Title: Tom Grogan
Author: Smith, Francis Hopkinson
Language: English
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TOM GROGAN

by F. Hopkinson Smith



I. BABCOCK’S DISCOVERY

Something worried Babcock. One could see that from the impatient gesture
with which he turned away from the ferry window on learning he had half
an hour to wait. He paced the slip with hands deep in his pockets, his
head on his chest. Every now and then he stopped, snapped open his watch
and shut it again quickly, as if to hurry the lagging minutes.

For the first time in years Tom Grogan, who had always unloaded his
boats, had failed him. A scow loaded with stone for the sea-wall that
Babcock was building for the Lighthouse Department had lain three days
at the government dock without a bucket having been swung across her
decks. His foreman had just reported that there was not enough material
to last the concrete-mixers two hours. If Grogan did not begin work at
once, the divers must come up.

Heretofore to turn over to Grogan the unloading of material for any
submarine work had been like feeding grist to a mill--so many tons of
concrete stone loaded on the scows by the stone crushing company
had meant that exact amount delivered by Grogan on Babcock’s
mixing-platforms twenty-four hours after arrival, ready for the divers
below. This was the way Grogan had worked, and he had required no
watching.

Babcock’s impatience did not cease even when he took his seat on the
upper deck of the ferry-boat and caught the welcome sound of the paddles
sweeping back to the landing at St. George. He thought of his men
standing idle, and of the heavy penalties which would be inflicted by
the Government if the winter caught him before the section of wall was
complete. It was no way to serve a man, he kept repeating to himself,
leaving his gangs idle, now when the good weather might soon be over
and a full day’s work could never be counted upon. Earlier in the season
Grogan’s delay would not have been so serious.

But one northeaster as yet had struck the work. This had carried away
some of the upper planking--the false work of the coffer-dam; but this
had been repaired in a few hours without delay or serious damage. After
that the Indian summer had set in--soft, dreamy days when the winds
dozed by the hour, the waves nibbled along the shores, and the swelling
breast of the ocean rose and fell as if in gentle slumber.

But would this good weather last? Babcock rose hurriedly, as this
anxiety again took possession of him, and leaned over the deck-rail,
scanning the sky. He did not like the drift of the low clouds off to the
west; southeasters began that way. It looked as though the wind might
change.

Some men would not have worried over these possibilities. Babcock did.
He was that kind of man.

When the boat touched the shore, he sprang over the chains, and hurried
through the ferry-slip.

“Keep an eye out, sir,” the bridge-tender called after him,--he had been
directing him to Grogan’s house,--“perhaps Tom may be on the road.”

Then it suddenly occurred to Babcock that, so far as he could remember,
he had never seen Mr. Thomas Grogan, his stevedore. He knew Grogan’s
name, of course, and would have recognized his signature affixed to the
little cramped notes with which his orders were always acknowledged, but
the man himself might have passed unnoticed within three feet of him.
This is not unusual where the work of a contractor lies in scattered
places, and he must often depend on strangers in the several localities.

As he hurried over the road he recalled the face of Grogan’s foreman,
a big blond Swede, and that of Grogan’s daughter, a slender fair-haired
girl, who once came to the office for her father’s pay; but all efforts
at reviving the lineaments of Grogan failed.

With this fact clear in his mind, he felt a tinge of disappointment.
It would have relieved his temper to unload a portion of it upon the
offending stevedore. Nothing cools a man’s wrath so quickly as not
knowing the size of the head he intends to hit.

As he approached near enough to the sea-wall to distinguish the swinging
booms and the puffs of white steam from the hoisting-engines, he saw
that the main derrick was at work lowering the buckets of mixed concrete
to the divers. Instantly his spirits rose. The delay on his contract
might not be so serious. Perhaps, after all, Grogan had started work.

When he reached the temporary wooden fence built by the Government,
shutting off the view of the depot yard, with its coal-docks and
machine-shops, and neared the small door cut through its planking, a
voice rang out clear and strong above the din of the mixers:--

“Hold on, ye wall-eyed macaroni! Do ye want that fall cut? Turn that
snatch-block, Cully, and tighten up the watch-tackle. Here, cap’n; lend
a hand. Lively now, lively, before I straighten out the hull gang of
ye!”

The voice had a ring of unquestioned authority. It was not quarrelsome
or abusive or bullying--only earnest and forceful.

“Ease away on that guy! Ease away, I tell ye!” it continued, rising in
intensity. “So--all gone! Now, haul out, Cully, and let that other team
back up.”

Babcock pushed open the door in the fence and stepped in. A loaded scow
lay close beside the string-piece of the government wharf. Alongside its
forward hatch was rigged a derrick with a swinging gaff. The “fall” led
through a snatch-block in the planking of the dock, and operated an iron
bucket that was hoisted by a big gray horse driven by a boy. A gang of
men were filling these buckets, and a number of teams being loaded with
their dumped contents. The captain of the scow was on the dock, holding
the guy.

At the foot of the derrick, within ten feet of Babcock, stood a woman
perhaps thirty-five years of age, with large, clear gray eyes, made
all the more luminous by the deep, rich color of her sunburnt skin. Her
teeth were snow-white, and her light brown hair was neatly parted over a
wide forehead. She wore a long ulster half concealing her well-rounded,
muscular figure, and a black silk hood rolled back from her face, the
strings falling over her broad shoulders, revealing a red silk scarf
loosely wound about her throat, the two ends tucked in her bosom. Her
feet were shod in thick-soled shoes laced around her well-turned ankles,
and her hands were covered by buckskin gauntlets creased with wear.
From the outside breast-pocket of her ulster protruded a time-book,
from which dangled a pencil fastened to a hempen string. Every movement
indicated great physical strength, perfect health, and a thorough
control of herself and her surroundings. Coupled with this was a dignity
and repose unmistakable to those who have watched the handling of large
bodies of workingmen by some one leading spirit, master in every tone of
the voice and every gesture of the body. The woman gave Babcock a quick
glance of interrogation as he entered, and, receiving no answer, forgot
him instantly.

“Come, now, ye blatherin’ Dagos,”--this time to two Italian shovelers
filling the buckets,--“shall I throw one of ye overboard to wake ye up,
or will I take a hand meself? Another shovel there--that bucket’s not
half full”--drawing one hand from her side pocket and pointing with an
authoritative gesture, breaking as suddenly into a good-humored laugh
over the awkwardness of their movements.

Babcock, with all his curiosity aroused, watched her for a moment,
forgetting for the time his own anxieties. He liked a skilled hand, and
he liked push and grit. This woman seemed to possess all three. He was
amazed at the way in which she handled her men. He wished somebody as
clearheaded and as capable were unloading his boat. He began to wonder
who she might be. There was no mistaking her nationality. Slight as was
her accent, her direct descent from the land of the shamrock and the
shilla-lah was not to be doubted. The very tones of her voice seemed
saturated with its national spirit--“a flower for you when you agree
with me, and a broken head when you don’t.” But underneath all these
outward indications of dominant power and great physical strength he
detected in the lines of the mouth and eyes a certain refinement
of nature. There was, too, a fresh, rosy wholesomeness, a sweet
cleanliness, about the woman. These, added to the noble lines of her
figure, would have appealed to one as beauty, and only that had it not
been that the firm mouth, well-set chin, and deep, penetrating glance of
the eye overpowered all other impressions.

Babcock moved down beside her.

“Can you tell me, madam, where I can find Thomas Grogan?”

“Right in front of ye,” she answered, turning quickly, with a toss of
her head like that of a great hound baffled in hunt. “I’m Tom Grogan.
What can I do for ye?”

“Not Grogan the stevedore?” Babcock asked in astonishment.

“Yes, Grogan the stevedore. Come! Make it short,--what can I do for ye?”

“Then this must be my boat. I came down”--

“Ye’re not the boss?”--looking him over slowly from his feet up, a
good-natured smile irradiating her face, her eyes beaming, every tooth
glistening. “There’s me hand, I’m glad to see ye. I’ve worked for ye off
and on for four years, and niver laid eyes on ye till this minute. Don’t
say a word. I know it. I’ve kept the concrete gangs back half a day, but
I couldn’t help it. I’ve had four horses down with the ‘zooty, and two
men laid up with dip’thery. The Big Gray Cully’s drivin’ over there--the
one that’s a-hoistin’--ain’t fit to be out of the stables. If ye weren’t
behind in the work, he’d have two blankets on him this minute. But I’m
here meself now, and I’ll have her out to-night if I work till daylight.
Here, cap’n, pull yerself together. This is the boss.”

Then catching sight of the boy turning a handspring behind the horse,
she called out again:--

“Now, look here, Cully, none of your skylarkin’. There’s the dinner
whistle. Unhitch the Big Gray; he’s as dry as a bone.”

The boy loosened the traces and led the horse to water, and Babcock,
after a word with the Captain, and an encouraging smile to Tom, turned
away. He meant to go to the engineer’s office before his return to town,
now that his affairs with Grogan were settled. As he swung back the door
in the board fence, he stumbled over a mere scrap of humanity carrying a
dinner-pail. The mite was peering through the crack and calling to Cully
at the horse-trough. He proved to be a boy of perhaps seven or eight
years of age, but with the face of an old man--pinched, weary, and
scarred all over with suffering and pain. He wore a white tennis-cap
pulled over his eyes, and a short gray jacket that reached to his waist.
Under one arm was a wooden crutch. His left leg was bent at the knee,
and swung clear when he jerked his little body along the ground. The
other, though unhurt, was thin and bony, the yarn stocking wrinkling
over the shrunken calf.

Beside him stood a big billy-goat, harnessed to a two-wheeled cart made
of a soap-box.

As Babcock stepped aside to let the boy pass he heard Cully shouting
in answer to the little cripple’s cries. “Cheese it, Patsy. Here’s Pete
Lathers comin’ down de yard. Look out fer Stumpy. He’ll have his dog on
him.”

Patsy laid down the pail and crept through the door again, drawing the
crutch after him. The yardmaster passed with a bulldog at his heels, and
touching his hat to the contractor, turned the corner of the coal-shed.

“What is your name?” said Babcock gently. A cripple always appealed to
him, especially a child.

“My name’s Patsy, sir,” looking straight up into Babcock’s eyes, the
goat nibbling at his thin hand.

“And who are you looking for?”

“I come down with mother’s dinner, sir. She’s here working on the dock.
There she is now.”

“I thought ye were niver comin’ wid that dinner, darlint,” came a
woman’s voice. “What kept ye? Stumpy was tired, was he? Well, niver
mind.”

The woman lifted the little fellow in her arms, pushed back his cap
and smoothed his hair with her fingers, her whole face beaming with
tenderness.

“Gimme the crutch, darlint, and hold on to me tight, and we’ll get
under the shed out of the sun till I see what Jennie’s sent me.” At this
instant she caught Babcock’s eye.

“Oh, it’s the boss. Sure, I thought ye’d gone back. Pull the hat off
ye, me boy; it’s the boss we’re workin’ for, the man that’s buildin’ the
wall. Ye see, sir, when I’m driv’ like I am to-day, I can’t go home to
dinner, and me Jennie sends me--big--man--Patsy--down”--rounding out
each word in a pompous tone, as she slipped her hand under the boy’s
chin and kissed him on the cheek.

After she had propped him between two big spars, she lifted the cover of
the tin pail.

“Pigs’ feet, as I’m alive, and hot cabbage, and the coffee a-b’ilin’
too!” she said, turning to the boy and pulling out a tin flask with a
screw top, the whole embedded in the smoking cabbage. “There, we’ll be
after puttin’ it where Stumpy can’t be rubbin’ his nose in it”--setting
the pail, as she spoke, on a rough anchor-stone.

Here the goat moved up, rubbing his head in the boy’s face, and then
reaching around for the pail.

“Look at him, Patsy! Git out, ye imp, or I’ll hurt ye! Leave that kiver
alone!” She laughed as she struck at the goat with her empty gauntlet,
and shrank back out of the way of his horns.

There was no embarrassment over her informal dinner, eaten as she sat
squat in a fence-corner, an anchor-stone for a table, and a pile of
spars for a chair. She talked to Babcock in an unabashed, self-possessed
way, pouring out the smoking coffee in the flask cup, chewing away on
the pigs’ feet, and throwing the bones to the goat, who sniffed them
contemptuously. “Yes, he’s the youngest of our children, sir. He and
Jennie--that’s home, and ‘most as tall as meself--are all that’s left.
The other two went to heaven when they was little ones.”

“Can’t the little fellow’s leg be straightened?” asked Babcock, in a
tone which plainly showed his sympathy for the boy’s suffering.

“No, not now; so Dr. Mason says. There was a time when it might have
been, but I couldn’t take him. I had him over to Quarantine again two
years ago, but it was too late; it’d growed fast, they said. When he
was four years old he would be under the horses’ heels all the time, and
a-climbin’ over them in the stable, and one day the Big Gray fetched
him a crack, and broke his hip. He didn’t mean it, for he’s as dacint
a horse as I’ve got; but the boys had been a-worritin’ him, and he let
drive, thinkin’, most likely, it was them. He’s been a-hoistin’ all the
mornin’.” Then, catching sight of Cully leading the horse back to work,
she rose to her feet, all the fire and energy renewed in her face.

“Shake the men up, Cully! I can’t give ‘em but half an hour to-day.
We’re behind time now. And tell the cap’n to pull them macaronis out
of the hold, and start two of ‘em to trimmin’ some of that stone to
starboard. She was a-listin’ when we knocked off for dinner. Come,
lively!”



II. A BOARD FENCE LOSES A PLANK

The work on the sea-wall progressed. The coffer-dam which had been built
by driving into the mud of the bottom a double row of heavy tongued and
grooved planking in two parallel rows, and bulkheading each end with
heavy boards, had been filled with concrete to low-water mark, consuming
not only the contents of the delayed scow, but two subsequent cargoes,
both of which had been unloaded by Tom Grogan.

To keep out the leakage, steam-pumps were kept going night and day.

By dint of hard work the upper masonry of the wall had been laid to the
top course, ready for the coping, and there was now every prospect that
the last stone would be lowered into place before the winter storms set
in.

The shanty--a temporary structure, good only for the life of the
work--rested on a set of stringers laid on extra piles driven outside of
the working-platform. When the submarine work lies miles from shore, a
shanty is the only shelter for the men, its interior being arranged
with sleeping-bunks, with one end partitioned off for a kitchen and
a storage-room. This last is filled with perishable property, extra
blocks, Manila rope, portable forges, tools, shovels, and barrows.

For this present sea-wall--an amphibious sort of structure, with one
foot on land and the other in the water--the shanty was of light pine
boards, roofed over, and made water-tight by tarred paper. The bunks had
been omitted, for most of the men boarded in the village. In this way
increased space for the storage of tools was gained, besides room for
a desk containing the government working drawings and specifications,
pay-rolls, etc. In addition to its door, fastened at night with a
padlock, and its one glass window, secured by a ten-penny nail, the
shanty had a flap-window, hinged at the bottom. When this was propped
up with a barrel stave it made a counter from which to pay the men, the
paymaster standing inside.

Babcock was sitting on a keg of dock spikes inside this working
shanty some days after he had discovered Tom’s identity, watching his
bookkeeper preparing the pay-roll, when a face was thrust through the
square of the window. It was not a prepossessing face, rather pudgy and
sleek, with uncertain, drooping mouth, and eyes that always looked over
one’s head when he talked. It was the property of Mr. Peter Lathers, the
yardmaster of the depot.

“When you’re done payin’ off maybe you’ll step outside, sir,” he said,
in a confiding tone. “I got a friend of mine who wants to know you. He’s
a stevedore, and does the work to the fort. He’s never done nothin’ for
you, but I told him next time you come down I’d fetch him over. Say,
Dan!” beckoning with his head over his shoulder; then, turning to
Babcock,--“I make you acquainted, sir, with Mr. Daniel McGaw.”

Two faces now filled the window--Lathers’s and that of a red-headed man
in a straw hat.

“All right. I’ll attend to you in a moment. Glad to see you, Mr. McGaw,”
 said Babcock, rising from the keg, and looking over his bookkeeper’s
shoulder.

Lathers’s friend proved to be a short, big-boned, square-shouldered
Irishman, about forty years of age, dressed in a once black broadcloth
suit with frayed buttonholes, the lapels and vest covered with
grease-spots. Around his collar, which had done service for several
days, was twisted a red tie decorated with a glass pin. His face was
spattered with blue powder-marks, as if from some quarry explosion. A
lump of a mustache dyed dark brown concealed his upper lip, making all
the more conspicuous the bushy, sandy-colored eyebrows that shaded a
pair of treacherous eyes. His mouth was coarse and filled with teeth
half worn off, like those of an old horse. When he smiled these opened
slowly like a vise. Whatever of humor played about this opening lost its
life instantly when these jaws clicked together again.

The hands were big and strong, wrinkled and seamed, their rough backs
spotted like a toad’s, the wrists covered with long spidery hairs.

Babcock noticed particularly his low, flat forehead when he removed his
hat, and the dry, red hair growing close to the eyebrows.

“I wuz a-sp’akin’ to me fri’nd Mister Lathers about doin’ yer wurruk,”
 began McGaw, resting one foot on a pile of barrow-planks, his elbow on
his knee. “I does all the haulin’ to the foort. Surgint Duffy knows me.
I wuz along here las’ week, an’ see ye wuz put back fer stone. If I’d
had the job, I’d had her unloaded two days befoore.”

“You’re dead right, Dan,” said Lathers, with an expression of disgust.
“This woman business ain’t no good, nohow. She ought to be over her
tubs.”

“She does her work, though,” Babcock said, beginning to see the drift of
things.

“Oh, I don’t be sayin’ she don’t. She’s a dacint woman, anough; but thim
b’ys as is a-runnin’ her carts is raisin’ h--ll all the toime.”

“And then look at the teams,” chimed in Lathers, with a jerk of his
thumb toward the dock--“a lot of staggering horse-car wrecks you
couldn’t sell to a glue-factory. That big gray she had a-hoistin’ is
blind of an eye and sprung so forrard he can’t hardly stand.”

At this moment the refrain of a song from somewhere near the board fence
came wafting through the air,--

          “And he wiped up the floor wid McGeechy.”

McGaw turned his head in search of the singer, and not finding him,
resumed his position.

“What are your rates per ton?” asked Babcock.

“We’re a-chargin’ forty cints,” said McGaw, deferring to Lathers, as if
for confirmation.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The Stevedores’ Union.”

“But Mrs. Grogan is doing it for thirty,” said Babcock, looking straight
into McGaw’s eyes, and speaking slowly and deliberately.

“Yis, I heared she wuz a-cuttin’ rates; but she can’t live at it. If I
does it, it’ll be done roight, an’ no throuble.”

“I’ll think it over,” said Babcock quietly, turning on his heel. The
meanness of the whole affair offended him--two big, strong men vilifying
a woman with no protector but her two hands. McGaw should never lift a
shovel for him.

Again the song floated out; this time it seemed nearer,--

   “. . . wid McGeechy--
    McGeechy of the Fourth.”

“Dan McGaw’s giv’n it to you straight,” said Lathers, stopping for a
last word, his face thrust through the window again. “He’s rigged for
this business, and Grogan ain’t in it with him. If she wants her work
done right, she ought to send down something with a mustache.”

Here the song subsided in a prolonged chuckle. McGaw turned, and caught
sight of a boy’s head, with its mop of black hair thrust through a
crownless hat, leaning over a water cask. Lathers turned, too, and
instantly lowered his voice. The head ducked out of sight. In the flash
glance Babcock caught of the face, he recognized the boy Cully, Patsy’s
friend, and the driver of the Big Gray. It was evident to Babcock that
Cully at that moment was bubbling over with fun. Indeed, this waif of
the streets, sometimes called James Finnegan, was seldom known to be
otherwise.

“Thet’s the wurrst rat in the stables,” said McGaw, his face reddening
with anger. “What kin ye do whin ye’re a-buckin’ ag’in’ a lot uv divils
loike him?”--speaking through the window to Babcock. “Come out uv thet,”
 he called to Cully, “or I’ll bu’st yer jaw, ye sneakin’ rat!”

Cully came out, but not in obedience to McGaw or Lathers. Indeed, he
paid no more attention to either of those distinguished diplomats than
if they had been two cement-barrels standing on end. His face, too, had
lost its irradiating smile; not a wrinkle or a pucker ruffled its calm
surface. His clay-soiled hat was in his hand--a very dirty hand, by
the way, with the torn cuff of his shirt hanging loosely over it.
His trousers bagged everywhere--at knees, seat, and waist. On his
stockingless feet were a pair of sun-baked, brick-colored shoes. His
ankles were as dark as mahogany. His throat and chest were bare, the
skin tanned to leather wherever the sun could work its way through the
holes in his garments. From out of this combination of dust and rags
shone a pair of piercing black eyes, snapping with fun.

“I come up fer de mont’s pay,” he said coolly to Babcock, the corner of
his eye glued to Lathers. “De ole woman said ye’d hev it ready.”

“Mrs. Grogan’s?” asked the bookkeeper, shuffling over his envelopes.

“Yep. Tom Grogan.”

“Can you sign the pay-roll?”

“You bet”--with an eye still out for Lathers.

“Where did you learn to write--at school?” asked Babcock, noting the
boy’s independence with undisguised pleasure.

“Naw. Patsy an’ me studies nights. Pop Mullins teaches us--he’s de ole
woman’s farder what she brung out from Ireland. He’s a-livin’ up ter
de shebang; dey’re all a-livin’ dere--Jinnie an’ de ole woman an’
Patsy--all ‘cept me an’ Carl. I bunks in wid de Big Gray. Say, mister,
ye’d oughter git onter Patsy--he’s de little kid wid de crutch. He’s a
corker, he is; reads po’try an’ everythin’. Where’ll I sign? Oh, I see;
in dis’ere square hole right along-side de ole woman’s name”--spreading
his elbows, pen in hand, and affixing “James Finnegan” to the collection
of autographs. The next moment he was running along the dock, the
money envelope tight in his hand, sticking out his tongue at McGaw,
and calling to Lathers as he disappeared through the door in the fence,
“Somp’n wid a mustache, somp’n wid a mustache,” like a news-boy calling
an extra. Then a stone grazed Lathers’s ear.

Lathers sprang through the gate, but the boy was half way through the
yard. It was this flea-like alertness that always saved Mr. Finnegan’s
scalp.

Once out of Lathers’s reach, Cully bounded up the road like a careering
letter X, with arms and legs in air. If there was any one thing that
delighted the boy’s soul, it was, to quote from his own picturesque
vocabulary, “to set up a job on de ole woman.” Here was his chance.
Before he reached the stable he had planned the whole scene, even to the
exact intonation of Lathers’s voice when he referred to the dearth of
mustaches in the Grogan household. Within a few minutes of his
arrival the details of the whole occurrence, word for word, with such
picturesque additions as his own fertile imagination could invent, were
common talk about the yard.

Lathers meanwhile had been called upon to direct a gang of laborers who
were moving an enormous iron buoy-float down the cinder-covered path to
the dock. Two of the men walked beside the buoy, steadying it with their
hands. Lathers was leaning against the board fence of the shop whittling
a stick, while the others worked.

Suddenly there was an angry cry for Lathers, and every man stood still.
So did the buoy and the moving truck.

With head up, eyes blazing, her silk hood pushed back from her face, as
if to give her air, her gray ulster open to her waist, her right hand
bare of a glove, came Tom Grogan, brushing the men out of her way.

“I knew I’d find you, Pete Lathers,” she said, facing him squarely; “why
do ye want to be takin’ the bread out of me children’s mouths?”

The stick dropped from Lathers’s hand: “Well, who said I did? What have
I got to do with your”--

“You’ve got enough to do with ‘em, you and your friend McGaw, to want
‘em to starve. Have I ever hurt ye that ye should try an’ sneak me
business away from me? Ye know very well the fight I’ve made, standin’
out on this dock, many a day an’ night, in the cold an’ wet, with
nothin’ between Tom’s children an’ the street but these two hands--an’
yet ye’d slink in like a dog to get me”--

“Here, now, I ain’t a-goin’ to have no row,” said Lathers, twitching his
shoulders. “It’s against orders, an’ I’ll call the yard-watch, and throw
you out if you make any fuss.”

“The yard-watch!” said Tom, with a look of supreme contempt. “I can
handle any two of ‘em, an’ ye too, an’ ye know it.” Her cheeks were
aflame. She crowded Lathers so closely his slinking figure hugged the
fence.

By this time the gang had abandoned the buoy, and were standing aghast,
watching the fury of the Amazon.

“Now, see here, don’t make a muss; the commandant’ll be down here in a
minute.”

“Let him come; he’s the one I want to see. If he knew he had a man in
his pay that would do as dirty a trick to a woman as ye’ve done to me,
his name would be Dinnis. I’ll see him meself this very day, and”--

Here Lathers interrupted with an angry gesture.

“Don’t ye lift yer arm at me,” she blazes out, “or I’ll break it at the
wrist!”

Lathers’s hand dropped. All the color was out of his face, his lip
quivering.

“Whoever said I said a word against you, Mrs. Grogan, is a--liar.” It
was the last resort of a cowardly nature.

“Stop lyin’ to me, Pete Lathers! If there’s anythin’ in this world I
hate, it’s a liar. Ye said it, and ye know ye said it. Ye want that
drunken loafer Dan McGaw to get me work. Ye’ve been at it all summer,
an’ ye think I haven’t watched ye; but I have. And ye say I don’t pay
full wages, and have got a lot of boys to do men’s work, an’ oughter be
over me tubs. Now let me tell ye”--Lathers shrank back, cowering before
her--“if ever I hear ye openin’ yer head about me, or me teams, or me
work, I’ll make ye swallow every tooth in yer head. Send down somethin’
with a mustache, will I? There’s not a man in the yard that’s a match
for me, an’ ye know it. Let one of ‘em try that.”

Her uplifted fist, tight-clenched, shot past Lathers’s ear. A quick
blow, a plank knocked clear of its fastenings, and a flood of daylight
broke in behind Lathers’s head!

“Now, the next time I come, Pete Lathers,” she said firmly, “I’ll miss
the plank and take yer face.”

Then she turned, and stalked out of the yard.



III. SERGEANT DUFFY’S LITTLE GAME

The bad weather so long expected finally arrived. An afternoon of soft,
warm autumn skies, aglow with the radiance of the setting sun, and
brilliant in violet and gold, had been followed by a cold, gray morning.
Of a sudden a cloud the size of a hand had mounted clear of the horizon,
and called together its fellows. An unseen herald in the east blew a
blast, and winds and sea awoke.

By nine o’clock a gale was blowing. By ten Babcock’s men were bracing
the outer sheathing of the coffer-dam, strengthening the derrick-guys,
tightening the anchor-lines, and clearing the working-platforms of sand,
cement, and other damageable property. The course-masonry, fortunately,
was above the water-line, but the coping was still unset and the rubble
backing of much of the wall unfinished. Two weeks of constant work
were necessary before that part of the structure contained in the first
section of the contract would be entirely safe for the coming winter.
Babcock doubled his gangs, and utilized every hour of low water to the
utmost, even when the men stood waist-deep. It was his only hope for
completing the first section that season. After that would come the
cold, freezing the mortar, and ending everything.

Tom Grogan performed wonders. Not only did she work her teams far into
the night, but during all this bad weather she stood throughout the day
on the unprotected dock, a man’s sou’wester covering her head, a rubber
waterproof reaching to her feet. She directed every boat-load herself,
and rushed the materials to the shovelers, who stood soaking wet in the
driving rain.

Lathers avoided her; so did McGaw. Everybody else watched her in
admiration. Even the commandant, a bluff, gray-bearded naval officer,--a
hero of Hampton Roads and Memphis,--passed her on his morning inspection
with a kindly look in his face and an aside to Babcock: “Hire some more
like her. She is worth a dozen men.”

Not until the final cargo required for the completion of the wall had
been dumped on the platforms did she relax her vigilance. Then she shook
the water from her oilskins and started for home. During all these hours
of constant strain there was no outbreak of bravado, no spell of ill
humor. She made no boasts or promises. With a certain buoyant pluck
she stood by the derricks day after day, firing volleys of criticism
or encouragement, as best suited the exigencies of the moment, now she
sprang forward to catch a sagging bucket, now tended a guy to relieve a
man, or handled the teams herself when the line of carts was blocked or
stalled.

Every hour she worked increased Babcock’s confidence and admiration. He
began to feel a certain pride in her, and to a certain extent to
rely upon her. Such capacity, endurance, and loyalty were new in his
experience. If she owed him anything for her delay on that first
cargo, the debt had been amply paid. Yet he saw that no such sense of
obligation had influenced her. To her this extra work had been a duty:
he was behind-hand with the wall, and anxious; she would help him out.
As to the weather, she reveled in it. The dash of the spray and the
driving rain only added to her enjoyment. The clatter of rattling
buckets and the rhythmic movement of the shovelers keeping time to her
orders made a music as dear to her as that of the steady tramp of men
and the sound of arms to a division commander.

Owing to the continued bad weather and the difficulty of shipping small
quantities of fuel, the pumping-engines ran out of coal, and a complaint
from Babcock’s office brought the agent of the coal company to the
sea-wall. In times like these Babcock rarely left his work. Once let the
Old Man of the Sea, as he knew, get his finger in between the cracks of
a coffer-dam, and he would smash the whole into wreckage.

“I was on my way to see Tom Grogan,” said the agent. “I heard you were
here, so I stopped to tell you about the coal. There will be a load down
in the morning. I am Mr. Crane, of Crane & Co., coal-dealers.”

“You know Mrs. Grogan, then?” asked Babcock, after the delay in the
delivery of the coal had been explained. He had been waiting for
some such opportunity to discover more about his stevedore. He never
discussed personalities with his men.

“Well, I should say so--known her for years. Best woman on top of Staten
Island. Does she work for you?”

“Yes, and has for some years; but I must confess I never knew Grogan was
a woman until I found her on the dock a few weeks ago, handling a cargo.
She works like a machine. How long has she been a widow?”

“Well, come to think of it, I don’t know that she is a widow. There’s
some mystery about the old man, but I never knew what. But that don’t
count; she’s good enough as she is, and a hustler, too.”

Crane was something of a hustler himself--one of those busy Americans
who opens his daily life with an office-key and closes it with a letter
for the late mail. He was a restless, wiry, black-eyed little man,
never still for a moment, and perpetually in chase of another eluding
dollar,--which half the time he caught.

Then, laying his hand on Babcock’s arm: “And she’s square as a brick,
too. Sometimes when a chunker captain, waiting to unload, shoves a few
tons aboard a sneak-boat at night, Tom will spot him every time. They
try to fool her into indorsing their bills of lading in full, but it
don’t work for a cent.”

“You call her Tom Grogan?” Babcock asked, with a certain tone in his
voice. He resented, somehow, Crane’s familiarity.

“Certainly. Everybody calls her Tom Grogan. It’s her husband’s name.
Call her anything else, and she don’t answer. She seems to glory in it,
and after you know her a while you don’t want to call her anything else
yourself. It comes kind of natural--like your calling a man ‘colonel’ or
‘judge.”

Babcock could not but admit that Crane might be right. All the names
which could apply to a woman who had been sweetheart, wife, and mother
seemed out of place when he thought of this undaunted spirit who had
defied Lathers, and with one blow of her fist sent the splinters of a
fence flying about his head.

“We’ve got the year’s contract for coal at the fort,” continued Crane.
“The quarter-master-sergeant who inspects it--Sergeant Duffy--has a
friend named McGaw who wants to do the unloading into the government
bins. There’s a low price on the coal, and there’s no margin for
anybody; and if Duffy should kick about the quality of the coal,--and
you can’t please these fellows if they want to be ugly,--Crane & Co.
will be in a hole, and lose money on the contract. I hate to go back on
Tom Grogan, but there’s no help for it. The ten cents a ton I’d save if
she hauls the coal instead of McGaw would be eaten up in Duffy’s short
weights and rejections. I sent Sergeant Duffy’s letter to her, so she
can tell how the land lies, and I’m going up now to her house to see
her, on my way to the fort. I don’t know what Duffy will get out of it;
perhaps he gets a few dollars out of the hauling. The coal is shipped,
by the way, and ought to be here any minute.”

“Wait; I’ll go with you,” said Babcock, handing him an order for more
coal. “She hasn’t sent down the tally-sheet for my last scow.” There was
not the slightest necessity, of course, for Babcock to go to Grogan’s
house for this document.

As they walked on, Crane talked of everything except what was uppermost
in Babcock’s mind. Babcock tried to lead the conversation back to Tom,
but Crane’s thoughts were on something else.

When they reached the top of the hill, the noble harbor lay spread out
beneath them, from the purple line of the great cities to the silver
sheen of the sea inside the narrows. The clearing wind had hauled to the
northwest. The sky was heaped with soft clouds floating in the blue. At
the base of the hill nestled the buildings and wharves of the Lighthouse
Depot, with the unfinished sea-wall running out from the shore, fringed
with platforms and bristling with swinging booms--the rings of white
steam twirling from the exhaust-pipes.

On either side of the vast basin lay two grim, silent forts, crouched on
grassy slopes like great beasts with claws concealed. Near by, big lazy
steamers, sullen and dull, rested motionless at Quarantine, awaiting
inspection; while beyond, white-winged graceful yachts curved tufts
of foam from their bows. In the open, elevators rose high as church
steeples; long lines of canal-boats stretched themselves out like huge
water-snakes, with hissing tugs for heads; enormous floats groaned under
whole trains of cars; big, burly lighters drifted slowly with widespread
oil-stained sails; monster derricks towered aloft, derricks that pick
up a hundred-ton gun as easily as an ant does a grain of sand--each
floating craft made necessary by some special industry peculiar to the
port of New York, and each unlike any other craft in the harbor of any
other city of the world.

Grogan’s house and stables lay just over the brow of this hill, in a
little hollow. The house was a plain, square frame dwelling, with
front and rear verandas, protected by the arching branches of a big
sycamore-tree, and surrounded by a small garden filled with flaming
dahlias and chrysanthemums. Everything about the place was scrupulously
neat and clean.

The stables--there were two--stood on the lower end of the lot. They
looked new, or were newly painted in a dark red, and appeared to have
accommodations for a number of horses. The stable-yard lay below the
house. In its open square were a pump and a horse-trough, at which two
horses were drinking. One, the Big Gray, had his collar off, showing
where the sweat had discolored the skin, the traces crossed loosely over
his back. He was drinking eagerly, and had evidently just come in from
work. About, under the sheds, were dirt-carts tilted forward on their
shafts, and dust-begrimed harnesses hanging on wooden pegs.

A strapping young fellow in a red shirt came out of the stable door
leading two other horses to the trough. Babcock looked about him in
surprise at the extent of the establishment. He had supposed that his
stevedore had a small outfit and needed all the work she could get. If,
as McGaw had said, only boys did Grogan’s work, they at least did it
well.

Crane mounted the porch first and knocked. Babcock followed.

“No, Mr. Crane,” said a young girl, opening the door, “she’s not at
home. I’m expecting her every minute. Mother went to work early this
morning. She’ll be sorry to miss you, sir. She ought to be home now, for
she’s been up ‘most all night at the fort. She’s just sent Carl up for
two more horses. Won’t you come in and wait?”

“No; I’ll keep on to the fort,” answered Crane. “I may meet her on the
road.”

“May I come in?” Babcock asked, explaining his business in a few words.

“Oh, yes, sir. Mother won’t be long now. You’ve not forgotten me, Mr.
Babcock? I’m her daughter Jennie. I was to your office once. Gran’pop,
this is the gentleman mother works for.”

An old man rose with some difficulty from an armchair, and bowed in a
kindly, deferential way. He had been reading near the window. He was
in his shirt-sleeves, his collar open at the throat. He seemed rather
feeble. His legs shook as if he were weak from some recent illness.
About the eyes was a certain kindliness that did not escape Babcock’s
quick glance; they were clear and honest, and looked straight into
his--the kind he liked. The old man’s most striking features were
his silver-white hair, parted over his forehead and falling to his
shoulders, and his thin, straight, transparent nose, indicating both ill
health and a certain refinement and sensitiveness of nature. Had it not
been for his dress, he might have passed for an English curate on half
pay.

“Me name’s Richard, sor--Richard Mullins,” said the old man. “I’m Mary’s
father. She won’t be long gone now. She promised me she’d be home for
dinner.” He placed a chair for Babcock, and remained standing.

“I will wait until she returns,” said Babcock. He had come to discover
something more definite about this woman who worked like a steam-engine,
crooned over a cripple, and broke a plank with her fist, and he did
not intend to leave until he knew. “Your daughter must have had great
experience. I have never seen any one man handle work better,” he
continued, extending his hand. Then, noticing that Mullins was still
standing, “Don’t let me take your seat.”

Mullins hesitated, glanced at Jennie, and, moving another chair from the
window, drew it nearer, and settled slowly beside Babcock.

The room was as clean as bare arms and scrubbing-brushes could make
it. Near the fireplace was a cast-iron stove, and opposite this stood a
parlor organ, its top littered with photographs. A few chromos hung
on the walls. There were also a big plush sofa and two haircloth
rocking-chairs, of walnut, covered with cotton tidies. The carpet on the
floor was new, and in the window, where the old man had been sitting,
some pots of nasturtiums were blooming, their tendrils reaching up both
sides of the sash. Opening from this room was the kitchen, resplendent
in bright pans and a shining copper wash-boiler. The girl passed
constantly in and out the open door, spreading the cloth and bringing
dishes for the table.

Her girlish figure was clothed in a blue calico frock and white apron,
the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, showing some faint traces of flour
clinging to her wrists, as if she had been suddenly summoned from the
bread-bowl. She was fresh and sweet, strong and healthy, with a certain
grace of manner about her that pleased Babcock instantly. He saw
now that she had her mother’s eyes and color, but not her air of
fearlessness and self-reliance--that kind of self-reliance which comes
only of many nights of anxiety and many days of success. He noticed,
too, that when she spoke to the old man her voice was tempered with a
peculiar tenderness, as if his infirmities were more to be pitied than
complained of. This pleased him most of all.

“You live with your daughter, Mrs. Grogan?” Babcock asked in a friendly
way, turning to the old man.

“Yis, sor. Whin Tom got sick, she sint fer me to come over an’ hilp her.
I feeds the horses whin Oi’m able, an’ looks after the garden, but Oi’m
not much good.”

“Is Mr. Thomas Grogan living?” asked Babcock cautiously, and with a
certain tone of respect, hoping to get closer to the facts, and yet not
to seem intrusive.

“Oh, yis, sor: an’ moight be dead fer all the good he does. He’s in
New Yorruk some’er’s, on a farm”--lowering his voice to a whisper and
looking anxiously toward Jennie--“belongin’ to the State, I think, sor.
He’s hurted pretty bad, an’ p’haps he’s a leetle off--I dunno. Mary has
niver tould me.”

Before Babcock could pursue the inquiry further there was a firm tread
on the porch steps, and the old man rose from the chair, his face
brightening.

“Here she is, Gran’pop,” said Jennie, laying down her dish and springing
to the door.

“Hold tight, darlint,” came a voice from the outside, and the next
instant Tom Grogan strode in, her face aglow with laughter, her hood
awry, her eyes beaming. Patsy was perched on her shoulder, his little
crutch fast in one hand, the other tightly wound about her neck. “Let
go, darlint; ye’re a-chokin’ the wind out of me.”

“Oh, it’s ye a-waitin’, Mr. Babcock--me man Carl thought ye’d gone.
Mr. Crane I met outside told me you’d been here. Jennie’ll get the
tally-sheet of the last load for ye. I’ve been to the fort since
daylight, and pretty much all night, to tell ye God’s truth. Oh,
Gran’pop, but I smashed ‘em!” she exclaimed as she gently removed
Patsy’s arm and laid him in the old man’s lap. She had picked the little
cripple up at the garden gate, where he always waited for her. “That’s
the last job that sneakin’ Duffy and Dan McGaw’ll ever put up on me. Oh,
but ye should’a’ minded the face on him, Gran’pop!”--untying her hood
and breaking into a laugh so contagious in its mirth that even Babcock
joined in without knowing what it was all about.

As she spoke, Tom stood facing her father, hood and ulster off, the
light of the windows silhouetting the splendid lines of her well-rounded
figure, with its deep chest, firm bust, broad back, and full throat, her
arms swinging loose and free.

“Ye see,” she said, turning to Babcock, “that man Duffy tried to do
me,--he’s the sergeant at the fort--and Dan McGaw--ye know him--he’s the
divil that wanted to work for ye. Ye know I always had the hauling of
the coal at the fort, an’ I want to hold on to it, for it comes every
year. I’ve been a-watchin’ for this coal for a month. Every October
there’s a new contractor, and this time it was me friend Mr. Crane I’ve
worked for before. So I sees Duffy about it the other day, an’ he says,
‘Well, I think ye better talk to the quartermaster, who’s away, but
who’ll be home next week.’ An’ that night when I got home, there lay a
letter from Mr. Crane, wid another letter inside it Sergeant Duffy
had sent to Mr. Crane, sayin’ he’d recommend Dan McGaw to do the
stevedorin’--the sneakin’ villain--an’ sayin’ that he--Duffy--was
a-goin’ to inspect the coal himself, an’ if his friend Dan McGaw hauled
it, the quality would be all right. Think of that! I tell ye, Mr.
Babcock, they’re divils. Then Mr. Crane put down at the bottom of his
letter to me that he was sorry not to give me the job, but that he must
give it to Duffy’s friend McGaw, or Duffy might reject the coal. Wait
till I wash me hands and I’ll tell ye how I fixed him,” she added
suddenly, as with a glance at her fingers she disappeared into the
kitchen, reappearing a moment later with her bare arms as fresh and as
rosy as her cheeks, from their friction with a clean crash towel.

“Well!” she continued, “I jumps into me bonnet yisterday, and over I
goes to the fort; an’ I up an’ says to Duffy, ‘I can’t wait for the
quartermaster. When’s that coal a-comin’?’ An’ he says, ‘In a couple of
weeks.’ An’ I turned onto him and says: ‘Ye’re a pretty loafer to take
the bread out of Tom Grogan’s children’s mouths! An’ ye want Dan McGaw
to do the haulin’, do ye? An’ the quality of the coal’ll be all right
if he gits it! An’ there’s sure to be twenty-five dollars for ye, won’t
there? If I hear a word more out of ye I’ll see Colonel Howard sure,
an’ hand him this letter.’ An’ Duffy turned white as a load of lime, and
says, ‘Don’t do it, for God’s sake! It’ll cost me m’ place.’ While I was
a-talkin’ I see a chunker-boat with the very coal on it round into the
dock with a tug; an’ I ran to the string-piece and catched the line, and
has her fast to a spile before the tug lost head-way. Then I started for
home on the run, to get me derricks and stuff. I got home, hooked up by
twelve o’clock last night, an’ before daylight I had me rig up an’ the
fall set and the buckets over her hatches. At six o’clock this mornin’ I
took the teams and was a-runnin’ the coal out of the chunker, when down
comes Mr.--Daniel--McGaw with a gang and his big derrick on a cart.” She
repeated this in a mocking tone, swinging her big shoulders exactly as
her rival would have done.

“‘That’s me rig,’ I says to him, p’intin’ up to the gaff, ‘an’ me coal,
an’ I’ll throw the fust man overboard who lays hands on it!’ An’ then
the sergeant come out and took McGaw one side an’ said somethin’ to him,
with his back to me; an’ when McGaw turned he was white too, an’ without
sayin’ a word he turned the team and druv off. An’ just now I met Mr.
Crane walkin’ down, lookin’ like he had lost a horse. ‘Tom Grogan,’ he
says, ‘I hate to disappoint ye, an’ wouldn’t, for ye’ve always done me
work well; but I’m stuck on the coal contract, an’ the sergeant can put
me in a hole if ye do the haulin’.’ An’ I says, ‘Brace up, Mr. Crane,
there’s a hole, but ye ain’t in it, an’ the sergeant is. I’ll unload
every pound of that coal, if I do it for nothin’, and if that sneak in
striped trousers bothers me or you, I’ll pull him apart an’ stamp on
him!’”

Through all her talk there was a triumphant good humor, a joyousness, a
glow and breeziness, which completely fascinated Babcock. Although she
had been up half the night, she was as sweet and fresh and rosy as a
child. Her vitality, her strength, her indomitable energy, impressed him
as no woman’s had ever done before.

When she had finished her story she suddenly caught Patsy out of her
father’s arms and dropped with him into a chair, all the mother-hunger
in her still unsatisfied. She smothered him with kisses and hugged him
to her breast, holding his pinched face against her ruddy cheek. Then
she smoothed his forehead with her well-shaped hand, and rocked him back
and forth. By and by she told him of the stone that the Big Gray had got
in his hoof down at the fort that morning, and how lame he had been, and
how Cully had taken it out with--a--great--big--spike!--dwelling on the
last words as if they belonged to some wonderful fairy-tale. The little
fellow sat up in her lap and laughed as he patted her breast joyously
with his thin hand. “Cully could do it,” he shouted in high glee; “Cully
can do anything.” Babcock, apparently, made no more difference to her
than if he had been an extra chair.

As she moved about her rooms afterward, calling to her men from the open
door, consulting with Jennie, her arms about her neck, or stopping
at intervals to croon over her child, she seemed to him to lose all
identity with the woman on the dock. The spirit that enveloped her
belonged rather to that of some royal dame of heroic times, than to that
of a working woman of to-day. The room somehow became her castle, the
rough stablemen her knights.

On his return to his work she walked back with him part of the way.
Babcock, still bewildered, and still consumed with curiosity to learn
something of her past, led the talk to her life along the docks,
expressing his great surprise at discovering her so capable and willing
to do a man’s work, asking who had taught her, and whether her husband
in his time had been equally efficient and strong.

Instantly she grew reticent. She did not even answer his question. He
waited a moment, and, realizing his mistake, turned the conversation in
another direction.

“And how about those rough fellows around the wharves--those who don’t
know you--are they never coarse and brutal to you?”

“Not when I look ‘em in the face,” she answered slowly and deliberately.
“No man ever opens his head, nor dar’sn’t. When they see me a-comin’
they stops talkin’, if it’s what they wouldn’t want their daughters to
hear; an’ there ain’t no dirty back talk, neither. An’ I make me own men
civil, too, with a dacint tongue in their heads. I had a young strip of
a lad once who would be a-swearin’ round the stables. I told him to mend
his manners or I’d wash his mouth out, an’ that I wouldn’t have nobody
hit me horses on the head. He kep’ along, an’ I see it was a bad example
for the other drivers (this was only a year ago, an’ I had three of
‘em); so when he hit the Big Gray ag’in, I hauled off and give him a
crack that laid him out. I was scared solid for two hours, though they
never knew it.”

Then, with an almost piteous look in her face, and with a sudden burst
of confidence, born, doubtless, of a dawning faith in the man’s evident
sincerity and esteem, she said in a faltering tone:--

“God help me! what can I do? I’ve no man to stand by me, an’ somebody’s
got to be boss.”



IV. A WALKING DELEGATE LEARNS A NEW STEP

McGaw’s failure to undermine Tom’s business with Babcock, and his
complete discomfiture over Crane’s coal contract at the fort, only
intensified his hatred of the woman.

Finding that he could make no headway against her alone, he called
upon the Union to assist him, claiming that she was employing non-union
labor, and had thus been able to cut down the discharging rates to
starvation prices.

A meeting was accordingly called by the executive committee of the
Knights, and a resolution passed condemning certain persons in the
village of Rockville as traitors to the cause of the workingman. Only
one copy of this edict was issued and mailed. This found its way into
Tom Grogan’s letter-box. Five minutes after she had broken the seal, her
men discovered the document pasted upside down on her stable door.

McGaw heard of her action that night, and started another line of
attack. It was managed so skillfully that that which until then had been
only a general dissatisfaction on the part of the members of the Union
and their sympathizers over Tom’s business methods now developed into an
avowed determination to crush her. They discussed several plans by which
she could be compelled either to restore rates for unloading, or
be forced out of the business altogether. As one result of these
deliberations a committee called upon the priest, Father McCluskey, and
informed him of the delicate position in which the Union had been placed
by her having hidden her husband away, thus forcing them to fight the
woman herself. She was making trouble, they urged, with her low wages
and her unloading rates. “Perhaps his Riverence c’u’d straighten her
out.” Father McCluskey’s interview with Tom took place in the priest’s
room one morning after early mass. It had gone abroad, somehow, that his
Reverence intended to discipline the “high-flyer,” and a considerable
number of the “tenement-house gang,” as Tom called them, had loitered
behind to watch the effect of the good father’s remonstrances.

What Tom told the priest no one ever knew: such conferences are part of
the regime of the church, and go no farther. It was noticed, however, as
she came down the aisle, that her eyes were red, as if from weeping,
and that she never raised them from the floor as she passed between her
enemies on her way to the church door. Once outside, she put her arm
around Jennie, who was waiting, and the two strolled slowly across the
lots to her house.

When the priest came out, his own eyes were tinged with moisture. He
called Dennis Quigg, McGaw’s right-hand man, and in a voice loud enough
to be heard by those nearest him expressed his indignation that any
dissension should have arisen among his people over a woman’s work,
and said that he would hear no more of this unchristian and unmanly
interference with one whose only support came from the labor of her
hands.

McGaw and his friends were not discouraged. They were only determined
upon some more definite stroke. It was therefore ordered that a
committee be appointed to waylay her men going to work, and inform them
of their duty to their fellow-laborers.

Accordingly, this same Quigg--smooth-shaven, smirking, and hollow-eyed,
with a diamond pin, half a yard of watch-chain, and a fancy
shirt--ex-village clerk with his accounts short, ex-deputy sheriff
with his accounts of cruelty and blackmail long, and at present walking
delegate of the Union--was appointed a committee of one for that duty.

Quigg began by begging a ride in one of Tom’s return carts, and taking
this opportunity to lay before the driver the enormity of working for
Grogan for thirty dollars a month and board, when there were a number of
his brethren out of work and starving who would not work for less than
two dollars a day if it were offered them. It was plainly the driver’s
duty, Quigg urged, to give up his job until Tom Grogan could be
compelled to hire him back at advanced wages. During this enforced
idleness the Union would pay the driver fifty cents a day. Here Quigg
pounded his chest, clenched his fists, and said solemnly, “If capital
once downs the lab’rin’ man, we’ll all be slaves.”

The driver was Carl Nilsson, a Swede, a big, blue-eyed, light-haired
young fellow of twenty-two, a sailor from boyhood, who three years
before, on a public highway, had been picked up penniless and hungry by
Tom Grogan, after the keeper of a sailors’ boarding-house had robbed him
of his year’s savings. The change from cracking ice from a ship’s deck
with a marlinespike, to currying and feeding something alive and warm
and comfortable, was so delightful to the Swede that he had given up the
sea for a while. He had felt that he could ship again at anytime, the
water was so near. As the months went by, however, he, too, gradually
fell under the spell of Tom’s influence. She reminded him of the great
Norse women he had read about in his boyhood. Besides all this, he was
loyal and true to the woman who had befriended him, and who had so far
appreciated his devotion to her interests as to promote him from hostler
and driver to foreman of the stables.

Nilsson knew Quigg by sight, for he had seen him walking home with
Jennie from church. His knowledge of English was slight, but it was
enough to enable him to comprehend Quigg’s purpose as he talked beside
him on the cart. After some questions about how long the enforced
idleness would continue, he asked suddenly:--

“Who da horse clean when I go ‘way?”

“D--n her! let her clean it herself,” Quigg answered angrily.

This ended the question for Nilsson, and it very nearly ended the
delegate. Jumping from the cart, Carl picked up the shovel and sprang
toward Quigg, who dodged out of his way, and then took to his heels.

When Nilsson, still white with anger, reached the dock, he related the
incident to Cully, who, on his return home, retailed it to Jennie with
such variety of gesture and intonation that that young lady blushed
scarlet, but whether from sympathy for Quigg or admiration for Nilsson,
Cully was unable to decide.

Quigg’s failure to coax away one of Tom’s men ended active operations
against Tom, so far as the Union was concerned. It continued to listen
to McGaw’s protests, but, with an eye open for its own interests,
replied that if Grogan’s men would not be enticed away it could at
present take no further action. His trouble with Tom was an individual
matter, and a little patience on McGaw’s part was advised. The season’s
work was over, and nothing of importance could be done until the opening
of the spring business. If Tom’s men struck now, she would be glad to
get rid of them. It would, therefore, be wiser to wait until she could
not do without them, when they might all be forced out in a body. In the
interim McGaw should direct his efforts to harassing his enemy. Perhaps
a word with Slattery, the blacksmith, might induce that worthy brother
Knight to refuse to do her shoeing some morning when she was stalled for
want of a horse; or he might let a nail slip in a tender hoof. No one
could tell what might happen in the coming months. At the moment the
funds of the Union were too low for aggressive measures. Were McGaw,
however, to make a contribution of two hundred dollars to the bank
account in order to meet possible emergencies, something might be done.
All this was duly inscribed in the books of the committee,--that is, the
last part of it,--and upon McGaw’s promising to do what he could toward
improving the funds. It was thereupon subsequently resolved that before
resorting to harsher measures the Union should do all in its power
toward winning over the enemy. Brother Knight Dennis Quigg was thereupon
deputed to call upon Mrs. Grogan and invite her into the Union.

On brother Knight Dennis Quigg’s declining for private reasons the
honorable mission intrusted to him by the honorable board (Mr. Quigg’s
exact words of refusal, whispered in the chairman’s ear, were, “I’m
a-jollyin’ one of her kittens; send somebody else after the old cat”),
another walking delegate, brother Knight Crimmins by name, was selected
to carry out the gracious action of the committee.

Crimmins had begun life as a plumber’s helper, had been iceman,
night-watchman, heeler, and full-fledged plumber; and having been out of
work himself for months at a time, was admirably qualified to speak of
the advantages of idleness to any other candidate for like honors.

He was a small man with a big nose, grizzled chin-whiskers, and
rum-and-watery eyes, and wore constantly a pair of patched blue overalls
as a badge of his laborship. The seat of these outside trousers showed
more wear than his hands.

Immediately upon his appointment, Crimmins went to McGaw’s house to talk
over the line of attack. The conference was held in the sitting-room and
behind closed doors--so tightly closed that young Billy McGaw, with one
eye in mourning from the effect of a recent street fight, was unable,
even by the aid of the undamaged eye and the keyhole, to get the
slightest inkling of what was going on inside.

When the door was finally opened and McGaw and Crimmins came out, they
brought with them an aroma the pungency of which was explained by two
empty glasses and a black bottle decorating one end of the only table in
the room.

As Crimmins stepped down from the broken stoop, with its rusty
rain-spout and rotting floor-planks, Billy overheard this parting remark
from his father: “Thry the ile furst, Crimmy, an’ see what she’ll do;
thin give her the vinegar; and thin,” with an oath, “ef that don’t
fetch’er, come back here to me and we’ll give ‘er the red pepper.”

Brother Knight Crimmins waved his hand to the speaker. “Just leave’er to
me, Dan,” he said, and started for Tom’s house. Crimmins was delighted
with his mission. He felt sure of bringing back her application within
an hour. Nothing ever pleased him so much as to work a poor woman into
an agony of fright with threats of the Union. Wives and daughters had
often followed him out into the street, begging him to let the men
alone for another week until they could pay the rent. Sometimes, when
he relented, the more grateful would bless him for his magnanimity. This
increased his self-respect.

Tom met him at the door. She had been sitting up with a sick child of
Dick Todd, foreman at the brewery, and had just come home. Hardly a week
passed without some one in distress sending for her. She had never seen
Crimmins before, and thought he had come to mend the roof. His first
words, however, betrayed him:--

“The Knights sent me up to have a word wid ye.”

Tom made a movement as if to shut the door in his face; then she paused
for an instant, and said curtly, “Come inside.”

Crimmins crushed his slouch-hat in his hand, and slunk into a chair by
the window. Tom remained standing.

“I see ye like flowers, Mrs. Grogan,” he began, in his gentlest voice.
“Them geraniums is the finest I iver see”--peering under the leaves of
the plants. “Guess it’s ‘cause ye water ‘em so much.”

Tom made no reply.

Crimmins fidgeted on his chair a little, and tried another tack. “I
s’pose ye ain’t doin’ much just now, weather’s so bad. The road’s awful
goin’ down to the fort.”

Tom’s hands were in the side pockets of her ulster. Her face was aglow
with her brisk walk from the tenements. She never took her eyes from his
face, and never moved a muscle of her body. She was slowly revolving in
her mind whether any information she could get out of him would be worth
the waiting for.

Crimmins relapsed into silence, and began patting the floor with his
foot. The prolonged stillness was becoming uncomfortable.

“I was tellin’ ye about the meetin’ we had to the Union last night. We
was goin’ over the list of members, an’ we didn’t find yer name. The
board thought maybe ye’d like to come in wid us. The dues is only
two dollars a month. We’re a-regulatin’ the prices for next year,
stevedorin’ an’ haulin’, an’ the rates’ll be sent out next week.” The
stopper was now out of the oil-bottle.

“How many members have ye got?” she asked quietly.

“Hundred an’ seventy-three in our branch of the Knights.”

“All pay two dollars a month?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Crimmins.

“What do we git when we jine?”

“Well, we all pull together--that’s one thing. One man’s strike’s
every man’s strike. The capitalists been tryin’ to down us, an’ the
laborin’-man’s got to stand together. Did ye hear about the Fertilizer
Company’s layin’ off two of our men las’ Friday just fer bein’ off a day
or so without leave, and their gittin’ a couple of scabs from Hoboken
to”--

“What else do we git?” said Tom, in a quick, imperious tone, ignoring
the digression. She had moved a step closer.

Crimmins looked slyly up into her eyes. Until this moment he had been
addressing his remarks to the brass ornament on the extreme top of the
cast-iron stove. Tom’s expression of face did not reassure him; in
fact, the steady gaze of her clear gray eye was as uncomfortable as the
focused light of a sun lens.

“Well--we help each other,” he blurted out.

“Do you do any helpin’?”

“Yis;” stiffening a little. “I’m the walkin’ delegate of our branch.”

“Oh, ye’re the walkin’ delegate! You don’t pay no two dollars, then, do
ye!”

“No. There’s got to be somebody a-goin’ round all the time, an’ Dinnis
Quigg and me’s confidential agents of the branch, an’ what we says
goes”--slapping his overalls decisively with his fist. McGaw’s suggested
stopper was being loosened on the vinegar.

Tom’s fingers closed tightly. Her collar began to feel small. “An’ I
s’pose if ye said I should pay me men double wages, and put up the price
o’ haulin’ so high that me customers couldn’t pay it, so that some of
yer dirty loafers could cut in an’ git it, I’d have to do it, whether
I wanted to or not; or maybe ye think I’d oughter chuck some o’ me own
boys into the road because they don’t belong to yer branch, as ye call
it, and git a lot o’ dead beats to work in their places who don’t know
a horse from a coal-bucket. An’ ye’ll help me, will ye? Come out here on
the front porch, Mr. Crimmins”--opening the door with a jerk. “Do ye see
that stable over there! Well, it covers seven horses; an’ the shed has
six carts with all the harness. Back of it--perhaps if ye stand on yer
toes even a little feller like you can see the top of another shed. That
one has me derricks an’ tools.”

Crimmins tried to interrupt long enough to free McGaw’s red pepper, but
her words poured out in a torrent.

“Now ye can go back an’ tell Dan McGaw an’ the balance of yer two-dollar
loafers that there ain’t a dollar owin’ on any horse in my stable, an’
that I’ve earned everything I’ve got without a man round to help ‘cept
those I pays wages to. An’ ye can tell ‘em, too, that I’ll hire who I
please, an’ pay ‘em what they oughter git; an’ I’ll do me own haulin’
an’ unloadin’ fer nothin’ if it suits me. When ye said ye were a walkin’
delegate ye spoke God’s truth. Ye’d be a ridin’ delegate if ye could;
but there’s one thing ye’ll niver be, an’ that’s a workin’ delegate,
as long as ye kin find fools to pay ye wages fer bummin’ round day ‘n’
night. If I had me way, ye would walk, but it would be on yer uppers,
wid yer bare feet to the road.”

Crimmins again attempted to speak, but she raised her arm threateningly:
“Now, if it’s walkin’ ye are, ye can begin right away. Let me see ye
earn yer wages down that garden an’ into the road. Come, lively now,
before I disgrace meself a-layin’ hands on the likes of ye!”



V. A WORD FROM THE TENEMENTS

One morning Patsy came up the garden path limping on his crutch; the
little fellow’s eyes were full of tears. He had been out with his goat
when some children from the tenements surrounded his cart, pitched it
into the ditch, and followed him half way home, calling “Scab! scab!” at
the top of their voices. Cully heard his cries, and ran through the yard
to meet him, his anger rising at every step. To lay hands on Patsy was,
to Cully, the unpardonable sin. Ever since the day, five years
before, when Tom had taken him into her employ, a homeless waif of
the streets,--his father had been drowned from a canal-boat she was
unloading,--and had set him down beside Patsy’s crib to watch while
she was at her work, Jennie being at school, Cully had loved the little
cripple with the devotion of a dog to its master. Lawless, rough, often
cruel, and sometimes vindictive as Cully was to others, a word from
Patsy humbled and softened him.

And Patsy loved Cully. His big, broad chest, stout, straight legs,
strong arms and hands, were his admiration and constant pride. Cully was
his champion and his ideal. The waif’s recklessness and audacity were to
him only evidences of so much brains and energy.

This love between the lads grew stronger after Tom had sent to Dublin
for her old father, that she might have “a man about the house.” Then
a new blessing came, not only into the lives of both the lads, but into
the whole household as well. Mullins, in his later years, had been a
dependent about Trinity College, and constant association with books and
students had given him a taste for knowledge denied his daughter. Tom
had left home when a girl. In the long winter nights during the slack
season, after the stalls were bedded and the horses were fed and watered
and locked up for the night, the old man would draw up his chair to
the big kerosene lamp on the table, and tell the boys stories--they
listening with wide-open eyes, Cully interrupting the narrative every
now and then by such asides as “No flies on them fellers, wuz ther’,
Patsy? They wuz daisies, they wuz. Go on, Pop; it’s better’n a circus;”
 while Patsy would cheer aloud at the downfall of the vanquished, with
their “three thousand lance-bearers put to death by the sword,” waving
his crutch over his head in his enthusiasm.

Jennie would come in too, and sit by her mother; and after Nilsson’s
encounter with Quigg--an incident which greatly advanced him in Tom’s
estimation--Cully would be sent to bring him in from his room over the
stable and give him a chair with the others, that he might learn
the language easier. At these times it was delightful to watch the
expression of pride and happiness that would come over Tom’s face as she
listened to her father’s talk.

“But ye have a great head, Gran’pop,” she would say. “Cully, ye
blatherin’ idiot, why don’t ye brace up an’ git some knowledge in yer
head? Sure, Gran’pop, Father McCluskey ain’t in it wid ye a minute. Ye
could down the whole gang of ‘em.” And the old man would smile faintly
and say he had heard the young gentlemen at the college recite the
stories so many times he could never forget them.

In this way the boys grew closer together, Patsy cramming himself from
books during the day in order to tell Cully at night all about the Forty
Thieves boiled in oil, or Ali Baba and his donkey, or poor man Friday
to whom Robinson Crusoe was so kind; and Cully relating in return how
Jimmie Finn smashed Pat Gilsey’s face because he threw stones at his
sister, ending with a full account of a dog-fight which a “snoozer of a
cop” stopped with his club.

So when Patsy came limping up the garden path this morning, rubbing
his eyes, his voice choking, and the tears streaming, and, burying
his little face in Cully’s jacket, poured out his tale of insult and
suffering, that valiant defender of the right pulled his cap tight over
his eyes and began a still-hunt through the tenements. There, as he
afterwards expressed it, he “mopped up the floor” with one after another
of the ringleaders, beginning with young Billy McGaw, Dan’s eldest son
and Cully’s senior.

Tom was dumfounded at the attack on Patsy. This was a blow upon which
she had not counted. To strike her Patsy, her cripple, her baby! The
cowardice of it incensed her, She knew instantly that her affairs must
have been common talk about the tenements to have produced so great an
effect upon the children. She felt sure that their fathers and mothers
had encouraged them in it.

In emergencies like this it was never to the old father that she turned.
He was too feeble, too much a thing of the past. While to a certain
extent he influenced her life, standing always for the right and always
for the kindest thing she could do, yet when it came to times of action
and danger she felt the need of a younger and more vigorous mind. It
was on Jennie, really more her companion than her daughter, that she
depended for counsel and sympathy at these times.

Tom did not underestimate the gravity of the situation. Up to that point
in her career she had fought only the cold, the heat, the many weary
hours of labor far into the night, and now and then some man like McGaw.
But this stab from out the dark was a danger to which she was unused.
She saw in this last move of McGaw’s, aided as he was by the Union,
not only a determination to ruin her, but a plan to divide her business
among a set of men who hated her as much on account of her success as
for anything else. A few more horses and carts and another barn or two,
and she herself would become a hated capitalist. That she had stood out
in the wet and cold herself, hours at a time, like any man among them;
that she had, in her husband’s early days, helped him feed and bed their
one horse, often currying him herself; that when she and her Tom had
moved to Rockville with their savings and there were three horses to
care for and her husband needed more help than he could hire, she had
brought her little baby Patsy to the stable while she worked there like
a man; that during all this time she had cooked and washed and kept the
house tidy for four people; that she had done all these things she
felt would not count now with the Union, though each member of it was a
bread-winner like herself.

She knew what power it wielded. There had been the Martin family,
honest, hardworking people, who had come down from Haverstraw--the man
and wife and their three children--and moved into the new tenement with
all their nice furniture and new carpets. Tom had helped them unload
these things from the brick-sloop that brought them. A few weeks after,
poor Martin, still almost a stranger, had been brought home from the
gas-house with his head laid open, because he had taken the place of a
Union man discharged for drunkenness, and lingered for weeks until he
died. Then the widow, with her children about her, had been put aboard
another sloop that was going back to her old home. Tom remembered, as
if it were yesterday, the heap of furniture and little pile of kitchen
things sold under the red flag outside the store near the post-office.

She had seen, too, the suffering and misery of her neighbors during the
long strike at the brewery two years before, and the moving in and out
from house to tenement and tenement to shanty, with never a day’s work
afterward for any man who left his job. She had helped many of the men
who, three years before, had been driven out of work by the majority
vote of the Carpenters’ Union, and who dared not go back and face the
terrible excommunication, the social boycott, with all its insults and
cruelties. She shuddered as she thought again of her suspicions years
ago when the bucket had fallen that crushed in her husband’s chest, and
sent him to bed for months, only to leave it a wrecked man. The rope
that held the bucket had been burned by acid, Dr. Mason said. Some
grudge of the Union, she had always felt, was paid off then.

She knew what the present trouble meant, now that it was started, and
she knew in what it might end. But her courage never wavered. She
ran over in her mind the names of the several men who were fighting
her--McGaw, for whom she had a contempt; Dempsey and Jimmie Brown, of
the executive committee, both liquor-dealers; Paterson, foreman of the
gas-house; and the rest--dangerous enemies, she knew.

That night she sent for Nilsson to come to the house; heard from him,
word for word, of Quigg’s effort to corrupt him; questioned Patsy
closely, getting the names of the children who had abused him; then
calling Jennie into her bedroom, she locked the door behind them.

When they reentered the sitting-room, an hour later, Jennie’s lips were
quivering. Tom’s mouth was firmly set. Her mind was made up.

She would fight it out to the bitter end.



VI. THE BIG GRAY GOES HUNGRY

That invincible spirit which dwelt in Tom’s breast--that spirit which
had dared Lathers, outwitted Duffy, cowed Crimmins, and braved the
Union, did not, strange to say, dominate all the members of her own
household. One defied her. This was no other than that despoiler of
new-washed clothes, old harness, wagon-grease, time-books, and spring
flowers, that Arab of the open lot, Stumpy the goat.

This supremacy of the goat had lasted since the eventful morning when,
only a kid of tender days, he had come into the stable-yard and wobbled
about on his uncertain legs, nestling down near the door where Patsy
lay. During all these years he had ruled over Tom. At first because his
fuzzy white back and soft, silky legs had been so precious to the
little cripple, and later because of his inexhaustible energy, his
aggressiveness, and his marvelous activity. Brave spirits have fainted
at the sight of spiders, others have turned pale at lizards, and some
have shivered when cats crossed their paths. The only thing Tom feared
on any number of legs, from centipedes to men, was Stumpy.

“Git out, ye imp of Satan!” she would say, raising her hand when he
wandered too near; “or I’ll smash ye!” The next instant she would be
dodging behind the cart out of the way of Stumpy’s lowered horns, with
a scream as natural and as uncontrollable as that of a schoolgirl over
a mouse. When he stood in the path cleared of snow from house to stable
door, with head down, prepared to dispute every inch of the way with
her, she would tramp yards around him, up to her knees in the drift,
rather than face his obstinate front.

The basest of ingratitude actuated the goat. When the accident occurred
that gained him his sobriquet and lost him his tail, it was Tom’s
quickness of hand alone that saved the remainder of his kidship from
disappearing as his tail had done. Indeed, she not only choked the dog
who attacked him, until he loosened his hold from want of breath, but
she threw him over the stable-yard fence as an additional mark of her
displeasure.

In spite of her fear of him, Tom never dispossessed Stumpy. That her
Patsy loved him insured him his place for life.

So Stumpy roamed through yard, kitchen, and stable, stalking over
bleaching sheets, burglarizing the garden gate, and grazing wherever he
chose.

The goat inspired no fear in anybody else. Jennie would chase him out
of her way a dozen times a day, and Cully would play bullfight with him,
and Carl and the other men would accord him his proper place, spanking
him with the flat of a shovel whenever he interfered with their daily
duties, or shying a corn-cob after him when his alertness carried him
out of their reach.

This afternoon Jennie had missed her blue-checked apron. It had been
drying on the line outside the kitchen door five minutes before. There
was no one at home but herself, and she had seen nobody pass the door.
Perhaps the apron had blown over into the stable-yard. If it had, Carl
would be sure to have seen it. She knew Carl had come home; she had been
watching for him through the window. Then she ran in for her shawl.

Carl was rubbing down the Big Gray. He had been hauling ice all the
morning for the brewery. The Gray was under the cart-shed, a flood of
winter sunlight silvering his shaggy mane and restless ears. The Swede
was scraping his sides with the currycomb, and the Big Gray, accustomed
to Cully’s gentler touch, was resenting the familiarity by biting at the
tippet wound about the neck of the young man.

Suddenly Carl raised his head--he had caught a glimpse of a flying apron
whipping round the stable door. He knew the pattern. It always gave him
a lump in his throat, and some little creepings down his back when he
saw it. Then he laid down the currycomb. The next instant there came a
sound as of a barrel-head knocked in by a mixing-shovel, and Stumpy
flew through the door, followed by Carl on the run. The familiar bit of
calico was Jennie’s lost apron. One half was inside the goat, the other
half was in the hand of the Swede.

Carl hesitated for a moment, looked cautiously about the yard, and
walked slowly toward the house, his eyes on the fragments. He never went
to the house except when he was invited, either to hear Pop read or to
take his dinner with the other men. At this instant Jennie came running
out, the shawl about her head.

“Oh, Carl, did you find my apron? It blew away, and I thought it might
have gone into the yard.”

“Yas, mees; an’ da goat see it too--luke!” extending the tattered
fragments, anger and sorrow struggling for the mastery in his face.

“Well, I never! Carl, it was a bran’-new one. Now just see, all the
strings torn off and the top gone! I’m just going to give Stumpy a good
beating.”

Carl suggested that he run after the goat and bring him back; but Jennie
thought he was down the road by this time, and Carl had been working all
the morning and must be tired. Besides, she must get some wood.

Carl instantly forgot the goat. He had forgotten everything, indeed,
except the trim little body who stood before him looking into his eyes.
He glowed all over with inward warmth and delight. Nobody had ever cared
before whether he was tired. When he was a little fellow at home at
Memlo his mother would sometimes worry about his lifting the big baskets
of fish all day, but he could not remember that anybody else had ever
given his feelings a thought. All this flashed through his mind as he
returned Jennie’s look.

“No, no! I not tire--I brang da wood.” And then Jennie said she never
meant it, and Carl knew she didn’t, of course; and then she said she had
never thought of such a thing, and he agreed to that; and they talked so
long over it, standing out in the radiance of the noonday sun, the color
coming and going in both their faces,--Carl playing aimlessly with
his tippet tassel, and Jennie plaiting and pinching up the ruined
apron,--that the fire in the kitchen stove went out, and the Big Gray
grew hungry and craned his long neck around the shed and whinnied for
Carl, and even Stumpy the goat forgot his hair-breadth escape, and
returned near enough to the scene of the robbery to look down at it from
the hill above.

There is no telling how long the Big Gray would have waited if Cully had
not come home to dinner, bringing another horse with Patsy perched on
his back. The brewery was only a short distance, and Tom always gave
her men a hot meal at the house whenever it was possible. Had any other
horse been neglected, Cully would not have cared; but the Big Gray which
he had driven ever since the day Tom brought him home,--“Old Blowhard,”
 as he would often call him (the Gray was a bit wheezy),--the Big Gray
without his dinner!

“Hully gee! Look at de bloke a-jollying Jinnie, an’ de Blowhard
a-starvin’. Say, Patsy,”--lifting him down,--“hold de line till I git
de Big Gray a bite. Git on ter Carl, will ye! I’m a-goin’--ter--tell
de--boss,”--with a threatening air, weighing each word--“jes soon as she
gits back. Ef I don’t I’m a chump.”

At sight of the boys, Jennie darted into the house, and Carl started for
the stable, his head in the clouds, his feet on air.

“No; I feed da horse, Cully,”--jerking at his halter to get him away
from Cully.

“A hell ov ‘er lot ye will! I’ll feed him meself. He’s been home an hour
now, an’ he ain’t half rubbed down.”

Carl made a grab for Cully, who dodged and ran under the cart. Then a
lump of ice whizzed past Carl’s ear.

“Here, stop that!” said Tom, entering the gate. She had been in the city
all the morning--“to look after her poor Tom,” Pop said. “Don’t ye be
throwing things round here, or I’ll land on top of ye.”

“Well, why don’t he feed de Gray, den? He started afore me, and dey
wants de Gray down ter de brewery, and he up ter de house a-buzzin’
Jinnie.”

“I go brang Mees Jan’s apron; da goat eat it oop.”

“Ye did, did ye! What ye givin’ us? Didn’t I see ye a-chinnin’ ‘er
whin I come over de hill--she a-leanin’ up ag’in’ de fence, an’ youse
a-talkin’ ter ‘er, an’ ole Blowhard cryin’ like his heart was broke?”

“Eat up what apron?” said Tom, thoroughly mystified over the situation.

“Stumpy eat da apron--I brang back--da half ta Mees Jan.”

“An’ it took ye all the mornin’ to give it to her?” said Tom
thoughtfully, looking Carl straight in the eye, a new vista opening
before her.

That night when the circle gathered about the lamp to hear Pop read,
Carl was missing. Tom had not sent for him.



VII. THE CONTENTS OF CULLY’S MAIL

When Walking Delegate Crimmins had recovered from his amazement, after
his humiliating defeat at Tom’s hands, he stood irresolute for a moment
outside her garden gate, indulged at some length in a form of profanity
peculiar to his class, and then walked direct to McGaw’s house.

That worthy Knight met him at the door. He had been waiting for him.

Young Billy McGaw also saw Crimmins enter the gate, and promptly hid
himself under the broken-down steps. He hoped to overhear what was going
on when the two went out again. Young Billy’s inordinate curiosity
was quite natural. He had heard enough of the current talk about the
tenements and open lots to know that something of a revengeful and
retaliatory nature against the Grogans was in the air; but as nobody who
knew the exact details had confided them to him, he had determined upon
an investigation of his own. He not only hated Cully, but the whole
Grogan household, for the pounding he had received at his hands, so he
was anxious to get even in some way.

After McGaw had locked both doors, shutting out his wife and little
Jack, their youngest, he took a bottle from the shelf, filled two
half-tumblers, and squaring himself in his chair, said:--

“Did ye see her, Crimmy?”

“I did,” replied Crimmins, swallowing the whiskey at a gulp.

“An’ she’ll come in wid us, will she?”

“She will, will she? She’ll come in nothin’. I jollied her about her
flowers, and thought I had her dead ter rights, when she up an’ asked me
what we was a-goin’ to do for her if she jined, an’ afore I could tell
her she opens the front door and gives me the dead cold.”

“Fired ye?” exclaimed McGaw incredulously.

“I’m givin’ it to ye straight, Dan; an’ she pulled a gun on me,
too,”--telling the lie with perfect composure. “That woman’s no slouch,
or I don’t know ‘em. One thing ye can bet yer bottom dollar on--all h---
can’t scare her. We’ve got to try some other way.”

It was the peculiarly fertile quality of Crimmins’s imagination that
made him so valuable to some of his friends.

When the conspirators reached the door, neither Crimmins nor his father
was in a talkative mood, and Billy heard nothing. They lingered a moment
on the sill, within a foot of his head as he lay in a cramped position
below, and then they sauntered out, his father bareheaded, to the
stable-yard. There McGaw leaned upon a cart-wheel, listening dejectedly
to Crimmins, who seemed to be outlining a plan of some kind, which
at intervals lightened the gloom of McGaw’s despair, judging from the
expression of his father’s face. Then he turned hurriedly to the house,
cursed his wife because he could not find his big fur cap, and started
across to the village. Billy followed, keeping a safe distance behind.

Tom after Patsy’s sad experience forbade him the streets, and never
allowed him out of her sight unless Cully or her father were with him.
She knew a storm was gathering, and she was watching the clouds and
waiting for the first patter of rain. When it came she intended that
every one of her people should be under cover. She had sent for Carl and
her two stablemen, and told them that if they were dissatisfied in any
way she wanted to know it at once. If the wages she was paying were not
enough, she was willing to raise them, but she wanted them distinctly
to understand that as she had built up the business herself, she was
the only one who had a right to manage it, adding that she would rather
clean and drive the horses herself than be dictated to by any person
outside. She said that she saw trouble brewing, and knew that her men
would feel it first. They must look out for themselves coming home late
at night. At the brewery strike, two years before, hardly a day passed
that some of the non-union men were not beaten into insensibility.

That night Carl came back again to the porch door, and in his quiet,
earnest way said: “We have t’ink ‘bout da Union. Da men not go--not
laik da union man. We not ‘fraid”--tapping his hip-pocket, where,
sailor-like, he always carried his knife sheathed in a leather case.

Tom’s eyes kindled as she looked into his manly face. She loved pluck
and grit. She knew the color of the blood running in this young fellow’s
veins.

Week after week passed, and though now and then she caught the
mutterings of distant thunder, as Cully or some of the others overheard
a remark on the ferry-boat or about the post-office, no other signs of
the threatened storm were visible.

Then it broke.

One morning an important-looking envelope lay in her letter-box. It was
long and puffy, and was stamped in the upper corner with a picture of a
brewery in full operation. One end bore an inscription addressed to the
postmaster, stating that in case Mr. Thomas Grogan was not found within
ten days, it should be returned to Schwartz & Co., Brewers.

The village post-office had several other letter-boxes, faced with
glass, so that the contents of each could be seen from the outside. Two
of these contained similar envelopes, looking equally important, one
being addressed to McGaw.

When he had called for his mail, the close resemblance between the
two envelopes seen in the letter-boxes set McGaw to thinking. Actual
scrutiny through the glass revealed the picture of the brewery on each.
He knew then that Tom had been asked to bid for the brewery hauling.
That night a special meeting of the Union was called at eight o’clock.
Quigg, Crimmins, and McGaw signed the call.

“Hully gee, what a wad!” said Cully, when the postmaster passed Tom’s
big letter out to him. One of Cully’s duties was to go for the mail.

When Pop broke the seal in Tom’s presence,--one of Pop’s duties was to
open what Cully brought,--out dropped a type-written sheet notifying Mr.
Thomas Grogan that sealed proposals would be received up to March
1st for “unloading, hauling, and delivering to the bins of the Eagle
Brewery” so many tons of coal and malt, together with such supplies,
etc. There were also blank forms in duplicate to be duly filled up with
the price and signature of the bidder. This contract was given out once
a year. Twice before it had been awarded to Thomas Grogan. The year
before a man from Stapleton had bid lowest, and had done the work. McGaw
and his friends complained that it took the bread out of Rockville’s
mouth; but as the bidder belonged to the Union, no protest could be
made.

The morning after the meeting of the Union, McGaw went to New York by
the early boat. He carried a letter from Pete Lathers, the yardmaster,
to Crane & Co., of so potent a character that the coal-dealers agreed
to lend McGaw five hundred dollars on his three-months’ note, taking
a chattel mortgage on his teams and carts as security, the money to be
paid McGaw as soon as the papers were drawn. McGaw, in return, was to
use his “pull” to get a permit from the village trustees for the free
use of the village dock by Crane & Co. for discharging their Rockville
coal. This would save Crane half a mile to haul. It was this promise
made by McGaw which really turned the scale in his favor. To hustle
successfully it was often necessary for Crane to cut some sharp corners.

This dock, as McGaw knew perfectly well, had been leased to another
party--the Fertilizing Company--for two years, and could not possibly be
placed at Crane’s disposal. But he said nothing of this to Crane.

When the day of payment to McGaw arrived, Dempsey of the executive
committee and Walking Delegate Quigg met McGaw at the ferry on his
return from New York. McGaw had Crane’s money in his pocket. That night
he paid two hundred dollars into the Union, two hundred to his feed-man
on an account long overdue, and the balance to Quigg in a poker game in
the back room over O’Leary’s bar.

Tom also had an interview with Mr. Crane shortly after his interview
with McGaw. Something she said about the dock having been leased to the
Fertilizing Company caused Crane to leave his chair in a hurry, and ask
his clerk in an angry voice if McGaw had yet been paid the money on his
chattel mortgage. When his cashier showed him the stub of the check,
dated two days before, Crane slammed the door behind him, his teeth set
tight, little puffs of profanity escaping between the openings. As he
walked with Tom to the door, he said:--

“Send your papers up, Tom, I’ll go bond any day in the year for you,
and for any amount; but I’ll get even with McGaw for that lie he told me
about the dock, if it takes my bank account.”

The annual hauling contract for the brewery, which had become an
important one in Rockville, its business having nearly doubled in
the last few years, was of special value to Tom at this time, and she
determined to make every effort to secure it.

Pop filled up the proposal in his round, clear hand, and Tom signed it,
“Thomas Grogan, Rockville, Staten Island.” Then Pop witnessed it, and
Mr. Crane, a few days later, duly inscribed the firm’s name under the
clause reserved for bondsmen. After that Tom brought the bid home, and
laid it on the shelf over her bed.

Everything was now ready for the fight.

The bids were to be opened at noon in the office of the brewery.

By eleven o’clock the hangers-on and idlers began to lounge into the
big yard paved with cobblestones. At half past eleven McGaw got out of a
buggy, accompanied by Quigg. At a quarter to twelve Tom, in her hood and
ulster, walked rapidly through the gate, and, without as much as a look
at the men gathered about the office door, pushed her way into the room.
Then she picked up a chair and, placing it against the wall, sat down.
Sticking out of the breast pocket of her ulster was the big envelope
containing her bid.

Five minutes before the hour the men began filing in one by one,
awkwardly uncovering their heads, and standing in one another’s way.
Some, using their hats as screens, looked over the rims. When the bids
were being gathered up by the clerk, Dennis Quigg handed over McGaw’s.
The ease with which Dan had raised the money on his notes had invested
that gentleman with some of the dignity and attributes of a capitalist;
the hired buggy and the obsequious Quigg indicated this. His new
position was strengthened by the liberal way in which he had portioned
out his possessions to the workingman. It was further sustained by the
hope that he might perhaps repeat his generosities in the near future.

At twelve o’clock precisely Mr. Schwartz, a round, bullet-headed German,
entered the room, turned his revolving-chair, and began to cut the six
envelopes heaped up before him on his desk, reading the prices aloud as
he opened them in succession, the clerk recording. The first four were
from parties in outside villages. Then came McGaw’s:--

“Forty-nine cents for coal, etc.”

So far he was lowest. Quigg twisted his hat nervously, and McGaw’s
coarse face grew red and white by turns.

Tom’s bid was the last.

“Thomas Grogan, Rockville, S.I., thirty-eight cents for coal, etc.”

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Schwartz, quietly, “Thomas Grogan gets the
hauling.”



VIII. POP MULLINS’S ADVICE

Almost every man and woman in the tenement district knew Oscar Schwartz,
and had felt the power of his obstinate hand during the long strike
of two years before, when, the Union having declared war, Schwartz
had closed the brewery for several months rather than submit to its
dictation. The news, therefore, that the Union had called a meeting and
appointed a committee to wait on Mr. Schwartz, to protest against his
giving work to a non-union woman filled them with alarm. The women
remembered the privations and suffering of that winter, and the three
dollars a week doled out to them by the Central Branch, while their
husbands, who had been earning two and three dollars a day, were
drinking at O’Leary’s bar, playing cards, or listening to the
encouraging talk of the delegates who came from New York to keep up
their spirits. The brewery employed a larger number of men than any
other concern in Rockville, so trouble with its employees meant serious
trouble for half the village if Schwartz defied the Union and selected a
non-union woman to do the work.

They knew, too, something of the indomitable pluck and endurance of
Tom Grogan. If she were lowest on the bids, she would fight for the
contract, they felt sure, if it took her last dollar. McGaw was a fool,
they said, to bid so high; he might have known she would cut his throat,
and bring them no end of trouble.

Having nursed their resentment, and needing a common object for their
wrath, the women broke out against Tom. Many of them had disliked her
ever since the day, years ago, when she had been seen carrying her
injured husband away at night to the hospital, after months of nursing
at home. And the most envious had always maintained that she meant at
the time to put him away forever where no one could find him, so that
she might play the man herself.

“Why should she be a-comin’ in an’ a-robbin’ us of our pay?” muttered
a coarse, red-faced virago, her hair in a frowse about her head, her
slatternly dress open at the throat. “Oi’ll be one to go an’ pull her
off the dock and jump on her. What’s she a-doin’, any-how, puttin’ down
prices! Ef her ole man had a leg to walk on, instid of his lyin’ to-day
a cripple in the hospital, he’d be back and be a-runnin’ things.”

“She’s doin’ what she’s a right to do,” broke out Mrs. Todd indignantly.
Mrs. Todd was the wife of the foreman at the brewery, and an old friend
of Tom’s. Tom had sat up with her child only the week before. Indeed,
there were few women in the tenements, for all their outcry, who did
not know how quick had been her hand to help when illness came, or the
landlord threatened the sidewalk, or the undertaker insisted on his
money in advance.

“It’s not Tom Grogan that’s crooked,” Mrs. Todd continued, “an’ ye all
know it. It’s that loafer, Dennis Quigg, and that old sneak, Crimmins.
They never lifted their hands on a decent job in their lives, an’ don’t
want to. When my man Jack was out of work for four months last winter,
and there wasn’t a pail of coal in the house, wasn’t Quigg gittin’ his
four dollars a day for shootin’ off his mouth every night at O’Leary’s,
an’ fillin’ the men’s heads full of capital and rights? An’ Dan McGaw’s
no better. If ye’re out for jumpin’ on people, Mrs. Moriarty, begin with
Quigg an’ some of the bummers as is runnin’ the Union, an’ as gits paid
whether the men works or not.”

“Bedad, ye’re roight,” said half a dozen women, the tide turning
suddenly, while the excitement grew and spread, and other women came in
from the several smaller tenements.

“Is the trouble at the brewery?” asked a shrunken-looking woman,
opening a door on the corridor, a faded shawl over her head. She was
a new-comer, and had been in the tenement only a week or so--not long
enough to have the run of the house or to know her neighbors.

“Yes; at Schwartz’s,” said Mrs. Todd, stopping opposite her door on the
way to her own rooms. “Your man’s got a job there, ain’t he?”

“He has, mum; he’s gateman--the fust job in six months. Ye don’t think
they’ll make him throw it up, do ye, mum?”

“Yes; an’ break his head if he don’t. Thet’s what they did to my man
three years gone, till he had to come in with the gang and pay ‘em two
dollars a month,” replied Mrs. Todd.

“But my man’s jined, mum, a month ago; they wouldn’t let him work till
he did. Won’t ye come in an’ set down? It’s a poor place we have--we’ve
been so long without work, an’ my girl’s laid off with a cough. She’s
been a-workin’ at the box-factory. If the Union give notice again,
I don’t know what’ll become of us. Can’t we do somethin’? Maybe Mrs.
Grogan might give up the work if she knew how it was wid us. She seems
like a dacent woman; she was in to look at me girl last week, hearin’ as
how we were strangers an’ she very bad.”

“Oh, ye don’t know her. Ye can save yer wind and shoe-leather. She’s on
ter McGaw red hot; that’s the worst of it. He better look out; she’ll
down him yet,” said Mrs. Todd.

As the two entered the stuffy, close room for further discussion, a
young girl left her seat by the window, and moved into the adjoining
apartment. She had that yellow, waxy skin, hollow, burning eyes, and
hectic flush which tell the fatal story so clearly.

While the women of the tenements were cursing or wringing their hands,
the men were devoting themselves to more vigorous measures. A meeting
was called for nine o’clock at Lion Hall.

It was held behind closed doors. Two walking delegates from Brooklyn
were present, having been summoned by telegram the night before, and who
were expected to coax or bully the weak-kneed, were the ultimatum sent
to Schwartz refused and an order for a sympathetic strike issued.

At the brewery all was quiet. Schwartz had read the notice left on
his desk by the committee the night before, and had already begun his
arrangements to supply the places of the men if a strike were ordered.
When pressed by Quigg for a reply, he said quietly:--

“The price for hauling will be Grogan’s bid. If she wants it, it is
hers.”

Tom talked the matter over with Pop, and had determined to buy another
horse and hire two extra carts. At her price there was a margin of at
least ten cents a ton profit, and as the work lasted through the year,
she could adjust the hauling of her other business without much extra
expense. She discussed the situation with no one outside her house. If
Schwartz wanted her to carry on the work, she would do it, Union or no
Union. Mr. Crane was on her bond. That in itself was a bracing factor.
Strong and self-reliant as she was, the helping hand which this man held
out to her was like an anchor in a storm.

That Sunday night they were all gathered round the kerosene lamp,--Pop
reading, Cully and Patsy on the floor, Jennie listening absent-mindedly,
her thoughts far away,--when there came a knock at the kitchen door.
Jennie flew to open it.

Outside stood two women. One was Mrs. Todd, the other the haggard,
pinched, careworn woman who had spoken to her that morning at her
room-door in the tenement.

“They want to see you, mother,” said Jennie, all the light gone out of
her eyes. What could be the matter with Carl, she thought. It had been
this way for a week.

“Well, bring ‘em in. Hold on, I’ll go meself.”

“She would come, Tom,” said Mrs. Todd, unwinding her shawl from her head
and shoulders; “an’ ye mustn’t blame me, fer it’s none of my doin’s.
Walk in, mum; ye can speak to her yerself. Why, where is she?”--looking
out of the door into the darkness. “Oh, here ye are; I thought ye’d
skipped.”

“Do ye remember me?” said the woman, stepping into the room, her gaunt
face looking more wretched under the flickering light of the candle than
it had done in the morning. “I’m the new-comer in the tenements. Ye were
in to see my girl th’other night. We’re in great trouble.”

“She’s not dead?” said Tom, sinking into a chair.

“No, thank God; we’ve got her still wid us; but me man’s come home
to-night nigh crazy. He’s a-walkin’ the floor this minute, an’ so I goes
to Mrs. Todd, an’ she come wid me. If he loses the job now, we’re in the
street. Only two weeks’ work since las’ fall, an’ the girl gettin’ worse
every day, and every cint in the bank gone, an’ hardly a chair lef’ in
the place. An’ I says to him, ‘I’ll go meself. She come in to see Katie
th’ other night; she’ll listen to me.’ We lived in Newark, mum, an’ had
four rooms and a mahogany sofa and two carpets, till the strike come
in the clock-factory, an’ me man had to quit; an’ then all winter--oh,
we’re not used to the likes of this!”--covering her face with her shawl
and bursting into tears.

Tom had risen to her feet, her face expressing the deepest sympathy
for the woman, though she was at a loss to understand the cause of her
visitor’s distress.

“Is yer man fired?” she asked.

“No, an’ wouldn’t be if they’d let him alone. He’s sober an’ steady,
an’ never tastes a drop, and brings his money home to me every Saturday
night, and always done; an’ now they”--

“Well, what’s the matter, then?” Tom could not stand much beating about
the bush.

“Why, don’t ye know they’ve give notice?” she said in astonishment;
then, as a misgiving entered her mind, “Maybe I’m wrong; but me man an’
all of ‘em tells me ye’re a-buckin’ ag’in’ Mr. McGaw, an’ that ye has
the haulin’ job at the brewery.”

“No,” said Tom, with emphasis, “ye’re not wrong; ye’re dead right. But
who’s give notice?”

“The committee’s give notice, an’ the boss at the brewery says he’ll
give ye the job if he has to shut up the brewery; an’ the committee’s
decided to-day that if he does they’ll call out the men. My man is a
member, and so I come over”--And she rested her head wearily against the
door, the tears streaming down her face.

Tom looked at her wonderingly, and then, putting her strong arms about
her, half carried her across the kitchen to a chair by the stove. Mrs.
Todd leaned against the table, watching the sobbing woman.

For a moment no one spoke. It was a new experience for Tom. Heretofore
the fight had been her own and for her own. She had never supposed
before that she filled so important a place in the neighborhood, and for
a moment there flashed across her mind a certain justifiable pride in
the situation. But this feeling was momentary. Here was a suffering
woman. For the first time she realized that one weaker than herself
might suffer in the struggle. What could she do to help her? This
thought was uppermost in her mind.

“Don’t ye worry,” she said tenderly. “Schwartz won’t fire yer man.”

“No; but the sluggers will. There was five men ‘p’inted to-day to do up
the scabs an’ the kickers who won’t go out. They near killed him once
in Newark for kickin’. It was that time, you know, when Katie was first
took bad.”

“Do ye know their names?” said Tom, her eyes flashing.

“No, an’ me man don’t. He’s new, an’ they dar’sn’t trust him. It was in
the back room, he says, they picked ‘em out.”

Tom stood for some moments in deep thought, gazing at the fire, her
arms akimbo. Then, wheeling suddenly, she opened the door of the
sitting-room, and said in a firm, resolute voice:--

“Gran’pop, come here; I want ye.”

The old man laid down his book, and stood in the kitchen doorway. He was
in his shirt-sleeves, his spectacles on his forehead.

“Come inside the kitchen, an’ shut that door behind ye. Here’s me friend
Jane Todd an’ a friend of hers from the tenement. That thief of a McGaw
has stirred up the Union over the haulin’ bid, and they’ve sent notice
to Schwartz that I don’t belong to the Union, an’ if he don’t throw me
over an’ give the job to McGaw they’ll call out the men. If they do,
there’s a hundred women and three times that many children that’ll go
hungry. This woman here’s got a girl herself that hasn’t drawed a well
breath for six months, an’ her man’s been idle all winter, an’ only just
now got a job at Schwartz’s, tending gate. Now, what’ll I do? Shall I
chuck up the job or stick?”

The old man looked into the desolate, weary face of the woman and then
at Tom. Then he said slowly:--

“Well, child, ye kin do widout it, an’ maybe t’ others can’t.”

“Ye’ve got it straight,” said Tom; “that’s just what I think meself.”
 Then, turning to the stranger:--

“Go home and tell yer man to go to bed. I’ll touch nothin’ that’ll break
the heart of any woman. The job’s McGaw’s. I’ll throw up me bid.”



IX. WHAT A SPARROW SAW

Ever since the eventful morning when Carl had neglected the Big Gray for
a stolen hour with Jennie, Cully had busied himself in devising ways
of making the Swede’s life miserable. With a boy’s keen insight, he had
discovered enough to convince him that Carl was “dead mashed on Jennie,”
 as he put it, but whether “for keeps” or not he had not yet determined.
He had already enriched his songs with certain tender allusions to their
present frame of mind and their future state of happiness. “Where was
Moses when the light went out!” and “Little Annie Rooney” had undergone
so subtle a change when sung at the top of Mr. James Finnegan’s voice
that while the original warp and woof of those very popular melodies
were entirely unrecognizable to any but the persons interested, to
them they were as gall and wormwood. This was Cully’s invariable way
of expressing his opinions on current affairs. He would sit on the
front-board of his cart,--the Big Gray stumbling over the stones as he
walked, the reins lying loose,--and fill the air with details of events
passing in the village, with all the gusto of a variety actor. The
impending strike at the brewery had been made the basis of a paraphrase
of “Johnnie, get your gun;” and even McGaw’s red head had come in for
its share of abuse to the air of “Fire, boys, fire!” So for a time this
new development of tenderness on the part of Carl for Jennie served to
ring the changes on “Moses” and “Annie Rooney.”

Carl’s budding hopes had been slightly nipped by the cold look in Tom’s
eye when she asked him if it took an hour to give Jennie a tattered
apron. With some disappointment he noticed that except at rare
intervals, and only when Tom was at home, he was no longer invited to
the house. He had always been a timid, shrinking fellow where a woman
was concerned, having followed the sea and lived among men since he was
sixteen years old. During these earlier years he had made two voyages
in the Pacific, and another to the whaling-ground in the Arctic seas. On
this last voyage, in a gale of wind, he had saved all the lives aboard
a brig, the crew helpless from scurvy. When the lifeboat reached the
lee of her stern, Carl at the risk of his life climbed aboard, caught a
line, and lowered the men, one by one, into the rescuing yawl. He could
with perfect equanimity have faced another storm and rescued a second
crew any hour of the day or night, but he could not face a woman’s
displeasure. Moreover, what Tom wanted done was law to Carl. She had
taken him out of the streets and given him a home. He would serve her in
whatever way she wished as long as he lived.

He and Gran’pop were fast friends. On rainy days, or when work was dull
in the winter months, the old man would often come into Carl’s little
chamber, next the harness-room in the stable, and sit on his bed by the
hour. And Carl would tell him about his people at home, and show him
the pictures tacked over his bed, those of his old mother with her white
cap, and of the young sister who was soon to be married.

On Sundays Carl followed Tom and her family to church, waiting until
they had left the house. He always sat far back near the door, so that
he could see them come out. Then he would overtake Pop with Patsy,
whenever the little fellow could go. This was not often, for now there
were many days when the boy had to lie all day on the lounge in the
sitting-room, poring over his books or playing with Stumpy, brought into
the kitchen to amuse him.

Since the day of Tom’s warning look, Carl rarely joined her daughter.
Jennie would loiter by the way, speaking to the girls, but he would hang
back. He felt that Tom did not want them together.

One spring morning, however, a new complication arose. It was a morning
when the sky was a delicate violet-blue, when the sunlight came tempered
through a tender land haze and a filmy mist from the still sea, when
all the air was redolent with sweet smells of coming spring, and all the
girls were gay in new attire. Dennis Quigg had been lounging outside the
church door, his silk hat and green satin necktie glistening in the sun.
When Jennie tripped out Quigg started forward. The look on his face,
as with swinging shoulders he slouched beside her, sent a thrill
of indignation through Carl. He could give her up, perhaps, if Tom
insisted, but never to a man like Quigg. Before the walking delegate
had “passed the time of day,” the young sailor was close beside Jennie,
within touch of her hand.

There was no love lost between the two men. Carl had not forgotten the
proposition Quigg had made to him to leave Tom’s employ, nor had Quigg
forgotten the uplifted shovel with which his proposal had been greeted.
Yet there was no well-defined jealousy between them. Mr. Walking
Delegate Dennis Quigg, confidential agent of Branch No. 3, Knights
of Labor, had too good an opinion of himself ever to look upon that
“tow-headed duffer of a stable-boy” in the light of a rival. Nor could
Carl for a moment think of that narrow-chested, red-faced, flashily
dressed Knight as being able to make the slightest impression on “Mees
Jan.”

Quigg, however, was more than welcome to Jennie to-day. A little sense
of wounded pride sent the hot color to her cheeks when she thought of
Carl’s apparent neglect. He had hardly spoken to her in weeks. What had
she done that he should treat her so? She would show him that there were
just as good fellows about as Mr. Carl Nilsson.

But all this faded out when Carl joined her--Carl, so straight,
clear-skinned, brown, and ruddy; his teeth so white; his eyes so blue!
She could see out of the corner of her eye how the hair curled in tiny
rings on his temples.

Still it was to Quigg she talked. And more than that, she gave him her
prayer-book to carry until she fixed her glove--the glove that needed
no fixing at all. And she chattered on about the dance at the boat club,
and the picnic which was to come off when the weather grew warmer.

And Carl walked silent beside her, with his head up and his heart down,
and the tears very near his eyes.

When they reached the outer gate of the stable-yard, and Quigg had
slouched off without even raising his hat,--the absence of all courtesy
stands in a certain class for a mark of higher respect,--Carl swung back
the gate, and held it open for her to pass in. Jennie loitered for a
moment. There was a look in Carl’s face she had not seen before. She had
not meant to hurt him, she said to herself.

“What mak’ you no lak me anna more, Mees Jan? I big annough to carry da
buke,” said Carl.

“Why, how you talk, Carl! I never said such a word,” said Jennie,
leaning over the fence, her heart fluttering.

The air was soft as a caress. Opal-tinted clouds with violet shadows
sailed above the low hills. In the shade of the fence dandelions had
burst into bloom. From a bush near by a song-sparrow flung a note of
spring across the meadow.

“Well, you nev’ cam’ to stable anna more, Mees Jan,” Carl said slowly,
in a tender, pleading tone, his gaze on her face.

The girl reached through the fence for the golden flower. She dared not
trust herself to look. She knew what was in her lover’s eyes.

“I get ta flower,” said Carl, vaulting the fence with one hand.

“No; please don’t trouble. Oh, Carl!” she exclaimed suddenly. “The
horrid brier! My hand’s all scratched!”

“Ah, Mees Jan, I so sorry! Let Carl see it,” he said, his voice melting.
“I tak’ ta brier out,” pushing back the tangled vines of last year to
bring himself nearer.

The clouds sailed on. The sparrow stood, on its tallest toes and twisted
its little neck.

“Oh, please do, Carl, it hurts so!” she said, laying her little round
hand in the big, strong, horny palm that had held the life-line the
night of the wreck.

The song-sparrow clung to the swaying top of a mullein-stalk near by,
and poured out a strong, swelling, joyous song that well-nigh split its
throat.

When Tom called Jennie, half an hour later, she and Carl were still
talking across the fence.



X. CULLY WINS BY A NECK

About this time the labor element in the village and vicinity was
startled by an advertisement in the Rockville “Daily News,” signed by
the clerk of the Board of Village Trustees, notifying contractors that
thirty days thereafter, closing at nine P.M. precisely, separate sealed
proposals would be received at the meeting-room of the board, over the
post-office, for the hauling of twenty thousand cubic yards of fine
crushed stone for use on the public highways; bidders would be obliged
to give suitable bonds, etc.; certified check for five hundred dollars
to accompany each bid as guaranty, etc.

The news was a grateful surprise to the workingmen. The hauling and
placing of so large an amount of material as soon as spring opened meant
plenty of work for many shovelers and pickers. The local politicians,
of course, had known all about it for weeks; especially those who owned
property fronting on the streets to be improved: they had helped the
appropriation through the finance committee. McGaw, too, had known about
it from the first day of its discussion before the board. Those who were
inside the ring had decided then that he would be the best man to haul
the stone. The “steal,” they knew, could best be arranged in the tally
of the carts--the final check on the scow measurement. They knew that
McGaw’s accounts could be controlled, and the total result easily
“fixed.” The stone itself had been purchased of the manufacturers the
year before, but there were not funds enough to put it on the roads at
that time.

Here, then, was McGaw’s chance. His triumph at obtaining the brewery
contract was but short-lived. Schwartz had given him the work, but at
Tom’s price, not at his own. McGaw had accepted it, hoping for profits
that would help him with his chattel mortgage. After he had been at work
for a month, however, he found that he ran behind. He began to see that,
in spite of its boastings, the Union had really done nothing for him,
except indirectly with its threatened strike. The Union, on the other
hand, insisted that it had been McGaw’s business to arrange his
own terms with Schwartz. What it had done was to kill Grogan as a
competitor, and knock her non-union men out of the job. This ended its
duty.

While they said this much to McGaw; so far as outsiders could know, the
Union claimed that they had scored a brilliant victory. The Brooklyn and
New York branches duly paraded it as another triumph over capital,
and their bank accounts were accordingly increased with new dues and
collections.

With this new contract in his possession, McGaw felt certain he could
cancel his debt with Crane and get even with the world. He began his
arrangements at once. Police-Justice Rowan, the prospective candidate
for the Assembly, who had acquired some landed property by the purchase
of expired tax titles, agreed to furnish the certified check for five
hundred dollars and to sign McGaw’s bond for a consideration to be
subsequently agreed upon. A brother of Rowan’s, a contractor, who was
finishing some grading at Quarantine Landing, had also consented, for a
consideration, to loan McGaw what extra teams he required.

The size of the contract was so great, and the deposit check and bond
were so large, that McGaw concluded at once that the competition would
be narrowed down between himself and Rowan’s brother, with Justice Rowan
as backer, and perhaps one other firm from across the island, near New
Brighton. His own advantage over other bidders was in his living on the
spot, with his stables and teams near at hand.

Tom, he felt assured, was out of the way. Not only was the contract very
much too large for her, requiring twice as many carts as she possessed,
but now that the spring work was about to begin, and Babcock’s sea-wall
work to be resumed, she had all the stevedoring she could do for her own
customers, without going outside for additional business.

Moreover, she had apparently given up the fight, for she had bid on no
work of any kind since the morning she had called upon Schwartz and told
him, in her blunt, frank way, “Give the work to McGaw at me price. It’s
enough and fair.”

Tom, meanwhile, made frequent visits to New York, returning late at
night. One day she brought home a circular with cuts of several improved
kinds of hoisting-engines with automatic dumping-buckets. She showed
them to Pop under the kerosene lamp at night, explaining to him their
advantages in handling small material like coal or broken stone. Once
she so far relaxed her rules in regard to Jennie’s lover as to send for
Carl to come to the house after supper, questioning him closely about
the upper rigging of a new derrick she had seen. Carl’s experience as
a sailor was especially valuable in matters of this kind. He could not
only splice a broken “fall,” and repair the sheaves and friction-rollers
in a hoisting-block, but whenever the rigging got tangled aloft he could
spring up the derrick like a cat and unreeve the rope in an instant. She
also wrote to Babcock, asking him to stop at her house some morning
on his way to the Quarantine Landing, where he was building a
retaining-wall; and when he arrived, she took him out to the shed where
she kept her heavy derricks. That more experienced contractor at once
became deeply interested, and made a series of sketches for her, on the
back of an envelope, of an improved pintle and revolving-cap which
he claimed would greatly improve the working of her derricks. These
sketches she took to the village blacksmith next day, and by that night
had an estimate of their cost. She was also seen one morning, when the
new trolley company got rid of its old stock, at a sale of car-horses,
watching the prices closely, and examining the condition of the animals
sold. She asked the superintendent to drop her a postal when the next
sale occurred. To her neighbors, however, and even to her own men,
she said nothing. The only man in the village to whom she had spoken
regarding the new work was the clerk of the board, and then only
casually as to the exact time when the bids would be received.

The day before the eventful night when the proposals were to be opened,
Mr. Crane, in his buggy, stopped at her house on his way back from the
fort, and they drove together to the ferry. When she returned she called
Pop into the kitchen, shut the door, and showed him the bid duly signed
and a slip of pink paper. This was a check of Crane & Co.’s to be
deposited with the bid. Then she went down to the stable and had a long
conference with Cully.

The village Board of Trustees consisted of nine men, representing a fair
average of the intelligence and honesty of the people. The president
was a reputable hardware merchant, a very good citizen, who kept a store
largely patronized by local contractors. The other members were two
lawyers,--young men working up in practice with the assistance of a
political pull,--a veterinary surgeon, and five gentlemen of leisure,
whose only visible means of support were derived from pool-rooms and
ward meetings. Every man on the board, except the surgeon and the
president, had some particular axe to grind. One wished to be sheriff;
another, county clerk. The five gentlemen of leisure wished to stay
where they were. When a pie was cut, these five held the knife. It was
their fault, they said, when they went hungry.

In the side of this body politic the surgeon was a thorn as sharp as any
one of his scalpels. He was a hard-headed, sober-minded Scotchman, who
had been elected to represent a group of his countrymen living in the
eastern part of the village, and whose profession, the five supposed,
indicated without doubt his entire willingness to see through a
cart-wheel, especially when the hub was silver-plated. At the first
meeting of the board they learned their mistake, but it did not worry
them much. They had seven votes to two.

The council-chamber of the board was a hall--large for
Rockville--situated over the post-office, and only two doors from
O’Leary’s barroom It was the ordinary village hall, used for everything
from a Christmas festival to a prize-fight. In summer it answered for a
skating-rink.

Once a month the board occupied it. On these occasions a sort of rostrum
was brought in for the president, besides a square table and a dozen
chairs. These were placed at one end, and were partitioned off by a
wooden rail to form an inclosure, outside of which always stood the
citizens. On the wall hung a big eight-day clock. Over the table,
about which were placed chairs, a kerosene lamp swung on a brass chain.
Opposite each seat lay a square of blotting-paper and some cheap pens
and paper. Down the middle of the table were three inkstands, standing
in china plates.

The board always met in the evening, as the business hours of the
members prevented their giving the day to their deliberations.

Upon the night of the letting of the contract the first man to arrive
was McGaw. He ran up the stairs hurriedly, found no one he was looking
for, and returned to O’Leary’s, where he was joined by Justice Rowan and
his brother John, the contractor, Quigg, Crimmins, and two friends of
the Union. During the last week the Union was outspoken in its aid of
McGaw, and its men had quietly passed the word of “Hands off this job!”
 about in the neighborhood. If McGaw got the work--and there was now not
the slightest doubt of it--he would, of course, employ all Union men.
If anybody else got it--well, they would attend to him later. “One thing
was certain: no ‘scab’ from New Brighton should come over and take it.”
 They’d do up anybody who tried that game.

When McGaw, surrounded by his friends entered the board-room again, the
place was full. Outside the rail stood a solid mass of people. Inside
every seat was occupied. It was too important a meeting for any trustee
to miss.

McGaw stood on his toes and looked over the heads. To his delight, Tom
was not in the room, and no one representing her. If he had had any
lingering suspicion of her bidding, her non-appearance allayed it. He
knew now that she was out of the race. Moreover, no New Brighton people
had come. He whispered this information to Justice Rowan’s brother
behind his big, speckled hand covered with its red, spidery hair. Then
the two forced their way out again, reentered the post-office, and
borrowed a pen. Once there, McGaw took from his side pocket two large
envelopes, the contents of which he spread out under the light.

“I’m dead roight,” said McGaw. “I’ll put up the price of this other bid.
There ain’t a man round here that dares show his head. The Union’s fixed
‘em.”

“Will the woman bid?” asked his companion.

“The woman! What’d she be a-doin’ wid a bid loike that? She c’u’dn’t
handle the half of it. I’ll wait till a few minutes to nine o’clock. Ye
kin fix up both these bids an’ hold ‘em in yer pocket. Thin we kin see
what bids is laid on the table. Ours’ll go in last. If there’s nothin’
else we’ll give’em the high one. I’ll git inside the rail, so’s to be
near the table.”

When the two squeezed back through the throng again into the board-room,
even the staircase was packed. McGaw pulled off his fur cap and
struggled past the rail, bowing to the president. The justice’s brother
stood outside, within reach of McGaw’s hand. McGaw glanced at the clock
and winked complacently at his prospective partner--not a single bid
had been handed in. Then he thrust out his long arm, took from Rowan’s
brother the big envelope containing the higher bid, and dropped it on
the table.

Just then there was a commotion at the door. Somebody was trying to
force a passage in. The president rose from his chair, and looked over
the crowd. McGaw started from his chair, looked anxiously at the clock,
then at his partner. The body of a boy struggling like an eel worked its
way through the mass, dodged under the wooden bar, and threw an envelope
on the table.

“Dat’s Tom Grogan’s bid,” he said, looking at the president. “Hully gee!
but dat was a close shave! She telled me not ter dump it till one minute
o’ nine, an’ de bloke at de door come near sp’ilin’ de game till I give
him one in de mug.”

At this instant the clock struck nine, and the president’s gavel fell.

“Time’s up,” said the Scotchman.



XI. A TWO-DOLLAR BILL

The excitement over the outcome of the bidding was intense. The barroom
at O’Leary’s was filled with a motley crowd of men, most of whom
belonged to the Union, and all of whom had hoped to profit in some way
had the contract fallen into the hands of the political ring who were
dominating the affairs of the village. The more hot-headed and outspoken
swore vengeance; not only against the horse-doctor, who had refused to
permit McGaw to smuggle in the second bid, but against Crane & Co. and
everybody else who had helped to defeat their schemes. They meant to
boycott Crane before tomorrow night. He should not unload or freight
another cargo of coal until they allowed it. The village powers, they
admitted, could not be boycotted, but they would do everything they
could to make it uncomfortable for the board if it awarded the contract
to Grogan. Neither would they forget the trustees at the next election.
As to that “smart Alec” of a horse-doctor, they knew how to fix him.
Suppose it had struck nine and the polls had closed, what right had
he to keep McGaw from handing in his other bid? (Both were higher than
Tom’s. This fact, however, McGaw had never mentioned.)

Around the tenements the interest was no less marked. Mr. Moriarty
had sent the news of Tom’s success ringing through O’Leary’s, and Mrs.
Moriarty, waiting outside the barroom door for the pitcher her husband
had filled for her inside, had spread its details through every hallway
in the tenement.

“Ah, but Tom’s a keener,” said that gossip. “Think of that little divil
Cully jammed behind the door with her bid in his hand, a-waitin’ for the
clock to get round to two minutes o’ nine, an’ that big stuff Dan McGaw
sittin’ inside wid two bids up his sleeve! Oh, but she’s cunnin’, she
is! Dan’s clean beat. He’ll niver haul a shovel o’ that stone.”

“How’ll she be a-doin’ a job like that?” came from a woman listening
over the banisters.

“Be doin’?” rejoined a red-headed virago. “Wouldn’t ye be doin’ it
yerself if ye had that big coal-dealer behind ye?”

“Oh, we hear enough. Who says they’re in it?” rejoined a third listener.

“Pete Lathers says so--the yard boss. He was a-tellin’ me man
yisterday.”

On consulting Justice Rowan the next morning, McGaw and his friends
found but little comfort. The law was explicit, the justice said.
The contract must be given to the lowest responsible bidder. Tom had
deposited her certified check of five hundred dollars with the bid, and
there was no informality in her proposal. He was sorry for McGaw, but
if Mrs. Grogan signed the contract there was no hope for him. The
horse-doctor’s action was right. If McGaw’s second bid had been
received, it would simply have invalidated both of his, the law
forbidding two from the same bidder.

Rowan’s opinion sustaining Tom’s right was a blow he did not expect.
Furthermore, the justice offered no hope for the future. The law gave
Tom the award, and nothing could prevent her hauling the stone if she
signed the contract. These words rang in McGaw’s ears--if she signed the
contract. On this if hung his only hope.

Rowan was too shrewd a politician, now that McGaw’s chances were gone,
to advise any departure, even by a hair-line, from the strict letter of
the law. He was, moreover, too upright as a justice to advise any member
of the defeated party to an overt act which might look like unfairness
to any bidder concerned. He had had a talk, besides, with his brother
over night, and they had accordingly determined to watch events. Should
a way be found of rejecting on legal grounds Tom’s bid, making a new
advertisement necessary, Rowan meant to ignore McGaw altogether,
and have his brother bid in his own name. This determination was
strengthened when McGaw, in a burst of confidence, told Rowan of his
present financial straits.

From Rowan’s the complaining trio adjourned to O’Leary’s barroom.
Crimmins and McGaw entered first. Quigg arrived later. He closed one eye
meaningly as he entered, and O’Leary handed a brass key to him over the
bar with the remark, “Stamp on the floor three toimes, Dinny, an’
I’ll send yez up what ye want to drink.” Then Crimmins opened a door
concealed by a wooden screen, and the three disappeared upstairs.
Crimmins reappeared within an hour, and hurried out the front door. In
a few moments he returned with Justice Rowan, who had adjourned court.
Immediately after the justice’s arrival there came three raps from the
floor above, and O’Leary swung back the door, and disappeared with an
assortment of drinkables on a tray.

The conference lasted until noon. Then the men separated outside the
barroom. From the expression on the face of each one as he emerged
from the door it was evident that the meeting had not produced any very
cheering or conclusive results. McGaw had that vindictive, ugly, bulldog
look about the eyes and mouth which always made his wife tremble when
he came home. The result of the present struggle over the contract was
a matter of life or death to him. His notes, secured by the chattel
mortgage on his live stock, would be due in a few days. Crane had
already notified him that they must be paid, and he knew enough of
his moneylender, and of the anger which he had roused, to know that no
extension would be granted him. Losing this contract, he had lost his
only hope of paying them. Had it been awarded him, he could have found a
dozen men who would have loaned him the money to take up these notes
and so to pay Crane. He had comforted himself the night before with the
thought that Justice Rowan could find some way to help him out of his
dilemma; that the board would vote as the justice advised, and then, of
course, Tom’s bid would be invalidated. Now even this hope had failed
him. “Whoever heard of a woman’s doing a job for a city?” he kept
repeating mechanically to himself.

Tom knew of none of these conspiracies. Had she done so they would not
have caused her a moment’s anxiety. Here was a fight in which no one
would suffer except the head that got in her way, and she determined to
hit that with all her might the moment it rose into view. This was no
brewery contract, she argued with Pop, where five hundred men might be
thrown out of employment, with all the attendant suffering to women and
children. The village was a power nobody could boycott. Moreover, the
law protected her in her rights under the award. She would therefore
quietly wait until the day for signing the papers arrived, furnish her
bond, and begin a work she could superintend herself. In the meantime
she would continue her preparations. One thing she was resolved
upon--she would have nothing to do with the Union. Carl could lay his
hand on a dozen of his countrymen who would be glad to get employment
with her. If they were all like him she need have no fear in any
emergency.

She bought two horses--great strong ones,--at the trolley sale, and
ordered two new carts from a manufacturer in Newark, to be sent to her
on the first of the coming month.

Her friends took her good fortune less calmly. Their genuine
satisfaction expressed itself in a variety of ways. Crane sent her this
characteristic telegram:--

“Bully for you!”

Babcock came all the way down to her home to offer her his
congratulations, and to tender her what assistance she needed in tools
or money.

The Union, in their deliberations, insisted that it was the “raised bid”
 which had ruined the business with McGaw and for them. It was therefore
McGaw’s duty to spare no effort to prevent her signing the contract.
They had stuck by him in times gone by; he must now stick by them. One
point was positively insisted upon: Union men must be employed on the
work, whoever got it.

McGaw, however, was desperate. He denounced Tom in a vocabulary peculiar
to himself and full of innuendoes and oaths, but without offering any
suggestion as to how his threats against her might be carried out.

With his usual slyness, Quigg said very little openly. He had not yet
despaired of winning Jennie’s favor, and until that hope was abandoned
he could hardly make up his mind which side of the fence he was on.
Crimmins was even more indifferent in regard to the outcome--his pay as
walking delegate went on, whichever side won; he could wait.

In this emergency McGaw again sought Crimmins’s assistance. He urged the
importance of his getting the contract, and he promised to make Crimmins
foreman on the street, and to give him a share in the profits, if he
would help him in some way to get the work now. The first step, he
argued, was the necessity of crushing Tom. Everything else would be easy
after that. Such a task, he felt, would not be altogether uncongenial to
Crimmins, still smarting under Tom’s contemptuous treatment of him the
day he called upon her in his capacity of walking delegate.

McGaw’s tempting promise made a deep impression upon Crimmins. He
determined then and there to inflict some blow on Tom Grogan from
which she could never recover. He was equally determined on one other
thing--not to be caught.

Early the next morning Crimmins stationed himself outside O’Leary’s
where he could get an uninterrupted view of two streets. He stood
hunched up against the jamb of O’Leary’s door in the attitude of a
corner loafer, with three parts of his body touching the wood--hip,
shoulder, and cheek. For some time no one appeared in sight either
useful or inimical to his plans, until Mr. James Finnegan, who was
filling the morning air with one of his characteristic songs, brightened
the horizon up the street to his left.

Cully’s unexpected appearance at that moment produced so uncomfortable
an effect upon Mr. Crimmins that that gentleman fell instantly back
through the barroom door.

The boy’s quick eye caught the movement, and it also caught a moment
later, Mr. Crimmins’s nose and watery eye peering out again when
their owner had assured himself that his escape had been unseen. Cully
slackened his pace to see what new move Crimmins would make--but without
the slightest sign of recognition on his face--and again broke into
song. He was on his way to get the mail, and had passed McGaw’s house
but a few moments before, in the hope that that worthy Knight might be
either leaning over the fence or seated on the broken-down porch. He was
anxious McGaw should hear a few improvised stanzas of a new ballad he
had composed to that delightful old negro melody, “Massa’s in de
cold, cold ground,” in which the much-beloved Southern planter and the
thoroughly hated McGaw changed places in the cemetery.

That valiant Knight was still in bed, exhausted by the labors of the
previous evening. Young Billy, however, was about the stables, and so
Mr. James Finnegan took occasion to tarry long enough in the road for
the eldest son of his enemy to get the stanza by heart, in the hope that
he might retail it to his father when he appeared.

Billy dropped his manure-fork as soon as Cully had moved on again, and
dodging behind the fence, followed him toward the post-office, hoping to
hit the singer with a stone.

When the slinking body of McGaw’s eldest son became visible to Mr.
Crimmins, his face broke into creases so nearly imitative of a smile
that his best friend would not have known him. He slapped the patched
knees of his overalls gayly, bent over in a subdued chuckle, and
disported himself in a merry and much satisfied way. His rum-and-watery
eyes gleamed with delight, and even his chin-whisker took on a new
vibration. Next he laid one finger along his nose, looked about him
cautiously, and said to himself, in an undertone:--

“The very boy! It’ll fix McGaw dead to rights, an’ ther’ won’t be no
squealin’ after it’s done.”

Here he peered around the edge of one of O’Leary’s drawn window-shades,
and waited until Cully had passed the barroom, secured his mail, and
started for home, his uninterrupted song filling the air. Then he opened
the blind very cautiously, and beckoned to Billy.

Cully’s eye caught the new movement as he turned the corner. His song
ceased. When Mr. Finnegan had anything very serious on his mind he never
sang.

When, some time after, Billy emerged from O’Leary’s door, he had a
two-dollar bill tightly squeezed in his right hand. Part of this he
spent on his way home for a box of cigarettes; the balance he invested
in a mysterious-looking tin can. The can was narrow and long and had a
screw nozzle at one end. This can Cully saw him hide in a corner of his
father’s stable.



XII. CULLY’S NIGHT OUT

Ever since the night Cully, with the news of the hair-breadth escape of
the bid, had dashed back to Tom, waiting around the corner, he had been
the hero of the hour. As she listened to his description of McGaw when
her bid dropped on the table--“Lookin’ like he’d eat sumpin’ he couldn’t
swaller--see?” her face was radiant, and her sides shook with laughter.
She had counted upon McGaw falling into her trap, and she was delighted
over the success of her experiment. Tom had once before caught him
raising a bid when he discovered that but one had been offered.

In recognition of these valuable services Tom had given Cully two
tickets for a circus which was then charming the inhabitants of New
Brighton, a mile or more away, and he and Carl were going the following
night. Mr. Finnegan was to wear a black sack-coat, a derby hat, and a
white shirt which Jennie, in the goodness of her heart, had ironed for
him herself. She had also ironed a scarf of Carl’s, and had laid it on
the window-sill of the outer kitchen, where Cully might find it as he
passed by.

The walks home from church were now about the only chance the lovers had
of being together. Almost every day Carl was off with the teams. When he
did come home in working hours he would take his dinner with the men
and boys in the outer kitchen. Jennie sometimes waited on them, but he
rarely spoke to her as she passed in and out, except with his eyes.

When Cully handed him the scarf, Carl had already dressed himself in his
best clothes, producing so marked a change in the outward appearance
of the young Swede that Cully in his admiration pronounced him “out o’
sight.”

Cully’s metamorphosis was even more complete than Carl’s. Now that the
warm spring days were approaching, Mr. Finnegan had decided that his
superabundant locks were unseasonable, and had therefore had his hair
cropped close to his scalp, showing here and there a white scar, the
record of some former scrimmage. Reaching to the edge of each ear was
a collar as stiff as pasteboard. His derby was tilted over his left
eyebrow, shading a face brimming over with fun and expectancy. Below
this was a vermilion-colored necktie and a black coat and trousers. His
shoes sported three coats of blacking, which only partly concealed the
dust-marks of his profession.

“Hully gee, Carl! but de circus’s a-goin’ ter be a dandy,” he called
out in delight, as he patted a double shuffle with his feet. “I see de
picters on de fence when I come from de ferry. Dere’s a chariot-race out
o’ sight, an’ a’ elephant what stands on ‘is head. Hold on till I see
ef de Big Gray ‘s got enough beddin’ under him. He wuz awful stiff dis
mornin’ when I helped him up.” Cully never went to bed without seeing
the Gray first made comfortable for the night.

The two young fellows saw all the sights, and after filling their
pockets with peanuts and themselves with pink lemonade, took their seats
at last under the canvas roof, where they waited impatiently for the
performance to begin.

The only departure from the ordinary routine was Cully’s instant
acceptance of the clown’s challenge to ride the trick mule, and
his winning the wager amid the plaudits of the audience, after a
rough-and-tumble scramble in the sawdust, sticking so tight to his back
that a bystander remarked that the only way to get the boy off would be
to “peel the mule.”

When they returned it was nearly midnight. Cully had taken off his
“choker,” as he called it, and had curled it outside his hat, They had
walked over from the show, and the tight clutch of the collar greatly
interfered with Cully’s discussion of the wonderful things he had seen.
Besides, the mule had ruined it completely for a second use.

It was a warm night for early spring, and Carl had his coat over his
arm. When they reached the outer stable fence--the one nearest the
village--Cully’s keen nose scented a peculiar odor. “Who’s been a
breakin’ de lamp round here, Carl?” he asked, sniffing close to the
ground. “Holy smoke! Look at de light in de stable--sumpin’ mus’ be
de matter wid de Big Gray, or de ole woman wouldn’t be out dis time
o’ night wid a lamp. What would she be a-doin’ out here, anyway?” he
exclaimed in a sudden anxious tone. “Dis ain’t de road from de house.
Hully gee! Look out for yer coat! De rails is a-soakin’ wid ker’sene!”

At this moment a little flame shot out of the window over the Big Gray’s
head and licked its way up the siding, followed by a column of smoke
which burst through the door in the hay-loft above the stalls of the
three horses next the bedroom of Carl and Cully. A window was hastily
opened in Tom’s house and a frightened shriek broke the stillness of
the night. It was Jennie’s voice, and it had a tone of something besides
alarm.

What the sight of the fire had paralyzed in Carl, the voice awoke.

“No, no! I here--I safe, Jan!” he cried, clearing the fence with a
bound.

Cully did not hear Jennie. He saw only the curling flames over the
Big Gray’s head. As he dashed down the slope he kept muttering the old
horse’s pet names, catching his breath, and calling to Carl, “Save de
Gray--save Ole Blowhard!”

Cully reached the stable first, smashed the padlock with a shovel, and
rushed into the Gray’s stall. Carl seized a horse-bucket, and began
sousing the window-sills of the harness-room, where the fire was
hottest.

By this time the whole house was aroused. Tom, dazed by the sudden
awakening, with her ulster thrown about her shoulders, stood barefooted
on the porch. Jennie was still at the window, sobbing as if her heart
would break, now that Carl was safe. Patsy had crawled out of his low
crib by his mother’s bed, and was stumbling downstairs, one foot at a
time. Twice had Cully tried to drag the old horse clear of his stall,
and twice had he fallen back for fresh air. Then came a smothered cry
from inside the blinding smoke, a burst of flame lighting up the stable,
and the Big Gray was pushed out, his head wrapped in Carl’s coat, the
Swede pressing behind, Cully coaxing him on, his arms around the horse’s
neck.

Hardly had the Big Gray cleared the stable when the roof of the small
extension fell, and a great burst of flame shot up into the night air.
All hope of rescuing the other two horses was now gone.

Tom did not stand long dazed and bewildered. In a twinkling she had
drawn on a pair of men’s boots over her bare feet, buckled her ulster
over her night-dress, and rushed back upstairs to drag the blankets from
the beds. Laden with these she sprang down the steps, called to Jennie
to follow, soaked the bedding in the water-trough, and, picking up the
dripping mass, carried it to Carl and Cully, who, now that the Gray was
safely tied to the kitchen porch, were on the roof of the tool-house,
fighting the sparks that fell on the shingles.

By this time the neighbors began to arrive from the tenements. Tom took
charge of every man as soon as he got his breath, stationed two at the
pump-handle, and formed a line of bucket-passers from the water-trough
to Carl and Cully, who were spreading the blankets on the roof. The
heat now was terrific; Carl had to shield his face with his sleeve as he
threw the water. Cully lay flat on the shingles, holding to the steaming
blankets, and directing Carl’s buckets with his outstretched finger when
some greater spark lodged and gained headway. If they could keep these
burning brands under until the heat had spent itself, they could perhaps
save the tool-house and the larger stable.

All this time Patsy had stood on the porch where Tom had left him
hanging over the railing wrapped in Jennie’s shawl. He was not to move
until she came for him: she wanted him out of the way of trampling feet.
Now and then she would turn anxiously, catch sight of his wizened face
dazed with fright, wave her hand to him encouragingly, and work on.

Suddenly the little fellow gave a cry of terror and slid from the porch,
trailing the shawl after him, his crutch jerking over the ground, his
sobs almost choking him.

“Mammy! Cully! Stumpy’s tied in the loft! Oh, somebody help me! He’s in
the loft! Oh, please, please!”

In the roar of the flames nobody heard him. The noise of axes beating
down the burning fences drowned all other sounds. At this moment Tom was
standing on a cart, passing up the buckets to Carl. Cully had crawled to
the ridge-pole of the tool-house to watch both sides of the threatened
roof.

The little cripple made his way slowly into the crowd nearest the
sheltered side of the tool-house, pulling at the men’s coats, pleading
with them to save his goat, his Stumpy.

On this side was a door opening into a room where the chains were kept.
From it rose a short flight of six or seven steps leading to the loft.
This loft had two big doors--one closed, nearest the fire, and the other
wide open, fronting the house. When the roof of the burning stable fell,
the wisps of straw in the cracks of the closed door burst into flame.

Within three feet of this blazing mass, shivering with fear, tugging
at his rope, his eyes bursting from his head, stood Stumpy, his piteous
bleatings unheard in the surrounding roar. A child’s head appeared above
the floor, followed by a cry of joy as the boy flung himself upon the
straining rope. The next instant a half-frenzied goat sprang through the
open door and landed in the yard below in the midst of the startled men
and women.

Tom was on the cart when she saw this streak of light flash out of the
darkness of the loft door and disappear. Her eyes instinctively turned
to look at Patsy in his place on the porch. Then a cry of horror burst
from the crowd, silenced instantly as a piercing shriek filled the air.

“My God! It’s me Patsy!”

Bareheaded in the open doorway of the now blazing loft, a silhouette
against the flame, his little white gown reaching to his knees, his
crutch gone, the stifling smoke rolling out in great whirls above his
head, stood the cripple!

Tom hurled herself into the crowd, knocking the men out of her way,
and ran towards the chain room door. At this instant a man in his
shirt-sleeves dropped from the smoking roof, sprang in front of her, and
caught her in his arms.

“No, not you go; Carl go!” he said in a firm voice, holding her fast.

Before she could speak he snatched a handkerchief from a woman’s neck,
plunged it into the water of the horse-trough, bound it about his
head, dashed up the short flight of steps, and crawled toward the
terror-stricken child. There was a quick clutch, a bound back, and the
smoke rolled over them, shutting man and child from view.

The crowd held their breath as it waited. A man with his hair singed and
his shirt on fire staggered from the side door. In his arms he carried
the almost lifeless boy, his face covered by the handkerchief.

A woman rushed up, caught the boy in her arms, and sank on her knees.
The man reeled and fell.

*****

When Carl regained consciousness, Jennie was bending over him, chafing
his hands and bathing his face. Patsy was on the sofa, wrapped in
Jennie’s shawl. Pop was fanning him. Carl’s wet handkerchief, the old
man said, had kept the boy from suffocating.

The crowd had begun to disperse. The neighbors and strangers had gone
their several ways. The tenement-house mob were on the road to their
beds. Many friends had stopped to sympathize, and even the bitterest of
Tom’s enemies said they were glad it was no worse.

When the last of them had left the yard, Tom, tired out with anxiety
and hard work, threw herself down on the porch. The morning was already
breaking, the gray streaks of dawn brightening the east. From her seat
she could hear through the open door the soothing tones of Jennie’s
voice as she talked to her lover, and the hoarse whispers of Carl in
reply. He had recovered his breath again, and was but little worse for
his scorching, except in his speech. Jennie was in the kitchen making
some coffee for the exhausted workers, and he was helping her.

Tom realized fully all that had happened. She knew who had saved Patsy’s
life. She remembered how he laid her boy in her arms, and she still saw
the deathly pallor in his face as he staggered and fell. What had he not
done for her and her household since he entered her service? If he loved
Jennie, and she him, was it his fault? Why did she rebel, and refuse
this man a place in her home? Then she thought of her own Tom no longer
with her, and of her fight alone and without him. What would he have
thought of it? How would he have advised her to act? He had always hoped
such great things for Jennie. Would he now be willing to give her to
this stranger? If she could only talk to her Tom about it all!

As she sat, her head in her hand, the smoking stable, the eager
wild-eyed crowd, the dead horses, faded away and became to her as a
dream. She heard nothing but the voice of Jennie and her lover, saw only
the white face of her boy. A sickening sense of utter loneliness swept
over her. She rose and moved away.

During all this time Cully was watching the dying embers, and when all
danger was over,--only the small stable with its two horses had been
destroyed,--he led the Big Gray back to the pump, washed his head,
sponging his eyes and mouth, and housed him in the big stable. Then he
vanished.

Immediately on leaving the Big Gray, Cully had dodged behind the stable,
run rapidly up the hill, keeping close to the fence, and had come out
behind a group of scattering spectators. There he began a series of
complicated manoeuvres, mostly on his toes, lifting his head over those
of the crowd, and ending in a sudden dart forward and as sudden a halt,
within a few inches of young Billy McGaw’s coat-collar.

Billy turned pale, but held his ground. He felt sure Cully would not
dare attack him with so many others about. Then, again, the glow of the
smouldering cinders had a fascination for him that held him to the spot.

Cully also seemed spellbound. The only view of the smoking ruins
that satisfied him seemed to be the one he caught over young McGaw’s
shoulder. He moved closer and closer, sniffing about cautiously, as a
dog would on a trail. Indeed, the closer he got to Billy’s coat the more
absorbed he seemed to be in the view beyond.

Here an extraordinary thing happened. There was a dipping of Cully’s
head between Billy’s legs, a raising of both arms, grabbing Billy around
the waist, and in a flash the hope of the house of McGaw was swept off
his feet, Cully beneath him, and in full run toward Tom’s house. The
bystanders laughed; they thought it only a boyish trick. Billy kicked
and struggled, but Cully held on. When they were clear of the crowd,
Cully shook him to the ground and grabbed him by the coat-collar.

“Say, young feller, where wuz ye when de fire started?”

At this Billy broke into a howl, and one of the crowd, some distance
off, looked up. Cully clapped his hand over his mouth. “None o’ that, or
I’ll mash yer mug--see?” standing over him with clenched fist.

“I warn’t nowheres,” stammered Billy. “Say, take yer hands off’n me--ye
ain’t”--

“T’ell I ain’t! Ye answer me straight--see?--or I’ll punch yer face in,”
 tightening his grasp. “What wuz ye a-doin’ when de circus come out--an’,
anoder t’ing, what’s dis cologne yer got on yer coat? Maybe next time ye
climb a fence ye’ll keep from spillin’ it, see? Oh, I’m onter ye. Ye set
de stable afire. Dat’s what’s de matter.”

“I hope I may die--I wuz a-carryin’ de can er ker’sene home, an’ when
de roof fell in I wuz up on de fence so I c’u’d see de fire, an’ de can
slipped”--

“What fence?” said Cully, shaking him as a terrier would a rat.

“Why dat fence on de hill.”

That was enough for Cully. He had his man. The lie had betrayed him.
Without a word he jerked the cowardly boy from the ground, and marched
him straight into the kitchen:--

“Say, Carl, I got de fire-bug. Ye kin smell der ker’sene on his clo’es.”



XIII. MR. QUIGG DRAWS A PLAN

McGaw had watched the fire from his upper window with mingled joy and
fear--joy that Tom’s property was on fire, and fear that it would be put
out before she would be ruined. He had been waiting all the evening for
Crimmins, who had failed to arrive. Billy had not been at home since
supper, so he could get no details as to the amount of the damage from
that source. In this emergency he sent next morning for Quigg to make a
reconnaissance in the vicinity of the enemy’s camp, ascertain how badly
Tom had been crippled, and learn whether her loss would prevent her
signing the contract the following night. Mr. Quigg accepted the
mission, the more willingly because he wanted to settle certain affairs
of his own. Jennie had avoided him lately,--why he could not tell,--and
he determined, before communicating to his employer the results of his
inquiries about Tom, to know exactly what his own chances were with the
girl. He could slip over to the house while Tom was in the city, and
leave before she returned.

On his way, the next day, he robbed a garden fence of a mass of lilacs,
breaking off the leaves as he walked. When he reached the door of the
big stable he stopped for a moment, glanced cautiously in to see if he
could find any preparations for the new work, and then, making a mental
note of the surroundings, followed the path to the porch.

Pop opened the door. He knew Quigg only by sight--an unpleasant sight,
he thought, as he looked into his hesitating, wavering eyes.

“It’s a bad fire ye had, Mr. Mullins,” said Quigg, seating himself in
the rocker, the blossoms half strangled in his grasp.

“Yis, purty bad, but small loss, thank God,” said Pop quietly.

“That lets her out of the contract, don’t it?” said Quigg. “She’ll be
short of horses now.”

Pop made no answer. He did not intend to give Mr. Quigg any information
that might comfort him.

“Were ye insured?” asked Quigg, in a cautious tone, his eyes on the
lilacs.

“Oh, yis, ivery pinny on what was burned, so Mary tells me.”

Quigg caught his breath; the rumor in the village was the other way. Why
didn’t Crimmins make a clean sweep of it and burn ‘em all at once, he
said to himself.

“I brought some flowers over for Miss Jennie,” said Quigg, regaining his
composure. “Is she in?”

“Yis; I’ll call her.” Gentle and apparently harmless as Gran’pop was,
men like Quigg somehow never looked him steadily in the eye.

“I was tellin’ Mr. Mullins I brought ye over some flowers,” said Quigg,
turning to Jennie as she entered, and handing her the bunch without
leaving his seat, as if it had been a pair of shoes.

“You’re very kind, Mr. Quigg,” said the girl, laying them on the table,
and still standing.

“I hear’d your brother Patsy was near smothered till Dutchy got him out.
Was ye there?”

Jennie bit her lip and her heart quickened. Carl’s sobriquet in the
village, coming from such lips, sent the hot blood to her cheeks.

“Yes, Mr. Nilsson saved his life,” she answered slowly, with girlish
dignity, a backward rush filling her heart as she remembered Carl
staggering out of the burning stable, Patsy held close to his breast.

“The fellers in Rockville say ye think it was set afire. I see Justice
Rowan turned Billy McGaw loose. Do ye suspect anybody else? Some says a
tramp crawled in and upset his pipe.”

This lie was coined on the spot and issued immediately to see if it
would pass.

“Mother says she knows who did it, and it’ll all come out in time. Cully
found the can this morning,” said Jennie, leaning against the table.

Quigg’s jaw fell and his brow knit as Jennie spoke. That was just like
the fool, he said to himself. Why didn’t he get the stuff in a bottle
and then break it?

But the subject was too dangerous to linger over, so he began talking
of the dance down at the Town Hall, and the meeting last Sunday after
church. He asked her if she would go with him to the “sociable”
 they were going to have at No. 4 Truck-house; and when she said she
couldn’t,--that her mother didn’t want her to go out, etc.,--Quigg moved
his chair closer, with the remark that the old woman was always putting
her oar in and spoiling things; the way she was going on with the Union
would ruin her; she’d better join in with the boys, and be friendly;
they’d “down her yet if she didn’t.”

“I hope nothing will happen to mother, Mr. Quigg,” said Jennie, in an
anxious tone, as she sank into a chair.

Quigg misunderstood the movement, and moved his own closer.

“There won’t nothin’ happen any more, Jennie, if you’ll do as I say.”

It was the first time he had ever called her by her name. She could not
understand how he dared. She wished Carl would come in.

“Will you do it?” asked Quigg eagerly, his cunning face and mean eyes
turned toward her.

Jennie never raised her head. Her cheeks were burning. Quigg went on,--

“I’ve been keepin’ company with ye, Jennie, all winter, and the fellers
is guyin’ me about it. You know I’m solid with the Union and can help
yer mother, and if ye’ll let me speak to Father McCluskey next Sunday”--

The girl sprang from her chair.

“I won’t have you talk that way to me, Dennis Quigg! I never said a word
to you, and you know it.” Her mother’s spirit was now flashing in her
eyes. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself to come here--and”--

Then she broke down.

Another woman would have managed it differently, perhaps,--by a laugh,
a smile of contempt, or a frigid refusal. This mere child, stung to
the quick by Quigg’s insult, had only her tears in defense. The Walking
Delegate turned his head and looked out of the window. Then he caught up
his hat and without a word to the sobbing girl hastily left the room.

Tom was just entering the lower gate. Quigg saw her and tried to dodge
behind the tool-house, but it was too late, so he faced her. Tom’s keen
eye caught the sly movement and the quickly altered expression. Some
new trickery was in the air, she knew; she detected it in every line of
Quigg’s face. What was McGaw up to now? she asked herself. Was he after
Carl and the men, or getting ready to burn the other stable?

“Good-morning, Mr. Quigg. Ain’t ye lost?” she asked coldly.

“Oh no,” said Quigg, with a forced laugh. “I come over to see if I could
help about the fire.”

It was the first thing that came into his head; he had hoped to pass
with only a nod of greeting.

“Did ye?” replied Tom thoughtfully. She saw he had lied, but she led
him on. “What kind of help did ye think of givin’? The insurance company
will pay the money, the two horses is buried, an’ we begin diggin’
post-holes for a new stable in the mornin’. Perhaps ye were thinkin’ of
lendin’ a hand yerself. If ye did, I can put ye alongside of Carl; one
shovel might do for both of ye.”

Quigg colored and laughed uneasily. Somebody had told her, then, how
Carl had threatened him with uplifted shovel when he tried to coax the
Swede away.

“No, I’m not diggin’ these days; but I’ve got a pull wid the insurance
adjuster, and might git an extra allowance for yer.” This was cut from
whole cloth. He had never known an adjuster in his life.

“What’s that?” asked Tom, still looking square at him, Quigg squirming
under her glance like a worm on a pin.

“Well, the company can’t tell how much feed was in the bins, and tools,
and sech like,” he said, with another laugh.

A laugh is always a safe parry when a pair of clear gray search-light
eyes are cutting into one like a rapier.

“An’ yer idea is for me to git paid for stuff that wasn’t burned up, is
it?”

“Well, that’s as how the adjuster says. Sometimes he sees it an’
sometimes he don’t--that’s where the pull comes in.”

Tom put her arms akimbo, her favorite attitude when her anger began to
rise.

“Oh I see! The pull is in bribin’ the adjuster, as ye call him, so he
can cheat the company.”

Quigg shrugged his shoulders; that part of the transaction was a mere
trifle. What were companies made for but to be cheated?

Tom stood for a minute looking him all over.

“Dennis Quigg,” she said slowly, weighing each word, her eyes riveted
on his face, “ye’re a very sharp young man; ye’re so very sharp that I
wonder ye’ve gone so long without cuttin’ yerself, But one thing I tell
ye, an’ that is, if ye keep on the way ye’re a-goin’ ye’ll land where
you belong, and that’s up the river in a potato-bug suit of clothes.
Turn yer head this way, Quigg. Did ye niver in yer whole life think
there was somethin’ worth the havin’ in bein’ honest an’ clean an’
square, an’ holdin’ yer head up like a man, instead of skulkin’ round
like a thief? What ye’re up to this mornin’ I don’t know yet, but I want
to tell ye it ‘s the wrong time o’ day for ye to make calls, and the
night’s not much better, unless ye’re particularly invited.”

Quigg smothered a curse and turned on his heel toward the village. When
he reached O’Leary’s, Dempsey of the Executive Committee met him at the
door. He and McGaw had spent the whole morning in devising plans to keep
Tom out of the board-room.

Quigg’s report was not reassuring. She would be paid her insurance
money, he said, and would certainly be at the meeting that night.

The three adjourned to the room over the bar. McGaw began pacing the
floor, his long arms hooked behind his back. He had passed a sleepless
night, and every hour now added to his anxiety. His face was a dull
gray yellow, and his eyes were sunken. Now and then he would tug at
his collar nervously. As he walked he clutched his fingers, burying the
nails in the palms, the red hair on his wrists bristling like spiders’
legs. Dempsey sat at the table watching him calmly out of the corner of
his eye.

After a pause Quigg leaned over, his lips close to Dempsey’s ear. Then
he drew a plan on the back of an old wine-list. It marked the position
of the door in Tom’s stable, and that of a path which ran across lots
and was concealed from her house by a low fence. Dempsey studied it
a moment, nodding at Quigg’s whispered explanations, and passed it to
McGaw, repeating Quigg’s words. McGaw stopped and bent his head. A
dull gleam flashed out of his smouldering eyes. The lines of his face
hardened and his jaw tightened. For some minutes he stood irresolute,
gazing vacantly over the budding trees through the window. Then he
turned sharply, swallowed a brimming glass of raw whiskey, and left the
room.

When the sound of his footsteps had died away, Dempsey looked at Quigg
meaningly and gave a low laugh.



XIV. BLOSSOM-WEEK

It was “blossom-week,” and every garden and hedge flaunted its bloom in
the soft air. All about was the perfume of flowers, the odor of fresh
grass, and that peculiar earthy smell of new-made garden beds but lately
sprinkled. Behind the hill overlooking the harbor the sun was just
sinking into the sea. Some sentinel cedars guarding its crest stood
out in clear relief against the golden light. About their tops, in wide
circles, swooped a flock of crows.

Gran’pop and Tom sat on the front porch, their chairs touching, his hand
on hers. She had been telling him of Quigg’s visit that morning. She had
changed her dress for a new one. The dress was of brown cloth, and had
been made in the village--tight where it should be loose, and loose
where it should be tight. She had put it on, she told Pop, to make a
creditable appearance before the board that night.

Jennie was flitting in and out between the sitting-room and the garden,
her hands full of blossoms, filling the china jars on the mantel: none
of them contained Quigg’s contribution. Patsy was flat on his back on
the small patch of green surrounding the porch, playing circus-elephant
with Stumpy, who stood over him with leveled head.

Up the hill, but a few rods away, Cully was grazing the Big Gray--the
old horse munching tufts of fresh, sweet grass sprinkled with
dandelions. Cully walked beside him. Now and then he lifted one of his
legs, examining the hoof critically for possible tender places.

There was nothing the matter with the Gray; the old horse was still
sound: but it satisfied Cully to be assured, and it satisfied, too, a
certain yearning tenderness in his heart toward his old chum. Once in
a while he would pat the Gray’s neck, smoothing his ragged, half worn
mane, addressing him all the while in words of endearment expressed in
a slang positively profane and utterly without meaning except to these
two.

Suddenly Jennie’s cheek flushed as she came out on the porch. Carl was
coming up the path. The young Swede was bareheaded, the short blond
curls glistening in the light; his throat was bare too, so that one
could see the big muscles in his neck. Jennie always liked him with his
throat bare; it reminded her of a hero she had once seen in a play, who
stormed a fort and rescued all the starving women.

“Da brown horse seek; batta come to stabble an’ see him,” Carl said,
going direct to the porch, where he stood in front of Tom, resting one
hand on his hip, his eyes never wandering from her face. He knew where
Jennie was, but he never looked.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Tom, her thoughts far away at the
moment.

“I don’ know; he no eat da oats en da box.”

“Will he drink?” said Tom, awakening to the importance of the
information.

“Yas; ‘mos’ two buckets.”

“It’s fever he’s got,” she said, turning to Pop. “I thought that
yisterday noon when I sees him a-workin’. All right, Carl; I’ll be down
before I go to the board meetin’. And see here, Carl; ye’d better git
ready to go wid me. I’ll start in a couple o’ hours. Will it suit ye,
Gran’pop, if Carl goes with me?”--patting her father’s shoulder. “If ye
keep on a-worritin’ I’ll hev to hire a cop to follow me round.”

Carl lingered for a moment on the steps. Perhaps Tom had some further
orders; perhaps, too, Jennie would come out again. Involuntarily his eye
wandered toward the open door, and then he turned to go. Jennie’s heart
sprang up in her throat. She had seen from behind the curtains the
shade of disappointment that crossed her lover’s face. She could suffer
herself, but she could not see Carl unhappy. In an instant she was
beside her mother. Anything to keep Carl--she did not care what.

“Oh, Carl, will you bring the ladder so I can reach the long branches?”
 she said, her quick wit helping her with a subterfuge.

Carl turned and glanced at Tom. He felt the look in her face and could
read her thoughts.

If Tom had heard Jennie she never moved. This affair must end in some
way, she said to herself. Why had she not sent him away long before? How
could she do it now when he had risked his life to save Patsy?

Then she answered firmly, still without turning her head, “No, Jennie;
there won’t be time. Carl must get ready to”--

Pop laid his hand on hers.

“There’s plinty o’ toime, Mary. Ye’ll git the ladder behint the kitchen
door, Carl. I hed it ther’ mesilf this mornin’.”

Carl found the ladder, steadied it against the tree, and guided Jennie’s
little feet till they reached the topmost round, holding on to her
skirts so that she should not fall. Above their heads the branches
twined and interlaced, shedding their sweetest blossoms over their happy
upturned faces. The old man’s eyes lightened as he watched them for some
moments; then, turning to Tom, his voice full of tenderness, he said:--

“Carl’s a foine lad, Mary; ye’ll do no better for Jinnie.”

Tom did not answer; her eyes were on the cedars where the crows were
flying, black silhouettes against the yellow sky.

“Did I shtop ye an’ break yer heart whin ye wint off wid yer own Tom?
What wuz he but an honest lad thet loved ye, an’ he wid not a pinny in
his pocket but the fare that brought ye both to the new counthry.”

Tom’s eyes filled. She could not see the cedars now. All the hill was
swimming in light.

“Oi hev watched Carl sence he fust come, Mary. It’s a good mither
some’er’s as has lost a foine b’y. W’u’dn’t ye be lonely yersilf ef ye’d
come here wid nobody to touch yer hand?”

Tom shivered and covered her face. Who was more lonely than she--she who
had hungered for the same companionship that she was denying Jennie;
she who had longed for somebody to stand between her and the world,
some hand to touch, some arm to lean on; she who must play the man
always--the man and the mother too!

Pop went on, stroking her strong, firm hand with his stiff, shriveled
fingers. He never looked at her; his face was now too turned toward the
dying sun.

“Do ye remimber the day ye left me in the ould counthry, Mary, wid yer
own Tom; an’ how I walked wid ye to the turnin’ of the road? It wuz
spring thin, an’ the hedges all white wid blossoms. Look at thim two
over there, Mary, wid their arms full o’ flowers. Don’t be breakin’
their hearts, child.”

Tom turned and slipped her arm around the old man’s neck, her head
sinking on his shoulder. The tears were under her eyelids; her heart was
bursting; only her pride sustained her. Then in a half-whispered voice,
like a child telling its troubles, she said:--

“Ye don’t know--ye don’t know, Gran’pop. The dear God knows it’s not on
account of meself. It’s Tom I’m thinkin’ of night an’ day--me Tom,
me Tom. She’s his child as well as mine. If he could only help me! He
wanted such great things for Jennie. It ud be easier if he hadn’t saved
Patsy. Don’t speak to me ag’in about it, father dear; it hurts me.”

The old man rose from his chair and walked slowly into the house. All
his talks with his daughter ended in this way. It was always what Tom
would have thought. Why should a poor crazy cripple like her husband,
shut up in an asylum, make trouble for Jennie?

When the light faded and the trees grew indistinct in the gloom, Tom
still sat where Pop had left her. Soon the shadows fell in the little
valley, and the hill beyond the cedars lost itself in the deepening haze
that now crept in from the tranquil sea.

Carl’s voice calling to Cully to take in the Gray roused her to
consciousness. She pushed back her chair, stood for an instant watching
Carl romping with Patsy, and then walked slowly toward the stable.

By the time she reached the water-trough her old manner had returned.
Her step became once more elastic and firm; her strong will asserted
itself. She had work to do, and at once. In two hours the board would
meet. She needed all her energies and resources. The lovers must wait;
she could not decide any question for them now.

As she passed the stable window a man in a fur cap raised his head
cautiously above the low fence and shrank back into the shadow.

Tom threw open the door and felt along the sill for the lantern and
matches. They were not in their accustomed place. The man crouched, ran
noiselessly toward the rear entrance, and crept in behind a stall. Tom
laid her hand on the haunches of the horse and began rolling back his
blanket. The man drew himself up slowly until his shoulders were on a
level with the planking. Tom moved a step and turned her face. The man
raised his arm, whirled a hammer high in the air, and brought it down
upon her head.

When Cully led the Big Gray into his stall, a moment later, he stepped
into a pool of blood.



XV. IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH

At the appointed hour the Board of Trustees met in the hall over the
post-office. The usual loungers filled the room--members of the Union,
and others who had counted on a piece of the highway pie when it was
cut. Dempsey, Crimmins, and Quigg sat outside the rail, against the
wall. They were waiting for McGaw, who had not been seen since the
afternoon.

The president was in his accustomed place. The five gentlemen of
leisure, the veterinary surgeon, and the other trustees occupied their
several chairs. The roll had been called, and every man had answered to
his name. The occasion being one of much importance, a full board was
required.

As the minute-hand neared the hour of nine Dempsey became uneasy. He
started every time a new-comer mounted the stairs. Where was McGaw?
No one had seen him since he swallowed the tumblerful of whiskey and
disappeared from O’Leary’s, a few hours before.

The president rapped for order, and announced that the board was ready
to sign the contract with Thomas Grogan for the hauling and delivery of
the broken stone required for public highways.

There was no response.

“Is Mrs. Grogan here?” asked the president, looking over the room and
waiting for a reply.

“Is any one here who represents her?” he repeated, after a pause, rising
in his seat as he spoke.

No one answered. The only sound heard in the room was that of the heavy
step of a man mounting the stairs.

“Is there any one here who can speak for Mrs. Thomas Grogan?” called the
president again, in a louder voice.

“I can,” said the man with the heavy tread, who proved to be the foreman
at the brewery. “She won’t live till mornin’; one of her horses kicked
her and broke her skull, so McGaw told me.”

“Broke her skull! My God! man, how do you know?” demanded the president,
his voice trembling with excitement.

Every man’s face was now turned toward the new-comer; a momentary thrill
of horror ran through the assemblage.

“I heard it at the druggist’s. One of her boys was over for medicine.
Dr. Mason sewed up her head. He was drivin’ by, on his way to
Quarantine, when it happened.”

“What Dr. Mason?” asked a trustee, eager for details.

“The man what used to be at Quarantine seven years ago. He’s app’inted
ag’in.”

Dempsey caught up his hat and hurriedly left the room, followed by Quigg
and Crimmins. McGaw, he said to himself, as he ran downstairs, must
be blind drunk, not to come to the meeting, “----him! What if he gives
everything away!” he added aloud.

“This news is awful,” said the president. “I am very sorry for Mrs.
Grogan and her children--she was a fine woman. It is a serious matter,
too, for the village. The highway work ought to commence at once; the
roads need it. We may now have to advertise again. That would delay
everything for a month.”

“Well, there’s other bids,” said another trustee,--one of the gentlemen
of leisure,--ignoring the president’s sympathy, and hopeful now of
a possible slice on his own account. “What’s the matter with McGaw’s
proposal? There’s not much difference in the price. Perhaps he would
come down to the Grogan figure. Is Mr. McGaw here, or anybody who can
speak for him?”

Justice Rowan sat against the wall. The overzealous trustee had exactly
expressed his own wishes and anxieties. He wanted McGaw’s chances
settled at once. If they failed, there was Rowan’s own brother who might
come in for the work, the justice sharing of course in the profits.

“In the absence of me client,” said Rowan, looking about the room, and
drawing in his breath with an important air, “I suppose I can ripresint
him. I think, however, that if your honorable boord will go on with the
other business before you, Mr. McGaw will be on hand in half an hour
himself. In the meantime I will hunt him up.”

“I move,” said the Scotch surgeon, in a voice that showed how deeply
he had been affected, “that the whole matter be laid on the table for
a week, until we know for certain whether poor Mrs. Grogan is killed
or not. I can hardly credit it. It is very seldom that a horse kicks a
woman.”

Nobody having seconded this motion, the chair did not put it. The fact
was that every man was afraid to move. The majority of the trustees, who
favored McGaw, were in the dark as to what effect Tom’s death would
have upon the bids. The law might require readvertising and hence a new
competition, and perhaps somebody much worse for them than Tom might
turn up and take the work--somebody living outside of the village. Then
none of them would get a finger in the pie. Worse than all, the cutting
of it might have to be referred to the corporation counsel, Judge
Bowker. What his opinion would be was past finding out. He was beyond
the reach of “pulls,” and followed the law to the letter.

The minority--a minority of two, the president and the veterinary
surgeon--began to distrust the spirit of McGaw’s adherents. It looked to
the president as if a “deal” were in the air.

The Scotchman, practical, sober-minded, sensible man as he was, had
old-fashioned ideas of honesty and fair play. He had liked Tom from
the first time he saw her,--he had looked after her stables
professionally,--and he did not intend to see her, dead or alive, thrown
out, without making a fight for her.

“I move,” said he, “that the president appoint a committee of this board
to jump into the nearest wagon, drive to Mrs. Grogan’s, and find out
whether she is still alive. If she’s dead, that settles it; but if she’s
alive, I will protest against anything being done about this matter for
ten days. It won’t take twenty minutes to find out; meantime we can take
up the unfinished business of the last meeting.”

One of the gentlemen of leisure seconded this motion; it was carried
unanimously, and this gentleman of leisure was himself appointed courier
and left the room in a hurry. He had hardly reached the street when he
was back again, followed closely by Dempsey, Quigg, Crimmins, Justice
Rowan, and, last of all, fumbling with his fur cap, deathly pale, and
entirely sober--Dan McGaw.

“There’s no use of my going,” said the courier trustee, taking his seat.
“Grogan won’t live an hour, if she ain’t dead now. She had a sick horse
that wanted looking after, and she went into the stable without a light,
and he let drive, and broke her skull. She’s got a gash the length of
your hand--wasn’t that it, Mr. McGaw?”

McGaw nodded his head.

“Yes; that’s about it,” he said. The voice seemed to come from his
stomach, it was so hollow.

“Did you see her, Mr. McGaw?” asked the Scotchman in a positive tone.

“How c’u’d I be a-seein’ her whin I been in New Yorruk ‘mos’ all day? D’
ye think I’m runnin’ roun’ to ivery stable in the place? I wuz a-comin’
‘cross lots whin I heared it. They says the horse had blin’ staggers.”

“How do you know, then?” asked the Scotchman suspiciously. “Who told you
the horse kicked her?”

“Well, I dunno; I think it wuz some un”--

Dempsey looked at him and knit his brow. McGaw stopped.

“Don’t you know enough of a horse to know he couldn’t kick with blind
staggers?” insisted the Scotchman.

McGaw did not answer.

“Does anybody know any of the facts connected with this dreadful
accident to Mrs. Grogan?” asked the president. “Have you heard anything,
Mr. Quigg?”

Mr. Quigg had heard absolutely nothing, and had not seen Mrs. Grogan
for months. Mr. Crimmins was equally ignorant, and so were several other
gentlemen. Here a voice came from the back of the room.

“I met Dr. Mason, sir, an hour ago, after he had attended Tom Grogan.
He was on his way to Quarantine in his buggy. He said he left her
insensible after dressin’ the wound. He thought she might not live till
mornin’.”

“May I ask your name, sir?” asked the president in a courteous tone.

“Peter Lathers. I am yardmaster at the U. S. Lighthouse Depot.”

The title, and the calm way in which Lathers spoke, convinced the
president and the room. Everybody realized that Tom’s life hung by a
thread. The Scotchman still had a lingering doubt. He also wished to
clear up the blind-staggers theory.

“Did he say how she was hurt?” asked the Scotchman.

“Yes. He said he was a-drivin’ by when they picked her up, and he was
dead sure that somebody had hid in the stable and knocked her on the
head with a club.”

McGaw steadied himself with his hand and grasped the seat of his chair.
The sweat was rolling from his face. He seemed afraid to look up, lest
some other eye might catch his own and read his thoughts. If he had only
seen Lathers come in!

Lathers’s announcement, coupled with the Scotchman’s well-known
knowledge of equine diseases discrediting the blind-staggers theory,
produced a profound sensation. Heads were put together, and low whispers
were heard. Dempsey, Quigg, and Crimmins did not move a muscle.

The Scotchman again broke the silence.

“There seems to be no question, gentlemen, that the poor woman is badly
hurt; but she is still alive, and while she breathes we have no right
to take this work from her. It’s not decent to serve a woman so; and
I think, too, it’s illegal. I again move that the whole matter be laid
upon the table.”

This motion was not put, nobody seconding it.

Then Justice Rowan rose. The speech of the justice was seasoned with a
brogue as delicate in flavor as the garlic in a Spanish salad.

“Mr. Prisident and Gintlemen of the Honorable Boord of Village
Trustees,” said the justice, throwing back his coat. The elaborate
opening compelled attention at once. Such courtesies were too seldom
heard in their deliberations, thought the members, as they lay back in
their chairs to listen.

“No wan can be moore pained than meself that so estimable a woman
as Mrs. Grogan--a woman who fills so honorably her every station in
life--should at this moment be stricken down either by the hand of an
assassin or the hoof of a horse. Such acts in a law-abidin’ community
like Rockville bring with them the deepest detistation and the
profoundest sympathy. No wan, I am sure, is more touched by her
misforchune than me worthy friend Mr. Daniel McGaw, who by this direct
interposition of Providence is foorced into the position of being
compelled to assert his rights befoore your honorable body, with full
assurance that there is no tribunal in the land to which he could apply
which would lend a more willing ear.”

It was this sort of thing that made Rowan popular.

“But, gintlemen,”--here the justice curry-combed his front hair with
his fingers--greasy, jet-black hair, worn long, as befitted his
position,--“this is not a question of sympathy, but a question of law.
Your honorable boord advertoised some time since for certain supplies
needed for the growth and development of this most important of the
villages of Staten Island. In this call it was most positively and
clearly stated that the contract was to be awarded to the lowest
risponsible bidder who gave the proper bonds. Two risponses were made
to this call, wan by Mrs. Grogan, acting on behalf of her husband,--well
known to be a hopeless cripple in wan of the many charitable
institootions of our noble State,--and the other by our distinguished
fellow-townsman, Mr. Daniel McGaw, whom I have the honor to ripresint.
With that strict sinse of justice which has always characterized the
decisions of this honorable boord, the contract was promptly awarded
to Thomas Grogan, he being the lowest bidder; and my client, Daniel
McGaw,--honest Daniel McGaw I should call him if his presence did not
deter me,--stood wan side in obadience to the will of the people and
the laws of the State, and accepted his defate with that calmness which
always distinguishes the hard-workin’ sons of toil, who are not only
the bone and sinoo of our land, but its honor and proide. But,
gintlemen,”--running his hand lightly through his hair, and then laying
it in the bulging lapels of his now half-buttoned coat,--“there were
other conditions accompanying these proposals; to wit, that within tin
days from said openin’ the successful bidder should appear befoore
this honorable body, and then and there duly affix his signatoor to the
aforesaid contracts, already prepared by the attorney of this boord, my
honored associate, Judge Bowker. Now, gintlemen, I ask you to look
at the clock, whose calm face, like a rising moon, presides over the
deliberations of this boord, and note the passin’ hour; and then I
ask you to cast your eyes over this vast assemblage and see if Thomas
Grogan, or any wan ripresinting him or her, or who in any way is
connected with him or her, is within the confines of this noble hall, to
execute the mandates of this distinguished boord. Can it be believed
for an instant that if Mrs. Grogan, acting for her partly dismimbered
husband, Mr. Thomas Grogan, had intinded to sign this contract, she
would not have dispatched on the wings of the wind some Mercury, fleet
of foot, to infarm this boord of her desire for postponement? I demand
in the interests of justice that the contract be awarded to the lowest
risponsible bidder who is ready to sign the contract with proper bonds,
whether that bidder is Grogan, McGaw, Jones, Robinson, or Smith.”

There was a burst of applause and great stamping of feet; the tide
of sympathy had changed. Rowan had perhaps won a few more votes. This
pleased him evidently more than his hope of cutting the contract
pie. McGaw began to regain some of his color and lose some of his
nervousness. Rowan’s speech had quieted him.

The president gravely rapped for order. It was wonderful how much
backbone and dignity and self-respect the justice’s very flattering
remarks had injected into the nine trustees--no, eight, for the
Scotchman fully understood and despised Rowan’s oratorical powers.

The Scotchman was on his feet in an instant.

“I have listened,” he said, “to the talk that Justice Rowan has given
us. It’s very fine and tonguey, but it smothers up the facts. You can’t
rob this woman”--

“Question! question!” came from half a dozen throats.

“What’s your pleasure, gentlemen?” asked the president, pounding with
his gavel.

“I move,” said the courier member, “that the contract be awarded to Mr.
Daniel McGaw as the lowest bidder, provided he can sign the contract
to-night with proper bonds.”

Four members seconded it.

“Is Mr. McGaw’s bondsman present?” asked the president, rising.

Justice Rowan rose, and bowed with the air of a foreign banker accepting
a government loan.

“I have that honor, Mr. Prisident. I am willing to back Mr. McGaw to
the extent of me humble possissions, which are ample, I trust, for
the purposes of this contract”--looking around with an air of entire
confidence.

“Gentlemen, are you ready for the question?” asked the president.

At this instant there was a slight commotion at the end of the hall.
Half a dozen men nearest the door left their seats and crowded to the
top of the staircase. Then came a voice outside: “Fall back; don’t
block up the door! Get back there!” The excitement was so great that the
proceedings of the board were stopped.

The throng parted, The men near the table stood still. An ominous
silence suddenly prevailed. Daniel McGaw twisted his head, turned
ghastly white, and would have fallen from his chair but for Dempsey.

Advancing through the door with slow, measured tread, her long cloak
reaching to her feet; erect, calm, fearless; her face like chalk; her
lips compressed, stifling the agony of every step; her eyes deep sunken,
black-rimmed, burning like coals; her brow bound with a blood-stained
handkerchief that barely hid the bandages beneath, came Tom.

The deathly hush was unbroken. The men fell back with white, scared
faces to let her pass. McGaw cowered in his chair. Dempsey’s eyes
glistened, a half-sigh of relief escaping him. Crimmins had not moved;
the apparition stunned him.

On she came, her eyes fixed on the president, till she reached the
table. Then she steadied herself for a moment, took a roll of papers
from her dress, and sank into a chair.

No one spoke. The crowd pressed closer. Those outside the rail
noiselessly mounted the benches and chairs, craning their necks. Every
eye was fixed upon her.

Slowly and carefully she unrolled the contract, spreading it out before
her, picked up a pen from the table, and without a word wrote her name.
Then she rose firmly, and walked steadily to the door.

Just then a man entered within the rail and took her seat. It was her
bondsman, Mr. Crane.



XVI. A FRIEND IN NEED

Two days after Tom had signed the highway contract, Babcock sat in his
private office in New York, opening his mail. In the outside room
were half a dozen employees--engineers and others--awaiting their
instructions.

The fine spring weather had come and work had been started in every
direction, including the second section of the sea-wall at the depot,
where the divers were preparing the bottom for the layers of concrete.
Tom’s carts had hauled the stone.

Tucked into the pile of letters heaped before him, Babcock’s quick eye
caught the corner of a telegram. It read as follows:--

     Mother hurt.  Wants you immediately.  Please come.

                                  JENNIE GROGAN.

For an instant he sat motionless, gazing at the yellow slip. Then he
sprang to his feet. Thrusting his unopened correspondence into his
pocket, he gave a few hurried instructions to his men and started for
the ferry. Once on the boat, he began pacing the deck. “Tom hurt!” he
repeated to himself. “Tom hurt? How--when--what could have hurt her?”
 He had seen her at the sea-wall, only three days before, rosy-cheeked,
magnificent in health and strength. What had happened? At the St. George
landing he jumped into a hack, hurrying the cabman.

Jennie was watching for him at the garden gate. She said her mother was
in the sitting-room, and Gran’pop was with her. As they walked up the
path she recounted rapidly the events of the past two days.

Tom was on the lounge by the window, under the flowering plants,
when Babcock entered. She was apparently asleep. Across her forehead,
covering the temples, two narrow bandages bound up her wound. At
Babcock’s step she opened her eyes, her bruised, discolored face
breaking into a smile. Then, noting his evident anxiety, she threw the
shawl from her shoulders and sat up.

“No, don’t look so. It’s nothin’; I’ll be all right in a day or two.
I’ve been hurted before, but not so bad as this. I wouldn’t have
troubled ye, but Mr. Crane has gone West. It was kind and friendly o’ ye
to come; I knew ye would.”

Babcock nodded to Pop, and sank into a chair. The shock of her
appearance had completely unnerved him.

“Jennie has told me about it,” he said in a tender, sympathetic tone.
“Who was mean enough to serve you in this way, Tom?” He called her Tom
now, as the others did.

“Well, I won’t say now. It may have been the horse, but I hardly think
it, for I saw a face. All I remember clear is a-layin’ me hand on the
mare’s back. When I come to I was flat on the lounge. They had fixed me
up, and Dr. Mason had gone off. Only the thick hood saved me. Carl and
Cully searched the place, but nothin’ could be found. Cully says he
heard somebody a-runnin’ on the other side of the fence, but ye can’t
tell. Nobody keeps their heads in times like that.”

“Have you been in bed ever since?” Babcock asked.

“In bed! God rest ye! I was down to the board meetin’ two hours after,
wid Mr. Crane, and signed the contract. Jennie and all of ‘em wouldn’t
have it, and cried and went on, but I braved ‘em all. I knew I had to go
if I died for it. Mr. Crane had his buggy, so I didn’t have to walk. The
stairs was the worst. Once inside, I was all right. I only had to sign,
an’ come out again; it didn’t take a minute. Mr. Crane stayed and fixed
the bonds wid the trustees, an’ I come home wid Carl and Jennie.” Then,
turning to her father, she said, “Gran’pop, will ye and Jennie go into
the kitchen for a while? I’ve some private business wid Mr. Babcock.”

When they were gone her whole manner changed. She buried her face for a
moment in the pillow, covering her cheek with her hands; then, turning
to Babcock, she said:--

“Now, me friend, will ye lock the door?”

For some minutes she looked out of the window, through the curtains and
nasturtiums, then, in a low, broken voice, she said:

“I’m in great trouble. Will ye help me?”

“Help you, Tom? You know I will, and with anything I’ve got. What is
it!” he said earnestly, regaining his chair and drawing it closer.

“Has no one iver told ye about me Tom?” she asked, looking at him from
under her eyebrows.

“No; except that he was hurt or--or--out of his mind, maybe, and you
couldn’t bring him home.”

“An’ ye have heared nothin’ more?”

“No,” said Babcock, wondering at her anxious manner.

“Ye know that since he went away I’ve done the work meself, standin’ out
as he would have done in the cold an’ wet an’ workin’ for the children
wid nobody to help me but these two hands.”

Babcock nodded. He knew how true it was.

“Ye’ve wondered many a time, maybe, that I niver brought him home an’
had him round wid me other poor cripple, Patsy--them two togither.” Her
voice fell almost to a whisper.

“Or ye thought, maybe, it was mean and cruel in me that I kep’ him a
burden on the State, when I was able to care for him meself. Well, ye’ll
think so no more.”

Babcock began to see now why he had been sent for. His heart went out to
her all the more.

“Tom, is your husband dead?” he asked, with a quiver in his voice.

She never took her eyes from his face. Few people were ever tender
with her; they never seemed to think she needed it. She read this man’s
sincerity and sympathy in his eyes; then she answered slowly:--

“He is, Mr. Babcock.”

“When did he die! Was it last night, Tom?”

“Listen to me fust, an’ then I’ll tell ye. Ye must know that when me
Tom was hurted, seven years ago, we had a small place, an’ only three
horses, and them warn’t paid for; an’ we had the haulin’ at the brewery,
an’ that was about all we did have. When Tom had been sick a month--it
was the time the bucket fell an’ broke his rib--the new contract at the
brewery was let for the year, an’ Schwartz give it to us, a-thinkin’
that Tom’d be round ag’in, an’ niver carin’, so’s his work was done, an’
I doin’ it, me bein’ big an’ strong, as I always was. Me Tom got worse
an’ worse, an’ I saw him a-failin’, an’ one day Dr. Mason stopped an’
said if I brought him to Bellevue Hospital, where he had just been
appointed, he’d fix up his rib so he could breathe easier, and maybe
he’d get well. Well, I hung on an’ on, thinkin’ he’d get better,--poor
fellow, he didn’t want to go,--but one night, about dark, I took the
Big Gray an’ put him to the cart, an’ bedded it down wid straw; an’ I
wrapped me Tom up in two blankits an’ carried him downstairs in me own
arms, an’ driv slow to the ferry.”

She hesitated for a moment, leaned her bruised head on her hand, and
then went on:--

“When I got to Bellevue, over by the river, it was near ten o’clock at
night. Nobody stopped me or iver looked into me bundle of straw where
me poor boy lay; an’ I rung the bell, an’ they came out, an’ got him up
into the ward, an’ laid him on the bed. Dr. Mason was on night duty, an’
come an’ looked at him, an’ said I must come over the next day; an’ I
kissed me poor Tom an’ left him tucked in, promisin’ to be back early in
the mornin’. I had got only as far as the gate on the street whin one of
the men came a-runnin’ after me. I thought he had fainted, and ran
back as fast as I could, but when I got me arms under him again--he was
dead.”

“And all this seven years ago, Tom?” said Babcock in astonishment,
sinking back in his chair.

Tom bowed her head. The tears were trickling through her fingers and
falling on the coarse shawl.

“Yis; seven years ago this June.” She paused for a moment, as if the
scene was passing before her in every detail, and then went on: “Whin I
come home I niver said a word to anybody but Jennie. I’ve niver told
Pop yit. Nobody else would have cared; we was strangers here. The next
mornin’ I took Jennie,--she was a child then,--an’ we wint over to the
city, an’ I got what money I had, an’ the doctors helped, an’ we buried
him; nobody but just us two, Jennie an’ me, walkin’ behint the wagon,
his poor body in the box. Whin I come home I wanted to die, but I said
nothin’. I was afraid Schwartz would take the work away if he knew it
was only a woman who was a-doin’ it wid no man round, an so I kep’ on;
an’ whin the neighbors asked about him bein’ in a ‘sylum an’ out of his
head, an’ a cripple an’ all that, God forgive me, I was afraid to tell,
and I kept still and let it go at that; an’ whin they asked me how he
was I’d say he was better, or more comfortable, or easier; an’ so he
was, thank God! bein’ in heaven.”

She roused herself wearily, and wiped her eyes with the back of her
hand. Babcock sat motionless.

“Since that I’ve kep’ the promise to me Tom that I made on me
knees beside his bed the night I lifted him in me arms to take him
downstairs--that I ‘d keep his name clean, and do by it as he would hev
done himself, an’ bring up the children, an’ hold the roof over their
heads. An’ now they say I dar’n’t be called by Tom’s name, nor sign it
neither, an’ they’re a-goin’ to take me contract away for puttin’ his
name at the bottom of it, just as I’ve put it on ivery other bit o’
paper I’ve touched ink to these seven years since he left me.”

“Why, Tom, this is nonsense. Who says so?” said Babcock earnestly, glad
of any change of feeling to break the current of her thoughts.

“Dan McGaw an’ Rowan says so.”

“What’s McGaw got to do with it? He’s out of the fight.”

“Oh, ye don’t know some men, Mr. Babcock. McGaw’ll never stop fightin’
while I live. Maybe I oughtn’t tell ye,--I’ve niver told anybody,--but
whin my Tom lay sick upstairs, McGaw come in one night, an’ his own
wife half dead with a blow he had given her, an’ sat down in this very
room,--it was our kitchen then,--an’ he says,’ If your man don’t git
well, ye’ll be broke.’ An’ I says to him, ‘Dan McGaw, if I live twelve
months, Tom Grogan’ll be a richer man than he is now.’ I was a-sittin’
right here when I said it, wid a rag carpet on this floor, an’ hardly
any furniture in the room. He said more things, an’ tried to make love
to me, and I let drive and threw him out of me kitchen. Then all me
trouble wid him began; he’s done everything to beat me since, and now
maybe, after all, he’ll down me. It all come up yisterday through McGaw
meetin’ Dr. Mason an’ askin’ him about me Tom; an’ whin the doctor told
him Tom was dead seven years, McGaw runs to Justice Rowan wid the story,
an’ now they say I can’t sign a dead man’s name. Judge Bowker has the
papers, an’ it’s all to be settled to-morrow.”

“But they can’t take your contract away,” said Babcock indignantly, “no
matter what Rowan says.”

“Oh, it’s not that--it’s not that. That’s not what hurts me. I can git
another contract. That’s not what breaks me heart. But if they take me
Tom’s NAME from me, an’ say I can’t be Tom Grogan any more; it’s like
robbin’ me of my life. When I work on the docks I allus brace myself
an’ say’ I’m doing just what Tom did many a day for me.’ When I sign his
name to me checks an’ papers,--the name I’ve loved an’ that I’ve worked
for, the name I’ve kep’ clean for him--me Tom that loved me, an’ never
lied or was mean--me Tom that I promised, an’--an’”--

All the woman in her overcame her now. Sinking to her knees, she threw
her arms and head on the lounge, and burst into tears.

Babcock rested his head on his hand, and looked on in silence. Here was
something, it seemed to him, too sacred for him to touch even with his
sympathy.

“Tom,” he said, when she grew more quiet, his whole heart going out to
her, “what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know that ye can do anything,” she said in a quivering voice,
lifting her head, her eyes still wet. “Perhaps nobody can. But I thought
maybe ye’d go wid me to Judge Bowker in the mornin’. Rowan an’ all of
‘em ‘ll be there, an’ I’m no match for these lawyers. Perhaps ye’d speak
to the judge for me.”

Babcock held out his hand.

“I knew ye would, an’ I thank ye,” she said, drying her eyes. “Now
unlock the door, an’ let ‘em in. They worry so. Gran’pop hasn’t slep’
a night since I was hurted, an’ Jennie goes round cryin’ all the time,
sayin’ they ‘ll be a-killin’ me next.”

Then, rising to her feet, she called out in a cheery voice, as Babcock
opened the door, “Come in, Jennie; come in Gran’pop. It’s all over,
child. Mr. Babcock’s a-going wid me in the mornin’. Niver fear; we’ll
down ‘em all yit.”



XVII. A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT

When Judge Bowker entered his office adjoining the village bank, Justice
Rowan had already arrived. So had McGaw, Dempsey, Crimmins, Quigg, the
president of the board, and one or two of the trustees. The judge had
sent for McGaw and the president, and they had notified the others.

McGaw sat next to Dempsey. His extreme nervousness of a few days
ago--starting almost at the sound of his own footstep--had given place
to a certain air of bravado, now that everybody in the village believed
the horse had kicked Tom.

Babcock and Tom were by the window, she listless and weary, he alert
and watchful for the slightest point in her favor. She had on her brown
dress, washed clean of the blood-stains, and the silk hood, which better
concealed the bruises. All her old fire and energy were gone. It was not
from the shock of her wound,--her splendid constitution was fast healing
that,--but from this deeper hurt, this last thrust of McGaw’s which
seemed to have broken her indomitable spirit.

Babcock, although he did not betray his misgivings, was greatly worried
over the outcome of McGaw’s latest scheme. He wished in his secret
heart that Tom had signed her own name to the contract. He was afraid
so punctilious a man as the judge might decide against her. He had never
seen him; he only knew that no other judge in his district had so great
a reputation for technical rulings.

When the judge entered--a small, gray-haired, keen-eyed man in a
black suit, with gold spectacles, spotless linen, and clean-shaven
face--Babcock’s fears were confirmed. This man, he felt, would be
legally exact, no matter who suffered by his decision.

Rowan opened the case, the judge listening attentively, looking over his
glasses. Rowan recounted the details of the advertisement, the opening
of the bids, the award of the contract, the signing of “Thomas Grogan”
 in the presence of the full board, and the discovery by his “honored
client that no such man existed, had not existed for years, and did not
now exist.”

“Dead, your Honor”--throwing out his chest impressively, his voice
swelling--“dead in his grave these siven years, this Mr. Thomas Grogan;
and yet this woman has the bald and impudent effrontery to”--

“That will do, Mr. Rowan.”

Police justices--justices like Rowan--did not count much with Judge
Bowker, and then he never permitted any one to abuse a woman in his
presence.

“The point you make is that Mrs. Grogan had no right to sign her name to
a contract made out in the name of her dead husband.”

“I do, your Honor,” said Rowan, resuming his seat.

“Why did you sign it?” asked Judge Bowker, turning to Tom.

She looked at Babcock. He nodded assent, and then she answered:--

“I allus signed it so since he left me.”

There was a pleading, tender pathos in her words that startled Babcock.
He could hardly believe the voice to be Tom’s.

The judge looked at her with a quick, penetrating glance, which
broadened into an expression of kindly interest when he read her entire
honesty in her face. Then he turned to the president of the board.

“When you awarded this contract, whom did you expect to do the work,
Mrs. Grogan or her husband.’”

“Mrs. Grogan, of course. She has done her own work for years,” answered
the president.

The judge tapped the arm of his chair with his pencil. The taps could be
heard all over the room. Most men kept quiet in Bowker’s presence,
even men like Rowan. For some moments his Honor bent over the desk and
carefully examined the signed contract spread out before him; then he
pushed it back, and glanced about the room.

“Is Mr. Crane, the bondsman, present?”

“Mr. Crane has gone West, sir,” said Babcock, rising. “I represent Mrs.
Grogan in this matter.”

“Did Mr. Crane sign this bond knowing that Mrs. Grogan would haul the
stone?”

“He did; and I can add that all her checks, receipts, and correspondence
are signed in the same way, and have been for years. She is known
everywhere as Tom Grogan. She has never had any other name--in her
business.”

“Who else objects to this award?” said the judge calmly.

Rowan sprang to his feet. The judge looked at him.

“Please sit down, Justice Rowan. I said ‘who else.’ I have heard you.”
 He knew Rowan.

Dempsey jumped from his chair.

“I’m opposed to it, yer Honor, an’ so is all me fri’nds here. This woman
has been invited into the Union, and treats us as if we was dogs. She”--

“Are you a bidder for this work?” asked the judge.

“No, sir; but the Union has rights, and”--

“Please take your seat; only bidders can be heard now.”

“But who’s to stand up for the rights of the laborin’ man if”--

“You can, if you choose; but not here. This is a question of evidence.”

“Who’s Bowker anyhow?” said Dempsey behind his hand to Quigg. “Ridin’
‘round in his carriage and chokin’ off free speech?” After some moments
of thought the judge turned to the president of the board, and said in a
measured, deliberate voice:--

“This signature, in my opinion, is a proper one. No fraud is charged,
and under the testimony none was intended. The law gives Mrs. Grogan
the right to use any title she chooses in conducting her business--her
husband’s name, or any other. The contract must stand as it is.”

Here the judge arose and entered his private office, shutting the door
behind him.

Tom had listened with eyes dilating, every nerve in her body at highest
tension. Her contempt for Rowan in his abuse of her; her anger against
Dempsey at his insults; her gratitude to Babcock as he stood up to
defend her; her fears for the outcome, as she listened to the calm,
judicial voice of the judge,--each producing a different sensation of
heat and cold,--were all forgotten in the wild rush of joy that surged
through her as the judge’s words fell upon her ear. She shed no tears,
as other women might have done. Every fibre of her being seemed to be
turned to steel. She was herself again--she, Tom Grogan!--firm on her
own feet, with her big arms ready to obey her, and her head as clear as
a bell, master of herself, master of her rights, master of everything
about her. And, above all, master of the dear name of her Tom that
nothing could take from her now--not even the law!

With this tightening of her will power there quivered through her a
sense of her own wrongs--the wrongs she had endured for years, the
wrongs that had so nearly wrecked her life.

Then, forgetting the office, the still solemnity of the place--even
Babcock--she walked straight up to McGaw, blocking his exit to the
street door.

“Dan McGaw, there’s a word I’ve got for ye before ye l’ave this place,
an’ I’m a-going to say it to ye now before ivery man in this room.”

McGaw shrank back in alarm.

“You an’ I have known each other since the time I nursed yer wife when
yer boy Jack was born, an’ helped her through when she was near dyin’
from a kick ye give her. Ye began yer dirty work on me one night when
me Tom lay sick, an’ I threw ye out o’ me kitchen; an’ since that time
ye’ve”--

“Here! I ain’t a-goin’ ter stand here an’ listen ter yer. Git out o’ me
way, or I’ll”--

Tom stepped closer, her eyes flashing, every word ringing clear.

“Stand still, an’ hear what I’ve got to say to ye, or I’ll go into that
room and make a statement to the judge that’ll put ye where ye
won’t move for years. There was enough light for me to see. Look at
this”--drawing back her hood, and showing the bandaged scar.

McGaw seemed to shrivel up; the crowd stood still in amazement.

“I thought ye would. Now, I’ll go on. Since that night in me kitchen ye
‘ve tried to ruin me in ivery other way ye could. Ye’ve set these dead
beats Crimmins and Quigg on to me to coax away me men; ye’ve stirred up
the Union; ye burned me stable”--

“Ye lie! It’s a tramp did it,” snarled McGaw.

“Ye better keep still till I get through, Dan McGaw. I’ve got the can
that helt the ker’sene, an’ I know where yer boy Billy bought it, an’
who set him up to it,” she added, looking straight at Crimmins. “He
might’a’ been a dacent boy but for him.” Crimmins turned pale and bit
his lip.

The situation became intense. Even the judge, who had come out of his
private room at the attack, listened eagerly.

“Ye’ve been a sneak an’ a coward to serve a woman so who never harmed
ye. Now I give ye fair warnin’, an’ I want two or three other men in
this room to listen; if this don’t stop, ye’ll all be behint bars where
ye belong.--I mean you, too, Mr. Dempsey. As for you, Dan McGaw, if it
warn’t for yer wife Kate, who’s a dacent woman, ye’d go to-day. Now, one
thing more, an’ I’ll let ye go. I’ve bought yer chattel mortgage of Mr.
Crane that’s past due, an’ I can do wid it as I pl’ase. You’ll send
to me in the mornin’ two of yer horses to take the places of those ye
burned up, an’ if they’re not in my stable by siven o’clock I’ll be
round yer way ‘bout nine with the sheriff.”

Once outside in the sunlight, she became herself again. The outburst
had cleared her soul like a thunder-clap. She felt as free as air. The
secret that had weighed her down for years was off her mind. What
she had whispered to her own heart she could now proclaim from the
housetops. Even the law protected her.

Babcock walked beside her, silent and grave. She seemed to him like some
Joan with flaming sword.

When they reached the road that led to her own house, her eyes fell
upon Jennie and Carl. They had walked down behind them, and were waiting
under the trees.

“There’s one thing more ye can do for me, my friend,” she said, turning
to Babcock. “All the old things Tom an’ I did togither I can do by
meself; but it’s new things like Carl an’ Jennie that trouble me--the
new things I can’t ask him about. Do ye see them two yonder! Am I free
to do for ‘em as I would? No; ye needn’t answer. I see it in yer face.
Come here, child; I want ye. Give me yer hand.”

For an instant she stood looking into their faces, her eyes brimming.
Then she took Jennie’s hand, slipped it into Carl’s, and laying her big,
strong palm over the two, said slowly:

“Now go home, both o’ ye, to the house that’ll shelter ye, pl’ase God,
as long as ye live.”

*****

Before the highway-work was finished, McGaw was dead and Billy and
Crimmins in Sing Sing. The label on the empty can, Quigg’s volunteered
testimony, and Judge Bowker’s charge, convinced the jury. Quigg had
quarreled with Crimmins and the committee, and took that way of getting
even.

When Tom heard the news, she left her teams standing in the road and
went straight to McGaw’s house. His widow sat on a broken chair in an
almost empty room.

“Don’t cry, Katy,” said Tom, bending over her. “I’m sorry for Billy.
Seems to me, ye’ve had a lot o’ trouble since Dan was drowned. It was
not all Billy’s fault. It was Crimmins that put him up to it. But ye’ve
one thing left, and that’s yer boy Jack. Let me take him--I’ll make a
man of him.”

*****

Jack is still with her. Tom says he is the best man in her gang.





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