II

It was at Laramie, between the mountains, and Henniker was celebrating

the present and drowning the past in a large, untrammeled style, when he

received a letter from the quartermaster-sergeant at Custer,--a plain

statement until the end, where Henniker read:--

"If you should happen at any time to wish for news of your son, Meadows

and his wife have taken the child. They came on here to get him, and

Meadows insisted on standing the expense of the funeral, which was the

best we could give her for the credit of the troop. He put a handsome

stone over her, with 'Meta, wife of Trumpeter Henniker, K Troop, --th U.

S. Cavalry,' on it; and there it stands to her memory, poor girl, and to

your shame, a false, cruel, and cowardly man in the way you treated her.

And so every one of us calls you, officers and men the same,--of your

old troop that walked behind her to her grave. And where were you,

Henniker, and what were you doing this day two weeks, when we were

burying your poor wife? The twenty dollars you sent her by Billy,

Meadows has, and says he will keep it till he sees you again. Which some

of us think it will be a good while he will be packing that Judas piece

around with him.--And so good-by, Henniker. I might have said less, or I

might have said nothing at all, but that the boy is a fine child, my

wife says, and must have a grand constitution to stand what he has

stood; and I have a fondness for you myself when all is said and done.

"P. S. I would take a thought for that boy once in a while, if I was

you. A man doesn't care for the brats when he is young, but age cures us

of all wants but the want of a child."

But Henniker was not ready to go back to the Meadows cottage and be

clothed in the robe of forgiveness, and receive his babe like a pledge

of penitence on his hand.

The shock of the letter sobered him at first, and then the sting of it

drove him to drinking harder than ever. He did not run upon that "good

thing" at Laramie, nor in any of the cities westward, that one after

another beheld the progress of his deterioration. It does not take long

in the telling, but it was several years before he finally struck upon

the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco, where so many mothers' sons who

never were heard of have gone down. He went ashore, but he did not quite

go to pieces. His constitution had matured under healthy conditions, and

could stand a good deal of ill-usage; but we are "no stronger than our

weakest part," and at the end of all he found himself in a hospital bed

under treatment for his knee,--the same that had been mulcted for him

twice before.

He listened grimly to the doctor's explanations,--how the past sins of

his whole impenitent system were being vicariously reckoned for through

this one afflicted member. It was rough on his old knee, Henniker

remarked; but he had hopes of getting out all right again, and he made

the usual sick-bed promises to himself. He did get out, eventually,

without a penny in the world, and with a stiff knee to drag about for

the rest of his life. And he was just thirty-four years old.

His splendid vitality, that had been wont to express itself in so many

attractive ways, now found its chief vent in talk--inexpensive,

inordinate, meddlesome discourse--wherever two or three were gathered

together in the name of idleness and discontent. The members of these

congregations were pessimists to a man. They disbelieved in everybody

and everything except themselves, and secretly, at times, they were even

a little shaken on that head; but all the louder they exclaimed upon

the world that had refused them the chance to be the great and

successful characters nature had intended them to be.

It need hardly be said that when Henniker raved about the inequalities

of class, the helplessness of poverty, the tyranny of wealth, and the

curse of labor; and devoted in eloquent phrases the remainder of a

blighted existence to the cause of the Poor Man, he was thinking of but

one poor man, namely, himself. He classed himself with Labor only that

he might feel his superiority to the laboring masses. There were few

situations in which he could taste his superiority, in these days. The

"ego" in his Cosmos was very hungry; his memories were bitter, his hopes

unsatisfied; his vanity and artistic sense were crucified through

poverty, lameness, and bad clothes. Now all that was left him was the

conquests of the mind. For the smiles of women, give him the hoarse

plaudits of men. The dandy of the garrison began to shine in saloon

coteries and primaries of the most primary order. He was the star of

sidewalk convocations and vacant-lot meetings of the Unemployed. But he

despised the mob that echoed his perorations and paid for his drinks,

and was at heart the aristocrat that his old uniform had made him.

* * * * *

In the summer of 1894, a little black-eyed boy with chestnut curls used

to swing on the gate of the Meadows cottage that opens upon the common,

and chant some verses of domestic doggerel about Coxey's army, which was

then begging and bullying its way eastward, and demanding transportation

at the expense of the railroads and of the people at large.

He sang his song to the well-marked tune of Pharaoh's Army, and thus the

verses ran:--

"The Coxeyites they gathered,

The Coxeyites they gathered,

And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn,

And stole a train of freight-cars in the morning,

And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn.

"The engine left them standing,

The engine left them standing,

On the railroad-track at Caldwell in the morn.

Very sad it was for Caldwell in the morning

To feed that hungry army in the morn.

"Where are all the U. S. marshals,

The deputy U. S. marshals,

To jail that Coxey army in the morn,

That 'industrious, law-abiding' Coxey's army

That stole a train of freight-cars in the morn?"

Where indeed were all the U. S. marshals? The question was being asked

with anxiety in the town, for a posse of them had gone down to arrest

the defiant train-stealers, and it was rumored that the civil arm had

been disarmed, and the deputies carried on as prisoners to Pocatello,

where the Industrials, two hundred strong, were intrenched in the

sympathies of the town, and knocking the federal authorities about at

their law-abiding pleasure. Pocatello is a division town on the Union

Pacific Railroad; it is full of the company's shops and men, the latter

all in the American Railway Union or the Knights of Labor, and solid on

class issues, right or wrong; and it was said that the master workman

was expected at Pocatello to speak on the situation, and, if need arose,

to call out the trades all over the land in support of the principle

that tramp delegations shall not walk. Disquieting rumors were abroad,

and there was relief in the news that the regulars had been called on

to sustain the action of the federal court.

The troops at Bisuka barracks were under marching orders. While the town

was alert to hear them go they tramped away one evening, just as a

shower was clearing that had emptied the streets of citizens; and before

the ladies could say "There they go," and call each other to the window,

they were gone.

Then for a few days the remote little capital, with Coxeyites gathering

and threatening its mails and railroad service, waited in apprehensive

curiosity as to what was going to happen next. The party press on both

sides seized the occasion to point a moral on their own account, and

some said, "Behold the logic of McKinleyism," and others retorted,

"Behold the shadow of the Wilson Bill stalking abroad over the land. Let

us fall on our faces and pray!" But most people laughed instead, and

patted the Coxeyites on the back, preferring their backs to their faces.

It seemed as if it might be time to stop laughing and gibing and

inviting the procession to move on, when a thousand or more men,

calling themselves American citizens, were parading their idleness

through the land as authority for lawlessness and crime, and when our

sober regulars had to be called out to quell a Falstaff's army. The

regulars, be sure, did not enjoy it. If there is a sort of service our

soldiers would like to be spared, doubtless it is disarming crazy

Indians: but they prefer even that to standing up to be stoned and

insulted and chunked with railroad iron by a mob which they are ordered

not to fire upon, or to entering a peaceful country which has been sown

with dynamite by patriotic labor unions, or prepared with cut-bridges by

sympathetic strikers.

We are here to be hurt, so the strong ones tell us, and perhaps the best

apology the strong can make to the weak for the vast superiority that

training gives is to show how long they can hold their fire amidst a mob

of brute ignorances, and how much better they can bear their hurts when

the senseless missiles fly. We love the forbearance of our "unpitied

strong;" it is what we expect of them: but we trust also in their

firmness when the time for forbearance is past.

Little Ross Henniker--named for that mythical great Scotchman, his

supposed grandfather--was deeply disappointed because he did not see the

soldiers go. To have lived next door to them all his life, seven whole

years, and watched them practicing and preparing to be fit and ready to

go, and then not to see them when they did march away for actual service

in the field, was hard indeed.

Ross was not only one of those brightest boys of his age known to

parents and grand-parents by the million, but he was really a very

bright and handsome child. If Mother Meadows, now "granny," had ever had

any doubts at all about the Scottish chief of the Hudson's Bay Company,

the style and presence of that incomparable boy were proof enough. It

was a marked case of "throwing-back." There was none of the Bannock

here. Could he not be trusted like a man to do whatever things he liked

to do; as riding to fetch the cows and driving them hillward again, on

the weird little spotted pony, hardly bigger than a dog, with a huge

head and a furry cheek and a hanging under-lip, which the tributary

Bannocks had brought him? It was while he was on cow-duty far away, but

not out of sight of the post, that he saw the column move. "Great

Scott!" how he did ride! He broke his stick over the pony's back, and

kicked him with his bare heels, and slapped him with his hat, till the

pony bucked him off into a sagebush whence he picked himself up and flew

as fast as his own legs would spin; but he was too late. Then, for the

first time in six months at least, he howled. Aunt Callie comforted him

with fresh strawberry jam for supper, but the lump of grief remained,

until, as she was washing the dishes, she glanced at him, laughing out

of the corner of her eye, and began to make up the song about Coxey's

army. For some time Ross refused to smile, but when it came to the

chorus about the soldiers who were going

"To turn back Coxey's army, hallelujah!

To turn back Coxey's army, halleloo!"

he began to sing "hallelujah" too. Then gun-fire broke in with a

lonesome sound, as if the cavalry up on the hill missed its comrades of

the white stripes who were gone to "turn back" that ridiculous army.

Mother Meadows wished "that man Coxey had never been born," so weary did

she get of the Coxey song. Coxeyism had taken complete possession of the

young lord of the house, now that his friends the soldiers had gone to

take a hand in the business.

In a few days the soldiers came back escorting the Coxey prisoners. The

"presence of the troops" had sufficed. The two hundred Coxeyites were to

be tried at Bisuka for crimes committed within the State. They were

penned meanwhile in a field by the river, below the railroad track, and

at night they were shut into a rough barrack which had been hastily put

up for the purpose. A skirt of the town little known, except to the

Chinese vegetable gardeners and makers of hay on the river meadows and

small boys fishing along the shore, now became the centre of popular

regard; and "Have you been down to the Coxey camp?" was as common a

question as "Are you going to the Natatorium Saturday night?" or "Will

there be a mail from the west to-day?"

One evening, Mother Meadows, with little Ross Henniker by the hand,

stood close to the dead-line of the Coxey field, watching the groups on

the prisoners' side. The woman looked at them with perplexed pity, but

the child swung himself away and cried, "Pooh! only a lot of dirty

hobos!" and turned to look at the soldiers.

The tents of the guard of regulars stood in a row in front of a rank of

tall poplar-trees, their tops swinging slow in the last sunlight. Behind

the trees stretched the green river flats in the shadow. Frogs were

croaking; voices of girls could be heard in a tennis-court with a high

wall that ran back to the street of the railroad.

Roll-call was proceeding in front of the tents, the men firing their

quick, harsh answers like scattering shots along the line. Under the

trees at a little distance the beautiful sleek cavalry horses were

grouped, unsaddled and calling for their supper. Ross Henniker gazed at

them with a look of joy; then he turned a contemptuous eye upon the

prisoners.

"Which of them two kinds of animals looks most like what a man ought to

be?" he asked, pointing to the horses and then to the Coxeyites, who in

the cool of the evening were indulging in unbeautiful horse-play, not

without a suspicion of showing off before the eyes of visitors. The

horses in their free impatience were as unconscious as lords.

"What are you saying, Ross?" asked Mrs. Meadows, rousing herself.

"I say, suppose I'd just come down from the moon, or some place where

they don't know a man from a horse, and you said to me: 'Look at these

things, and then look at them things over there, and say which is boss

of t'other.' Why, I'd say _them_ things, every time." Ross pointed

without any prejudice to the horses.

"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Meadows, "if these Coxeys had been taken care

of and coddled all their lives like them troop horses, they might not be

so handsome, but they'd look a good deal better than what they do. And

they'd have more sense," she added in a lower voice. "Very few poor

men's sons get the training those horses have had. They've learned to

mind, for one thing, and to be faithful to the hand that feeds them."

"Not all of them don't," said Ross, shaking his head wisely. "There's

kickers and biters and shirks amongst them; but if they won't learn and

can't learn, they get 'condemned.'"

"And what becomes of them then?"

"Why, _you_ know," answered the boy, who began to suspect that there was

a moral looming in the distance of this bold generalization.

"Yes," said Mother Meadows, "I know what becomes of some of them,

because I've seen; and I don't think a condemned horse looks much better

in the latter end of him than a condemned man."

"But you can't leave them in the troop, for they'd spoil all the rest,"

objected the boy.

"It's too much for me, dear," replied the old woman humbly. "These

Coxeys are a kind of folks I don't understand."

"I should think you might understand, when the troops have to go out and

run 'em in! I'm on the side of the soldiers, every time."

"Well, that's simple enough," said Mrs. Meadows. She was a very mild

protagonist, for she could never confine herself to one side of a

question. "I'm on the side of the soldiers, too. A soldier has to do

what he's told, and pays with his life for it, right or wrong."

"And I think it's a shame to send the beautiful clean soldiers to shove

a lot of dirty hobos back where they belong."

"My goodness! Hush! you'd better talk less till you get more sense to

talk with," said Mrs. Meadows sternly. A man standing near, with his

back to them, had turned around quickly, and she saw by his angry eye

that he had overheard. She looked at him again, and knew the man. It was

the boy's father. Ross had bounded away to talk to his friend Corporal

Niles.

"Henniker!" exclaimed Mrs. Meadows in a low voice of shocked amazement.

"It don't seem as if this could be you!"

"Let that be!" said Henniker roughly. "I didn't enlist by that name in

this army. Who's that young son of a gun that's got so much lip on him?"

"God help you! don't you know your own son?"

"What? No! Has he got to be that size already?" The man's weather-beaten

face turned a darker red under the week-old beard that disfigured it. He

sat down on the ground, for suddenly he felt weak, and also to hide his

lameness from the woman who should have hated him, but who simply pitied

him instead. Her face showed a sort of motherly shame for the change

that she saw in him. It was very hard to bear. He had not fully realized

the change in himself till its effect upon her confronted him. He tried

to bluff it off carelessly.

"Bring the boy here. I have a word to say to him."

"You should have said it long ago, then." Mrs. Meadows was hurt and

indignant at his manner. "What has been said is said, for good and all.

It's too late to unsay it now."

"What do you mean by that, Mrs. Meadows? Am I the boy's father or am I

not?"

"You are not the father he knows. Do you think I have been teaching him

to be ashamed of the name he bears?"

"Old lady," cried Henniker the Coxeyite, "have you been stuffing that

boy about his dad as you did the mother about hers?"

"I have told him the truth, partly. The rest, if it wasn't the truth, it

ought to have been," answered Mrs. Meadows stoutly. "I have put the

story right, as an honest man would have lived it. Whatever you've been

doing with yourself these years, it's your own affair, not the boy's nor

mine. Keep it to yourself now. You were too good for them once,--the

mother and the child; they can do without you now."

"That's all right," said Henniker, wincing; "but as a matter of

curiosity let me hear how you have put it up."

"How I have what?"

"How you have dressed up the story to the boy. I'd like to see myself

with a woman's eyes once more."

Mrs. Meadows looked him over and hesitated; then her face kindled. "I've

told him that his father was a beautiful clean man," she said, using

unconsciously the boy's own words, "and rode a beautiful horse, and

saluted his captain so!" She pointed to the corporal of the guard who

was at that moment reporting. "I told him that when the troops went you

had to leave your young wife behind you, and she could not be kept from

following you with her child; and by a cruel mischance you passed each

other on the road, and you never knew till you had got to her old home

and heard she was dead and buried; and you were so broke up that you

couldn't bear your life in the place where you used to be with her; and

you were a sorrowful wandering man that he must pray for, and ask God to

bring you home. You never came near us, Henniker, nor thought of coming;

but could I tell your own child that? Indeed, I would be afraid to tell

him what did happen on that road from Custer station, for fear when he's

a man he'd go hunting you with a shotgun. Now where is the falsehood

here? Is it in me, or in you, who have made it as much as your own life

is worth to tell the truth about you to your son? _Was_ it the truth,

Henniker? Sure, man, you did love her! What did you want with her else?

Was it the truth that they told us at Custer? There are times when I

can't believe it myself. If there is a word you could say for

yourself,--say it, for the child's sake! You wouldn't mind speaking to

an old woman like me? There was a time when I would have been proud to

call you my son."

"You are a good woman, Mrs. Meadows, but I cannot lie to you, even for

the child's sake. And it's not that I don't know how to lie, for God

knows I'm nothing but a lie this blessed minute! What do I care for such

cattle as these?" He had risen, and waved his hand contemptuously toward

his fellow-martyrs. "Well, I must be going. I see they're passin' around

the flesh-pots. We're livin' like fighting-cocks here, on a restaurant

contract. There'll be a big deal in it for the marshal, I suspect."

Henniker winked, and his face fell into the lowest of its demoralized

expressions.

"There's no such a thing!" said Mrs. Meadows indignantly. "Some folks

are willing to work for very little these hard times, and give good

value for their money. You had better eat and be thankful, and leave

other folks alone!"

Little Ross coming up heard but the last words, and saw his granny's

agitation and the familiar attitude of the strange Coxeyite. His quick

temper flashed out: "Get out with you! Go off where you belong, you

dirty man!"

Mrs. Meadows caught the boy, and whirled him around and shook him.

"Never, never let me hear you speak like that to any man again!"

"Why?" he demanded.

"I'll tell you why, some day, if I have to. Pray God I may never need to

tell you!"

"Why?" repeated the boy, wondering at her excitement.

"Come away,--come away home!" she said, and Ross saw that her eyes were

red with unshed tears. He hung behind her and looked back.

"He's lame," said he, half to himself. "I wouldn't have spoken that way

if I'd known he had a game leg."

"Who's lame?" asked Mrs. Meadows.

"The Coxeyite. See. He limps bad."

"Didn't I tell you! We never know, when we call names, what sore spots

we may be hitting. You may have sore spots of your own some day."

"I hope I sha'n't be lame," mused the boy. "And I hope I sha'n't be a

Coxey."

The Coxeyites had been in camp a fortnight when their trial began. Twice

a day the prisoners were marched up the streets of Bisuka to the

courthouse, and back again to camp, till the citizens became accustomed

to the strange, unrepublican procession. The prisoners were herded along

the middle of the street; on either side of them walked the marshals,

and outside of the line of civil officers the guard of infantry or

cavalry, the officers riding and the men on foot.

This was the last march of the Coxeyites. Many citizens looking on were

of the opinion that if these men desired to make themselves an

"object-lesson" to the nation, this was their best chance of being

useful in that capacity.

For two weeks, day by day, in the prisoner's field, Henniker had been

confronted with the contrast of his old service with his present

demoralization. He had been a conspicuous figure among the Industrials

until they came in contact with the troops; then suddenly he subsided,

and was heard and seen as little as possible. Not for all that a

populist congress could vote, out of the pockets of the people into the

pockets of the tramp petitioners, would he have posed as one of them

before the eyes of an officer, or a man, of his old regiment, who might

remember him as Trumpeter Henniker of K troop. But the daily march to

the courthouse was the death-sickness of his pride. Once he had walked

these same streets with his head as high as any man's; and it had been,

"How are you, Henniker?" and "Step in, Henniker;" or Callie had been

laughing and falling out of step on his arm, or Meta--poor little

Meta--waiting for him when the darkness fell!

Now the women ran to the windows and crowded the porches, and stared at

him and his ill-conditioned comrades as if they had been animals

belonging to a different species.

But Henniker was mistaken here. The eyes of the pretty girls were for

the "pretty soldiers." It was all in the day's work for the soldiers,

who tramped indifferently along; but the officers looked bored, as if

they were neither proud of the duty nor of the display of it which the

times demanded.

On the last day's march from the courthouse to the camp, there was a

clamor of voices that drowned the shuffling and tramping of the feet.

The prisoners were all talking at once, discussing the sentences which

the court had just announced: the leaders and those taken in acts of

violence to be imprisoned at hard labor for specified terms; the rank

and file to be put back on their stolen progress as far westward, whence

they came, as the borders of the State would allow; there to be staked

out, as it were, on the banks of the Snake River, and guarded for sixty

days by the marshals, supported by the inevitable "presence of the

troops."

But the sentence that Henniker heard was that private one which his own

child had spoken: "Get out with you! Go back where you belong, you dirty

man!" He had wished at the time that he could make the proud youngster

feel the sting of his own lash: but that thought had passed entirely,

and been merged in the simple hurt of a father's longing for his son.

"If he were mine," he bitterly confessed, "if that little cock-a-hoop

rascal would own me and love me for his dad, I swear to God I could

begin my life again! But now, what next?"

There had been a stoppage ahead, the feet pressing on had slackened

step, when there, with his back to the high iron gates of the

capitol-grounds, was the beautiful child again. A young woman stood

beside him, a fine, wholesome girl like a full-blown cottage rose, with

auburn hair, an ivory-white throat, and a back as flat as a trooper's.

It was Callie, of course, with Meta's child. The cup of Henniker's

humiliation was full.

The boy stood with his chin up, his hat on the back of his head, his

plump hands spread on the hips of his white knickerbockers. He was

dressed in his best, as he had come from a children's fête. Around his

neck hung a prize which he had won in the games, a silver dog-whistle on

a scarlet ribbon. He caught it to his lips and blew a long piercing

trill, his dark eyes smiling, the wind blowing the short curls across

his cheek.

"There he is, the lame one! I made him look round," said Ross.

Henniker had turned, for one long look--the last, he thought--at his

son. All the singleness and passion of the mother, the fire and grace

and daring of the father, were in the promise of his childish face and

form. He flushed, not a self-conscious, but an honest, generous blush,

and took his hat away off his head to the lame Coxeyite--"because I was

mean to him; and they are down and done for now, the Coxeys."

"Whose kid is that?" asked the man who walked beside Henniker, seeing

the gesture and the look that passed between the man and the boy. "He's

as handsome as they make 'em," he added, smiling.

Henniker did not reply in the proud word "Mine." A sudden heat rushed to

his eyes, his chest was tight to bursting. He pulled his hat down and

tramped along. The shuffling feet of the prisoners passed on down the

middle of the street; the double line of guards kept step on either

side. The dust arose and blended the moving shapes, prisoners and guards

together, and blotted them out in the distance.

Callie had not seen her old lover at all. "Great is the recuperative

power of the human heart." She had been looking at Corporal Niles, who

could not turn his well-drilled head to look at her. But a side-spark

from his blue eye shot out in her direction, and made her blush and

cease to smile. Corporal Niles carried his head a little higher and

walked a little straighter after that; and Callie went slowly through

the gates, and sat a long while on one of the benches in the park, with

her elbow resting on the iron scroll and her cheek upon her hand.

She was thinking about the Coxeyites' sentence, and wondering if the

cavalry would have to go down to the stockade prison on the Snake; for

in that case Corporal Niles would have to go, and the wedding be

postponed. Everybody knows it is bad luck to put off a wedding-day; and

besides, the yellow roses she had promised her corporal to wear would

all be out of bloom, and no other roses but those were the true cavalry

yellow.

But the cavalry did not go down till after the wedding, which took place

on the evening appointed, at the Meadows cottage, between "Sound off"

and "Taps." The ring was duly blessed, and the father's and mother's

kiss was not wanting. The primrose radiance of the summer twilight shone

as strong as lamplight in the room, and Callie, in her white dress, with

her auburn braids gleaming through the wedding-veil and her lover's

colors in the roses on her breast, was as sweet and womanly a picture

as any mother could wish to behold.

When little Ross came up to kiss the bride, he somehow forgot, and flung

his arms first around Corporal Niles's brown neck.

"Corporal, I'm twice related to the cavalry now," said he. "I had a

father in it, and now I've got an uncle in it."

"That's right," the corporal agreed; "and if you have any sort of luck

you'll be in it yourself some day."

"But not in the ranks," said Ross firmly. "I'm going to West Point, you

know."

"Bless his heart!" cried Callie, catching the boy in her arms; "and how

does he think he's going to get there?"

"I shall manage it somehow," said Ross, struggling. He was very fond of

Aunt Callie, but a boy doesn't like to be hugged so before his military

acquaintances, and in Ross's opinion there had been a great deal too

much kissing and hugging, not to speak of crying, already. He did not

see why there should be all this fuss just because Aunt Callie was going

up to the barracks to live, in the jolliest little whitewashed cabin,

with a hop-vine hanging, like the veil on an old woman's bonnet, over

the front gable. He only wished that the corporal had asked him to go

too!

A slight misgiving about his last speech was making Ross uncomfortable.

If there was a person whose feelings he would not have wished to hurt

for anything in the world, it was Corporal Niles.

"Corporal," he amended affectionately, "if I should be a West Pointer,

and should be over you, I shouldn't put on any airs, you know. We should

be better friends than ever."

"I expect we should, captain. I'm looking forward to the day."

* * * * *

A mild species of corvée had been put in force down on the Snake River

while the stockade prison was building. The prisoners as a body rebelled

against it, and were not constrained to work; but a few were willing,

and these were promptly stigmatized as "scabs," and ill treated by the

lordly idlers. Hence they were given a separate camp and treated as

trusties.

When the work was done the trusties were rewarded with their freedom,

either to go independently, or to stay and eat government rations till

the sixty days of their sentence had expired.

Henniker, in spite of his infirmity, had been one of the hardest

volunteer workers. But now the work was done, and the question returned,

What next? What comes after Coxeyism when Coxeyism fails?

He sat one evening by the river, and again he was a free man. A dry

embankment, warm as an oven to the touch, sloped up to the railroad

track above his head; tufts of young sage and broken stone strewed the

face of it; there was not a tree in sight. He heard the river boiling

down over the rapids and thundering under the bridge. He heard the

trumpets calling the men to quarters. "Lights out" had sounded some time

before. He had been lying motionless, prone on his face, his head

resting on his crossed arms. The sound of the trumpets made him choke up

like a homesick boy. He lay there till, faintly in the distance, "Taps"

breathed its slow and sweet good-night.

"Last call," he said. "Time to turn in." He rolled over and began to

pull off the rags in which his child had spurned him.

"The next time I'm inspected," he muttered, "I shall be a clean man."

So, naked, he slipped into the black water under the bank. The river

bore him up and gave him one more chance, but he refused it: with two

strokes he was in the midst of the death current, and it seized him and

took him down.

_BOOKS OF FICTION._

Books by Mary Hallock Foote.

THE CHOSEN VALLEY. A Novel.

THE LED-HORSE CLAIM. Illustrated.

JOHN BODEWIN'S TESTIMONY.

THE LAST ASSEMBLY BALL, and THE FATE OF A VOICE.

IN EXILE, AND OTHER STORIES.

COEUR D'ALÉNE. A Novel.

THE CUP OF TREMBLING, AND OTHER STORIES.

Clara Louise Burnham.

Young Maids and Old.

Next Door.

Dearly Bought.

No Gentlemen.

A Sane Lunatic.

The Mistress of Beech Knoll.

Miss Bagg's Secretary.

Dr. Latimer.

Sweet Clover: A Romance of the White City.

The Wise Woman.

Edwin Lassetter Bynner.

Zachary Phips.

Agnes Surriage.

The Begum's Daughter.

These three Historical Novels:

Penelope's Suitors.

Damen's Ghost.

An Uncloseted Skeleton. (Written with Lucretia P. Hale.)

Rose Terry Cooke.

Somebody's Neighbors. Stories.

Happy Dodd.

The Sphinx's Children. Stories.

Steadfast.

Huckleberries. Gathered from New England Hills. Short Stories.

Charles Egbert Craddock [Mary N. Murfree].

In the Tennessee Mountains. Short Stories.

Down the Ravine. For Young People. Illustrated.

The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains.

In the Clouds.

The Story of Keedon Bluffs.

The Despot of Broomsedge Cove.

Where the Battle was Fought.

His Vanished Star.

The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain, and Other Stories.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Elsie Venner.

The Guardian Angel.

A Mortal Antipathy.

Augustus Hoppin.

Recollections of Auton House. Illustrated by the Author.

A Fashionable Sufferer. Illustrated by the Author.

Two Compton Boys. Illustrated by the Author.

Henry James.

Watch and Ward.

A Passionate Pilgrim, and other Tales.

Roderick Hudson.

The American.

The Europeans.

Confidence.

The Portrait of a Lady.

The Author of Beltraffio; Pandora; Georgina's Reasons; Four Meetings,

etc.

The Siege of London; The Pension Beaurepas; and The Point of View.

Tales of Three Cities (The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady Barberina;

A New England Winter)

Daisy Miller: A Comedy.

The Tragic Muse.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

The King of Folly Island, and other People.

Tales of New England. In Riverside Aldine Series.

A White Heron, and Other Stories.

A Marsh Island.

A Country Doctor.

Deephaven.

Old Friends and New.

Country By-Ways.

The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore.

Betty Leicester.

Strangers and Wayfarers.

A Native of Winby.

The Life of Nancy, and Other Stories.

Ellen Olney Kirk.

The Story of Lawrence Garthe.

Ciphers.

The Story of Margaret Kent.

Sons and Daughters.

Queen Money.

Better Times. Stories.

A Midsummer Madness.

A Lesson in Love.

A Daughter of Eve.

Walford.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps [Mrs. Ward].

The Gates Ajar.

Beyond the Gates.

The Gates Between.

Men, Women, and Ghosts. Stories.

Hedged In.

The Silent Partner.

The Story of Avis.

Sealed Orders, and other Stories.

Friends: A Duet.

Dr. Zay.

An Old Maid's Paradise, and Burglars in Paradise.

The Master of the Magicians. Collaborated by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

and Herbert D. Ward.

Come Forth. Collaborated by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Herbert D.

Ward.

Fourteen to One. Short Stories.

Donald Marcy.

The Madonna of the Tubs. With Illustrations.

Jack the Fisherman. Illustrated.

A Singular Life.

F. Hopkinson Smith.

Colonel Carter of Cartersville. With Illustrations.

A Day at Laguerre's, and other Days.

A Gentleman Vagabond, and other Stories.

Octave Thanet.

Knitters in the Sun.

Otto the Knight, and other Stories.

William Makepeace Thackeray.

Complete Works. _Illustrated Library Edition._

With Biographical and Bibliographical Introductions,

Portrait, and over 1600 Illustrations.

Gen. Lew Wallace.

The Fair God; or, The Last of the 'Tzins. A Tale of the Conquest of

Mexico.

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney.

Faith Gartney's Girlhood.

Hitherto.

Patience Strong's Outings.

The Gayworthys.

A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life.

We Girls.

Real Folks.

The Other Girls.

Sights and Insights.

Odd or Even?

Bonnyborough.

Homespun Yarns. Stories.

Ascutney Street.

A Golden Gossip.

Boys at Chequasset.

Mother Goose for Grown Folks.

Kate Douglas Wiggin.

The Birds' Christmas Carol. With Illustrations.

The Story of Patsy. Illustrated.

Timothy's Quest.

A Summer in a Cañon. Illustrated.

A Cathedral Courtship, and Penelope's English Experiences.

Illustrated.

Polly Oliver's Problem. Illustrated.

The Story Hour. Illustrated.

Timothy's Quest. _Holiday Edition._ Illustrated by Oliver Herford.