one of the old
bodies told me, ever marred his healthy skin.  He broke school
records in scholarship and athletics, and whipped every boy of his
size or years on Island McGill.

It was a triumph for Margaret Henan.  This paragon was hers, and it
bore the cherished name.  With the one exception of her mother,
friends and relatives drifted back and acknowledged that they had
been mistaken; though there were old crones who still abided by
their opinion and who shook their heads ominously over their cups
of tea.  The boy was too wonderful to last.  There was no escaping
the curse of the name his mother had wickedly laid upon him.  The
young generation joined Margaret Henan in laughing at them, but the
old crones continued to shake their heads.

Other children followed.  Margaret Henan's fifth was a boy, whom
she called Jamie, and in rapid succession followed three girls,
Alice, Sara, and Nora, the boy Timothy, and two more girls,
Florence and Katie.  Katie was the last and eleventh, and Margaret
Henan, at thirty-five, ceased from her exertions.  She had done
well by Island McGill and the Queen.  Nine healthy children were
hers.  All prospered.  It seemed her ill-luck had shot its bolt
with the deaths of her first two.  Nine lived, and one of them was
named Samuel.

Jamie elected to follow the sea, though it was not so much a matter
of election as compulsion, for the eldest sons on Island McGill
remained on the land, while all other sons went to the salt-
ploughing.  Timothy followed Jamie, and by the time the latter had
got his first command, a steamer in the Bay trade out of Cardiff,
Timothy was mate of a big sailing ship.  Samuel, however, did not
take kindly to the soil.  The farmer's life had no attraction for
him.  His brothers went to sea, not out of desire, but because it
was the only way for them to gain their bread; and he, who had no
need to go, envied them when, returned from far voyages, they sat
by the kitchen fire, and told their bold tales of the wonderlands
beyond the sea-rim.

Samuel became a teacher, much to his father's disgust, and even
took extra certificates, going to Belfast for his examinations.
When the old master retired, Samuel took over his school.
Secretly, however, he studied navigation, and it was Margaret's
delight when he sat by the kitchen fire, and, despite their
master's tickets, tangled up his brothers in the theoretics of
their profession.  Tom Henan alone was outraged when Samuel, school
teacher, gentleman, and heir to the Henan farm, shipped to sea
before the mast.  Margaret had an abiding faith in her son's star,
and whatever he did she was sure was for the best.  Like everything
else connected with his glorious personality, there had never been
known so swift a rise as in the case of Samuel.  Barely with two
years' sea experience before the mast, he was taken from the
forecastle and made a provisional second mate.  This occurred in a
fever port on the West Coast, and the committee of skippers that
examined him agreed that he knew more of the science of navigation
than they had remembered or forgotten.  Two years later he sailed
from Liverpool, mate of the Starry Grace, with both master's and
extra-master's tickets in his possession.  And then it happened--
the thing the old crones had been shaking their heads over for
years.

It was told me by Gavin McNab, bos'n of the Starry Grace at the
time, himself an Island McGill man.

"Wull do I remember ut," he said.  "We was runnin' our Eastun'
down, an' makun' heavy weather of ut.  Oz fine a sailor-mon oz ever
walked was Samuel Henan.  I remember the look of hum wull thot last
marnun', a-watch-un' them bug seas curlun' up astern, an' a-
watchun' the old girl an' seeun' how she took them--the skupper
down below an' drunkun' for days.  Ut was ot seven thot Henan
brought her up on tull the wund, not darun' tull run longer on thot
fearful sea.  Ot eight, after havun' breakfast, he turns un, an' a
half hour after up comes the skupper, bleary-eyed an' shaky an'
holdun' on tull the companion.  Ut was fair smokun', I om tellun'
ye, an' there he stood, blunkun' an' noddun' an' talkun' tull
humsel'.  'Keep off,' says he ot last tull the mon ot the wheel.
'My God!' says the second mate, standun' beside hum.  The skupper
never looks tull hum ot all, but keeps on mutterun" an' jabberun'
tull humsel'.  All of a suddent-like he straightens up an' throws
hus head back, an' says:  'Put your wheel over, me mon--now domn
ye!  Are ye deef thot ye'll no be hearun' me?'

"Ut was a drunken mon's luck, for the Starry Grace wore off afore
thot God-Almighty gale wuthout shuppun' a bucket o' watter, the
second mate shoutun' orders an' the crew jumpun' like mod.  An'
wuth thot the skupper nods contented-like tull humself an' goes
below after more whusky.  Ut was plain murder o' the lives o' all
of us, for ut was no the time for the buggest shup afloat tull be
runnun'.  Run?  Never hov I seen the like!  Ut was beyond all
thunkun', an' me goun' tull sea, boy an' men, for forty year.  I
tell you ut was fair awesome.

"The face o' the second mate was white oz death, an' he stood ut
alone for half an hour, when ut was too much for hum an' he went
below an' called Samuel an' the third.  Aye, a fine sailor-mon thot
Samuel, but ut was too much for hum.  He looked an' studied, and
looked an' studied, but he could no see hus way.  He durst na heave
tull.  She would ha' been sweeput o' all honds an' stucks an'
everythung afore she could a-fetched up.  There was naught tull do
but keep on runnun'.  An' uf ut worsened we were lost ony way, for
soon or late that overtakun' sea was sure tull sweep us clear over
poop an' all.

"Dud I say ut was a God-Almighty gale?  Ut was worse nor thot.  The
devil himself must ha' hod a hond un the brewun' o' ut, ut was thot
fearsome.  I ha' looked on some sights, but I om no carun' tull
look on the like o' thot again.  No mon dared tull be un hus bunk.
No, nor no mon on the decks.  All honds of us stood on top the
house an' held on an' watched.  The three mates was on the poop,
with two men ot the wheel, an' the only mon below was thot whusky-
blighted captain snorun' drunk.

"An' then I see ut comun', a mile away, risun' above all the waves
like an island un the sea--the buggest wave ever I looked upon.
The three mates stood tulgether an' watched ut comun', a-prayun'
like we thot she would no break un passun' us.  But ut was no tull
be.  Ot the last, when she rose up like a mountain, curlun' above
the stern an' blottun' out the sky, the mates scattered, the second
an' third runnun' for the mizzen-shrouds an' climbun' up, but the
first runnun' tull the wheel tull lend a hond.  He was a brave men,
thot Samuel Henan.  He run straight un tull the face o' thot father
o' all waves, no thunkun' on humself but thunkun' only o' the shup.
The two men was lashed tull the wheel, but he would be ready tull
hond un the case they was kult.  An' then she took ut.  We on the
house could no see the poop for the thousand tons o' watter thot
hod hut ut.  Thot wave cleaned them out, took everythung along wuth
ut--the two mates, climbun' up the mizzen-ruggun', Samuel Henan
runnun' tull the wheel, the two men ot the wheel, aye, an' the
wheel utself.  We never saw aught o' them, for she broached tull
what o' the wheel goun', an' two men o' us was drownded off the
house, no tull mention the carpenter thot we pucked up ot the break
o' the poop wuth every bone o' hus body broke tull he was like so
much jelly."

And here enters the marvel of it, the miraculous wonder of that
woman's heroic spirit.  Margaret Henan was forty-seven when the
news came home of the loss of Samuel; and it was not long after
that the unbelievable rumour went around Island McGill.  I say
unbelievable.  Island McGill would not believe.  Doctor Hall pooh-
pooh'd it.  Everybody laughed at it as a good joke.  They traced
back the gossip to Sara Dack, servant to the Henans', and who alone
lived with Margaret and her husband.  But Sara Dack persisted in
her assertion and was called a low-mouthed liar.  One or two dared
question Tom Henan himself, but beyond black looks and curses for
their presumption they elicited nothing from him.

The rumour died down, and the island fell to discussing in all its
ramifications the loss of the Grenoble in the China seas, with all
her officers and half her crew born and married on Island McGill.
But the rumour would not stay down.  Sara Dack was louder in her
assertions, the looks Tom Henan cast about him were blacker than
ever, and Dr. Hall, after a visit to the Henan house, no longer
pooh-pooh'd.  Then Island McGill sat up, and there was a tremendous
wagging of tongues.  It was unnatural and ungodly.  The like had
never been heard.  And when, as time passed, the truth of Sara
Dack's utterances was manifest, the island folk decided, like the
bos'n of the Starry Grace, that only the devil could have had a
hand in so untoward a happening.  And the infatuated woman, so Sara
Dack reported, insisted that it would be a boy.  "Eleven bairns ha'
I borne," she said; "sux o' them lossies an' five o' them loddies.
An' sunce there be balance un all thungs, so wull there be balance
wuth me.  Sux o' one an' half a dozen o' the other--there uz the
balance, an' oz sure oz the sun rises un the marnun', thot sure
wull ut be a boy."

And boy it was, and a prodigy.  Dr. Hall raved about its
unblemished perfection and massive strength, and wrote a brochure
on it for the Dublin Medical Society as the most interesting case
of the sort in his long career.  When Sara Dack gave the babe's
unbelievable weight, Island McGill refused to believe and once
again called her liar.  But when Doctor Hall attested that he had
himself weighed it and seen it tip that very notch, Island McGill
held its breath and accepted whatever report Sara Dack made of the
infant's progress or appetite.  And once again Margaret Henan
carried a babe to Belfast and had it christened Samuel.


"Oz good oz gold ut was," said Sara Dack to me.

Sara, at the time I met her, was a buxom, phlegmatic spinster of
sixty, equipped with an experience so tragic and unusual that
though her tongue ran on for decades its output would still be of
imperishable interest to her cronies.

"Oz good oz good," said Sara Dack.  "Ut never fretted.  Sut ut down
un the sun by the hour an' never a sound ut would make oz long oz
ut was no hungered!  An' thot strong!  The grup o' uts honds was
like a mon's.  I mind me, when ut was but hours old, ut grupped me
so mighty thot I fetched a scream I was thot frightened.  Ut was
the punk o' health.  Ut slept an' ate, an' grew.  Ut never
bothered.  Never a night's sleep ut lost tull no one, nor ever a
munut's, an' thot wuth cuttin' uts teeth an' all.  An' Margaret
would dandle ut on her knee an' ask was there ever so fine a loddie
un the three Kungdoms.

"The way ut grew!  Ut was un keepun' wuth the way ut ate.  Ot a
year ut was the size o' a bairn of two.  Ut was slow tull walk an'
talk.  Exceptun' for gurgly noises un uts throat an' for creepun'
on all fours, ut dudna monage much un the walkun' an' talkun' line.
But thot was tull be expected from the way ut grew.  Ut all went
tull growun' strong an' healthy.  An' even old Tom Henan cheered up
ot the might of ut an' said was there ever the like o' ut un the
three Kungdoms.  Ut was Doctor Hall thot first suspicioned, I mind
me well, though ut was luttle I dreamt what he was up tull ot the
time.  I seehum holdun' thungs' un fronto' luttle Sammy's eyes, an'
a-makun' noises, loud an' soft, an' far an' near, un luttle Sammy's
ears.  An' then I see Doctor Hall go away, wrunklun' hus eyebrows
an' shakun' hus head like the bairn was ailun'.  But he was no
ailun', oz I could swear tull, me a-seeun' hum eat an' grow.  But
Doctor Hall no said a word tull Margaret an' I was no for guessun'
the why he was sore puzzled.

"I mind me when luttle Sammy first spoke.  He was two years old an'
the size of a child o five, though he could no monage the walkun'
yet but went around on all fours, happy an' contented-like an'
makun' no trouble oz long oz he was fed promptly, which was onusual
often.  I was hangun' the wash on the line ot the time when out he
comes, on all fours, hus bug head waggun' tull an' fro an' blunkun'
un the sun.  An' then, suddent, he talked.  I was thot took a-back
I near died o' fright, an' fine I knew ut then, the shakun' o'
Doctor Hall's head.  Talked?  Never a bairn on Island McGill talked
so loud an' tull such purpose.  There was no mustakun' ut.  I stood
there all tremblun' an' shakun'.  Little Sammy was brayun'.  I tell
you, sir, he was brayun' like an ass--just like thot,--loud an'
long an' cheerful tull ut seemed hus lungs ud crack.

"He was a eediot--a great, awful, monster eediot.  Ut was after he
talked thot Doctor Hall told Margaret, but she would no believe.
Ut would all come right, she said.  Ut was growun' too fast for
aught else.  Guv ut time, said she, an' we would see.  But old Tom
Henan knew, an' he never held up hus head again.  He could no abide
the thung, an' would no brung humsel' tull touch ut, though I om no
denyun' he was fair fascinated by ut.  Mony the time, I see hum
watchun' of ut around a corner, lookun' ot ut tull hus eyes fair
bulged wuth the horror; an' when ut brayed old Tom ud stuck hus
fungers tull hus ears an' look thot miserable I could a-puttied
hum.

"An' bray ut could!  Ut was the only thung ut could do besides eat
an' grow.  Whenever ut was hungry ut brayed, an' there was no
stoppun' ut save wuth food.  An' always of a marnun', when first ut
crawled tull the kutchen-door an' blunked out ot the sun, ut
brayed.  An' ut was brayun' that brought about uts end.

"I mind me well.  Ut was three years old an' oz bug oz a led o'
ten.  Old Tom hed been goun' from bed tull worse, ploughun' up an'
down the fields an' talkun' an' mutterun' tull humself.  On the
marnun' o' the day I mind me, he was suttun' on the bench outside
the kutchen, a-futtun' the handle tull a puck-axe.  Unbeknown, the
monster eediot crawled tull the door an' brayed after hus fashion
ot the sun.  I see old Tom start up an' look.  An' there was the
monster eediot, waggun' uts bug head an' blunkun' an' brayun' like
the great bug ass ut was.  Ut was too much for Tom.  Somethun' went
wrong wuth hum suddent-like.  He jumped tull hus feet an' fetched
the puck-handle down on the monster eediot's head.  An' he hut ut
again an' again like ut was a mod dog an' hum afeard o' ut.  An' he
went straight tull the stable an' hung humsel' tull a rafter.  An'
I was no for stoppun' on after such-like, an' I went tull stay
along wuth me suster thot was married tull John Martin an'
comfortable-off."


I sat on the bench by the kitchen door and regarded Margaret Henan,
while with her callous thumb she pressed down the live fire of her
pipe and gazed out across the twilight-sombred fields.  It was the
very bench Tom Henan had sat upon that last sanguinary day of life.
And Margaret sat in the doorway where the monster, blinking at the
sun, had so often wagged its head and brayed.  We had been talking
for an hour, she with that slow certitude of eternity that so
befitted her; and, for the life of me, I could lay no finger on the
motives that ran through the tangled warp and woof of her.  Was she
a martyr to Truth?  Did she have it in her to worship at so
abstract a shrine?  Had she conceived Abstract Truth to be the one
high goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named
her first-born Samuel?  Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the
ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the
self-willed peasant-mind?  Was it whim or fancy?--the one streak of
lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind?  Or,
reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno?  Was she convinced of
the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken?  Was hers a
steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or--and a subtler
thought--was she mastered by some vaster, profounder superstition,
a fetish-worship of which the Alpha and the Omega was the cryptic
SAMUEL?

"Wull ye be tellun' me," she said, "thot uf the second Samuel hod
been named Larry thot he would no hov fell un the hot watter an'
drownded?  Atween you an' me, sir, an' ye are untellugent-lookun'
tull the eye, would the name hov made ut onyways dufferent?  Would
the washun' no be done thot day uf he hod been Larry or Michael?
Would hot watter no be hot, an' would hot watter no burn uf he hod
hod ony other name but Samuel?"

I acknowledged the justice of her contention, and she went on.

"Do a wee but of a name change the plans o' God?  Do the world run
by hut or muss, an' be God a weak, shully-shallyun' creature thot
ud alter the fate an' destiny o' thungs because the worm Margaret
Henan seen fut tull name her bairn Samuel?  There be my son Jamie.
He wull no sign a Rooshan-Funn un hus crew because o' believun'
thot Rooshan-Funns do be monajun' the wunds an' hov the makun' o'
bod weather.  Wull you be thunkun' so?  Wull you be thunkun' thot
God thot makes the wunds tull blow wull bend Hus head from on high
tull lussen tull the word o' a greasy Rooshan-Funn un some dirty
shup's fo'c'sle?"

I said no, certainly not; but she was not to be set aside from
pressing home the point of her argument.

"Then wull you be thunkun' thot God thot directs the stars un their
courses, an' tull whose mighty foot the world uz but a footstool,
wull you be thunkun' thot He wull take a spite again' Margaret
Henan an' send a bug wave off the Cape tull wash her son un tull
eternity, all because she was for namun' hum Samuel?"

"But why Samuel?" I asked.

"An' thot I dinna know.  I wantud ut so."

"But WHY did you want it so?"

"An' uz ut me thot would be answerun' a such-like question?  Be
there ony mon luvun' or dead thot can answer?  Who can tell the WHY
o' like?  My Jamie was fair daft on buttermilk, he would drunk ut
tull, oz he said humself, hus back teeth was awash.  But my Tumothy
could no abide buttermilk.  I like tull lussen tull the thunder
growlun' an' roarun', an' rampajun'.  My Katie could no abide the
noise of ut, but must scream an' flutter an' go runnun' for the
mudmost o' a feather-bed.  Never yet hov I heard the answer tull
the WHY o' like, God alone hoz thot answer.  You an' me be mortal
an' we canna know.  Enough for us tull know what we like an' what
we duslike.  I LIKE--thot uz the first word an' the last.  An'
behind thot like no men can go an' find the WHY o' ut.  I LIKE
Samuel, an' I like ut well.  Ut uz a sweet name, an' there be a
rollun' wonder un the sound o' ut thot passes onderstandun'."

The twilight deepened, and in the silence I gazed upon that
splendid dome of a forehead which time could not mar, at the width
between the eyes, and at the eyes themselves--clear, out-looking,
and wide-seeing.  She rose to her feet with an air of dismissing
me, saying--

"Ut wull be a dark walk home, an' there wull be more thon a
sprunkle o' wet un the sky."

"Have you any regrets, Margaret Henan?" I asked, suddenly and
without forethought.

She studied me a moment.

"Aye, thot I no ha' borne another son."

"And you would . . .?" I faltered.

"Aye, thot I would," she answered.  "Ut would ha' been hus name."

I went down the dark road between the hawthorn hedges puzzling over
the why of like, repeating SAMUEL to myself and aloud and listening
to the rolling wonder in its sound that had charmed her soul and
led her life in tragic places.  SAMUEL!  There was a rolling wonder
in the sound.  Aye, there was!




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