rooms outside the chamber of the New York State Senate. It was not a
routine session. A bill was before it, the purpose of which was
virtually to dispossess some four or five hundred families of their
homes in the counties of Hamilton, Tupper and Racquette. The bill did
not say this. It cited the need of adequate transportation in that
part of the State and proposed that the U. & M. Railroad should be
granted the right of eminent domain over three thousand square miles
of the region, in order to help the development of the country.
The committee was composed of five members, three of the majority
party in the Senate and two of the minority. A political agent of the
railroad who drew a salary from Racquette County as a judge had just
finished presenting to the committee the reasons why the people of
that part of the State were unanimous in the wish that the bill should
become a law. He had drawn a pathetic picture of the condition of the
farmers, so long deprived of the benefits of a railroad. He had
almost wept as he told of the rich loads of produce left to rot up
there in the hills because the men who toiled to produce it had no
means of bringing it down to the starving thousands of the cities. The
scraggy rocks and thinly soiled farms of that region became in his
picture vast reservoirs of cheap food, only waiting to be tapped by
the beneficent railroad for the benefit of the world's poor.
When the judge had finished, one minority member of the committee
looked at his colleague, the other minority member, and winked. It was
a grave and respectful wink. It meant that the committee was not often
privileged to listen to quite such bare-faced effrontery. If the
hearing had been a secret one they would not have listened to it. But
the bill had already aroused a storm. So the leader of the majority
had given orders that the hearing should be public.
So far not a word had been said as to the fact which underlay the
motives of the bill. Iron had been found in workable quantities in
those three thousand square miles of hill country. Not a word had been
said about iron.
No one in the room had listened to the speech with any degree of
interest. It was intended entirely for the consumption of the outside
public. Even the reporters had sat listless and bored during its
delivery. They had been furnished with advance copies of it and had
already turned them in to their papers. But with the naming of the
next witness a stir of interest ran sharply around the room.
Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden rose from his place in the rear of the
room and walked briskly forward to the chair reserved. A tall, spare
figure of a man coming to his sixty years, his hair as white as the
snow of his hills, with a large, firm mouth and the nose of a Puritan
governor, he would have attracted attention under almost any
circumstances.
Nathan Gorham, the chairman of the committee, had received his orders
from the leader of the majority in the Senate that the bill should be
reported back favourably to that body before night. He had anticipated
no difficulty. The form of a public hearing had to be gone through
with. It was the most effective way of disarming the suspicions that
had been aroused as to the nature of the bill. The speech of the
Racquette County Judge was the usual thing at public hearings. The
chairman had expected that one or two self-advertising reformers of
the opposition would come before the committee with time-honoured,
stock diatribes against the rapacity and greed of railroads in general
and this one in particular. Then he and his two majority colleagues
would vote to report the bill favourably, while the two members of the
minority would vote to report adversely. This, the chairman said, was
about all a public hearing ever amounted to. He had not counted on
the coming of the Bishop of Alden.
"The committee would like to hear, sir," began the chairman, as the
Bishop took his place, "whom you represent in the matter of this
bill."
The reporters, scenting a welcome sensation in what had been a dull
session of a dull committee, sat with poised pencils while the Bishop
turned a look of quiet gravity upon the chairman and said:
"I represent Joseph Winthrop, a voter of Racquette County."
"I beg pardon, sir, of course. The committee quite understands that
you do not come here in the interest of any one. But the gentleman who
has just been before us spoke for the farmers who would be most
directly affected by the prosperity of the railroad, including those
of your county. Are we to understand that there is opposition in your
county to the proposed grant?"
"Your committee," said the Bishop, "cannot be ignorant that there is
the most stubborn opposition to this grant in all three counties. If
there had not been that opposition, there would have been no call for
the bill which you are now considering. If the railroad could have
gotten the options which it tried to get on those farms the grant
would have been given without question. Your committee knows this
better than I."
"But," returned the chairman, "we have been advised that the railroad
was not able to get those options because a boy up there in the
Beaver River country, who fancied that he had some grievance against
the railroad people, banded the people together to oppose the options
in unfair and unlawful ways."
The chairman paused an impressive moment.
"In fact," he resumed, "from what this committee has been able to
gather, it looks very much as though there were conspiracy in the
matter, against the U. & M. Railroad. It almost would seem that some
rival of the railroad in question had used the boy and his fancied
grievance to manufacture opposition. Conspiracy could not be proven,
but there was every appearance."
The Bishop smiled grimly as he dropped his challenge quietly at the
feet of the committee.
"The boy, Jeffrey Whiting," he said, "was guided by me. I directed his
movements from the beginning."
The whole room sat up and leaned forward as one man, alive to the fact
that a novel and stirring situation was being developed. Everybody had
understood that the Bishop had come to plead the cause of the
French-Canadian farmers of the hills.
They had supposed that he would speak only on what was a side issue of
the case. No one had expected that he would attack the main question
of the bill itself. And here he was openly proclaiming himself the
principal in that silent, stubborn fight that had been going on up in
the hills for six months!
The reporters doubled down to their work and wrote furiously. They
were trying to throw this unusual man upon a screen before their
readers. It was not easy. He was an unmistakable product of New
England, and what was more he had been one of the leaders of that
collection of striking men who made the Brook Farm "Experiment." He
had endeared himself to the old generation of Americans by his war
record as a chaplain. To some of the new generation he was known as
the Yankee Bishop. But in the hill country, from the Mohawk Valley to
the Canadian line and to Lake Champlain, he had one name, The Shepherd
of the North. From Old Forge to Ausable to North Creek men knew his
ways and felt the beating of the great heart of him behind the stern,
ascetic set of his countenance.
As much as they could of this the reporters were trying to put into
their notes while Nathan Gorham was recovering from his surprise. That
well-trained statesman saw that he had let himself into a trap. He had
been too zealous in announcing his impression that the opposition to
the U. & M. Railroad was the work of a jealous rival. The Bishop had
taken that ground from under him by a simple stroke of truth. He could
neither go forward with his charge nor could he retract it.
"Would you be so kind, then, as to tell this committee," he
temporised, "just why you wished to arouse this opposition to the
railroad?"
"There is not and has never been any opposition whatever to the
railroad," said the Bishop. "The bill before your committee has
nothing to do with the right of way of the railroad. That has already
been granted. Your bill proposes to confiscate, practically, from the
present owners a strip of valuable land forty miles wide by nearly
eighty miles long. That land is valuable because the experts of the
railroad know, and the people up there know, and, I think, this
committee knows that there is iron ore in these hills.
"I have said that I do not represent any one here," the Bishop went
on. "But there are four hundred families up there in our hills who
stand to suffer by this bill. They are a silent people. They have no
voice to reach the world. I have asked to speak before your committee
because only in this way can the case of my people reach the great,
final trial court of publicity before the whole State.
"They are a silent people, the people of the hills. You will have
heard that they are a stubborn people. They are a stubborn people, for
they cling to their rocky soil and to the hillside homes that their
hands have made just as do the hardy trees of the hills. You cannot
uproot them by the stroke of a pen.
"These people are my friends and my neighbours. Many of them were once
my comrades. I know what they think. I know what they feel. I would
beg your committee to consider very earnestly this question before
bringing to bear against these people the sovereign power of the
State. They love their State. Many of them have loved their country to
the peril of their lives. They live on the little farms that their
fathers literally hewed out of a resisting wilderness.
"Not through prejudice or ignorance are they opposing this development,
which will in the end be for the good of the whole region. They are
opposed to this bill before you because it would give a corporation
power to drive them from the homes they love, and that without fair
compensation.
"They are opposed to it because they are Americans. They know what it
has meant and what it still means to be Americans. And they know that
this bill is directly against everything that is American.
"They are ever ready to submit themselves to the sovereign will of the
State, but you will never convince them that this bill is the real
will of the State. They are fighting men and the sons of fighting men.
They have fought the course of the railroad in trying to get options
from them by coercion and trickery. They have been aroused. Their
homes, poor and wretched as they often are, mean more to them than any
law you can set on paper. They will fight this law, if you pass it. It
will set a ring of fire and murder about our peaceful hills.
"In the name of high justice, in the name of common honesty, in the
name--to come to lower levels--of political common sense, I tell you
this bill should never go back to the Senate.
"It is wrong, it is unjust, and it can only rebound upon those who are
found weak enough to let it pass here."
The Bishop paused, and the racing, jabbing pencils of the reporters
could be plainly heard in the hush of the room.
Nathan Gorham broke the pause with a hesitating question which he had
been wanting to put from the beginning.
"Perhaps the committee has been badly informed," he began to the
Bishop; "we understood that your people, sir, were mostly Canadian
immigrants and not usually owners of land."
"Is it necessary for me to repeat," said the Bishop, turning sharply,
"that I am here, Joseph Winthrop, speaking of and for my neighbours
and my friends? Does it matter to them or to this committee that I
wear the badge of a service that they do not understand? I do not come
before you as the Catholic bishop. Neither do I come as an owner of
property. I come because I think the cause of my friends will be
served by my coming.
"The facts I have laid before you, the warning I have given might as
well have been sent out direct through the press. But I have chosen to
come before you, with your permission, because these facts will get a
wider hearing and a more eager reading coming from this room.
"I do not seek to create sensation here. I have no doubt that some
of you are thinking that the place for a churchman to speak is in
his church. But I am willing to face that criticism. I am willing to
create sensation. I am willing that you should say that I have
gone far beyond the privilege of a witness invited to come before
your committee. I am willing, in fact, that you should put any
interpretation you like upon my use of my privilege here, only so
that my neighbours of the hills shall have their matter put squarely
and fully before all the people of the State.
"When this matter is once thoroughly understood by the people, then I
know that no branch of the lawmaking power will dare make itself
responsible for the passage of this bill."
The Bishop stood a moment, waiting for further questions. When he saw
that none were forthcoming, he thanked the committee and begged leave
to retire.
As the Bishop passed out of the room the chairman arose and declared
the public hearing closed. Witnesses, spectators and reporters
crowded out of the room and scattered through the corridors of the
Capitol. Four or five reporters bunched themselves about the elevator
shaft waiting for a car. One of them, a tow-haired boy of twenty,
summed up the matter with irreverent brevity.
"Well, it got a fine funeral, anyway," he said. "Not every bad bill
has a bishop at the obsequies."
"You can't tell," said the Associated Press man slowly; "they might
report it out in spite of all that."
"No use," said the youngster shortly. "The Senate wouldn't dare touch
it once this stuff is in the papers." And he jammed a wad of flimsy
down into his pocket.
* * * * *
Three weeks of a blistering August sun had withered the grasses of the
hills almost to a powder. The thin soil of the north country, where
the trees have been cut away, does not hold moisture; so that the heat
of the short, vicious summer goes down through the roots of the
vegetation to the rock beneath and heats it as a cooking stone.
Since June there had been no rain. The tumbling hill streams were
reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were
covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted
timber, showing everywhere the scars of the wasting rapacity of man,
stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle
to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide
itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen
away into the depths of the thick woods.
Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French
Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up
away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the
menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first,
ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had
cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what
they were leaving behind. They had taken only the prime, sound trees
that stood handiest to the roll-ways. They had left dead and dying
trees standing. Everywhere they had strewn loose heaps of brush and
trimmings. The farmers had come pushing into the hills in the wake of
the lumbermen and had cleared their pieces for corn and potatoes and
hay land. But around every piece of cleared land there was an
ever-encroaching ring of brush and undergrowth and fallen timber that
held a constant threat for the little home within the ring.
A summer without rain meant a season of grim and unrelenting
watchfulness. Men armed themselves and tramped through the woods on
unbidden sentry duty, to see that no campfires were made. Strangers
and outsiders who were likely to be careless were watched from the
moment they came into the hills until they were seen safely out of
them again. Where other children scouted for and fought imaginary
Indians, the children of our hills hunted and fought imaginary fires.
The forest fire was to them not a tradition or a bugaboo. It was an
enemy that lurked just outside the little clearing of the farm, out
there in the underbrush and fallen timber.
Ruth was waiting for Jeffrey Whiting. He had ridden up to French
Village for mail. For some weeks they had known that the railroad
would try to have its bill for eminent domain passed at the special
session of the Legislature. And they knew that the session would
probably come to a close this week.
If that bill became a law, then the resistance of the people of the
hills had been in vain: Jeffrey had merely led them into a bitter and
useless fight against a power with which they could not cope. They
would have to leave their homes, taking whatever a corrupted board of
condemnation would grant for them. It would be hard on all, but it
would fall upon Jeffrey with a crushing bitterness. He would have to
remember that he had had the chance to make his mother and himself
independently rich. He had thrown away that chance, and now if his
fight had failed he would have nothing to bring back to his mother
but his own miserable failure.
Ruth remembered that day in the Bishop's house in Alden when Jeffrey
had said proudly that his mother would be glad to follow him into
poverty. And she smiled now at her own outburst at that time. They had
both meant it, every word; but the ashes of failure are bitter. And
she had seen the iron of this fight biting into Jeffrey through all
the summer.
She, too, would lose a great deal if the railroad had succeeded. She
would not be able to go back to school, and would probably have to go
somewhere to get work of some kind, for the little that she would get
for her farm now would not keep her any time. But that was a little
matter, or at least it seemed little and vague beside the imminence of
Jeffrey's failure and what he would consider his disgrace. She did not
know how he would take it, for during the summer she had seen him in
vicious moods when he seemed capable of everything.
She saw the speck which he made against the horizon as he came over
Argyle Mountain three miles away and she saw that he was riding fast.
He was bringing good news!
It needed only the excited, happy touch of her hand to set Brom Bones
whirling up the road, for the big colt understood her ways and moods
and followed them better than he would have followed whip or rein of
another. Half-way, she pulled the big fellow down to a decorous canter
and gradually slowed down to a walk as Jeffrey came thundering down
upon them. He pulled up sharply and turned on his hind feet. The two
horses fell into step, as they knew they were expected to do and their
two riders gave them no more heed than if they had been wooden
horses.
"How did you know it was all right, Ruth?"
"I saw you coming down Argyle Mountain," Ruth laughed. "You looked as
though you were riding Victory down the top side of the earth. How did
it all come out?"
"Here's the paper," he said, handing her an Albany newspaper of the
day previous; "it tells the story right off. But I got a letter from
the Bishop, too," he added.
"Oh, did you?" she exclaimed, looking up from the headline--U. & M.
Grab Killed in Committee--which she had been feverishly trying to
translate into her own language. "Please let me hear. I'm never sure
what headlines mean till I go down to the fine print, and then it's
generally something else. I can understand what the Bishop says, I'm
sure."
"Well, it's only short," said Jeffrey, unfolding the letter. "He
leaves out all the part that he did himself."
"Of course," said Ruth simply. "He always does."
"He says:
"'You will see from the Albany papers, which will probably reach you
before this does, that the special session of the Legislature closed
to-night and that the railroad's bill was not reported to the Senate.
It had passed the Assembly, as you know. The bill aroused a measure of
just public anger through the newspapers and its authors evidently
thought it the part of wisdom not to risk a contest over it in the
open Senate. So there can be no legislative action in favour of the
railroad before December at the earliest, and I regard it as doubtful
that the matter will be brought up even then.'
"You see," said Jeffrey, "from this you'd never know that he was there
present at all. And it was just his speech before the committee that
aroused that public anger. Then he goes on:
"'But we must not make the mistake of presuming that the matter ends
here. You and your people are just where you were in the beginning.
Nothing has been lost, nothing gained. It is not in the nature of
things that a corporation which has spent an enormous amount of money
in constructing a line with the one purpose of getting to your lands
should now give up the idea of getting them by reason of a mere
legislative setback. They have not entered into this business in
any half-hearted manner. They are bound to carry it through
somehow--anyhow. We must realise that.
"'We need not speculate upon the soul or the conscience of a
corporation or the lack of those things. We know that this corporation
will have an answer to this defeat of its bill. We must watch for that
answer. What their future methods or their plans may be I think no man
can tell. Perhaps those plans are not yet even formed. But there will
be an answer. While rejoicing that a fear of sound public opinion has
been on your side, we must never forget that there will be an answer.
"'In this matter, young sir, I have gone beyond the limits which men
set for the proper activities of a priest of the church. I do not
apologise. I have done this, partly because your people are my own,
my friends and my comrades of old, partly because you yourself
came to me in a confidence which I do not forget, partly--and most,
perhaps--because where my people and their rights are in question I
have never greatly respected those limits which men set. I put
these things before you so that when the answer comes you will
remember that you engaged yourself in this business solely in
defence of the right. So it is not your personal fight and you must
try to keep from your mind and heart the bitterness of a quarrel.
The struggle is a larger thing than that and you must keep your heart
larger still and above it. I fear that you will sorely need to
remember this.
"'My sincerest regards to your family and to all my friends in the
hills, not forgetting your friend Ruth.' That's all," said Jeffrey,
folding the letter. "I wish he'd said more about how he managed the
thing."
"Isn't it enough to know that he did manage it, without bothering
about how? That is the way he does everything."
"I suppose I ought to be satisfied," said Jeffrey as he gathered up
his reins. "But I wonder what he means by that last part of the
letter. It sounds like a warning to me."
"It is a warning to you," said Ruth thoughtfully.
"Why, what does it mean? What does he think I'm likely to do?"
"Maybe he does not mean what you are likely to do exactly," said Ruth,
trying to choose her words wisely; "maybe he is thinking more of what
you are likely to feel. Maybe he is talking to your heart rather than
to your head or about your actions."
"Now I don't know what you mean, either," said Jeffrey a little
discontentedly.
"I know I oughtn't to try to tell you what the Bishop means, for I
don't know myself. But I've been worried and I'm sure your mother has
too," said Ruth reluctantly.
"But what is it?" said Jeffrey quickly. "What have I been doing?"
"I'm sure it isn't anything you've done, nor anything maybe that
you're likely to do. I don't know just what it is, or how to say it.
But, Jeffrey, you remember what you said that day in the Bishop's
house at Alden?"
"Yes, and I remember what you said, too."
"We both meant it," Ruth returned gravely, not attempting to evade any
of the meaning that he had thrown into his words. "And we both mean it
now, I'm sure. But there's a difference, Jeffrey, a difference with
you."
"I don't know it," he said a little shortly. "I'm still doing just the
thing I started out to do that day."
"Yes. But that day you started out to fight for the people. Now you
are fighting for yourself-- Oh, not for anything selfish! Not for
anything you want for yourself! I know that. But you have made the
fight your own. It is your own quarrel now. You are fighting because
you have come to hate the railroad people."
"Well, you wouldn't expect me to love them?"