CHAPTER X
Dick’s impression, as he made his first rounds of Sabinsport after his return, was, Why, here is a new town! What had come over her? He had never pictured any such realization of the war as he sensed at every turn. It seemed to him that it was the one occupation, the one interest of everybody; and it was an orderly, systematized interest. The town seemed not only to have mobilized, but to have trained herself. She was doing her work with a vim and a freshness that he had not thought possible. The women, for instance, the women who had held off, said the City is taking care of the camp; who, as a whole, had never gone beyond the knitting stage, had been marshaled into organized groups and were working with the steadiness of so many factory hands. Since his departure a Red Cross house had gone up, and there, from eight to five every day, regular detachments served under a direction which he found was almost military in its severity. And it was a democratic house. Thursday afternoon was the afternoon “out” of cooks and maids in Sabinsport, and many a one gave her three or four hours at the tables on an equal footing with the greatest ladies of High Town.
Nancy’s canteen, which had met so poor a response when suggested, could be counted on now, night or day. It was no unusual thing for 2000 tired boys to be served at fourA. M.with coffee and food at the headquarters by the track.
It was amazing the women that could be called on for this severe duty. There was a little manicurist at the Paradise—a saucy, competent, flirtatious person, that went into the canteen organization for night work. Three nights a week, from nine at night until six in the morning, she was ready for call, and again and again she would serve her full time, and, after two hours’ sleep, go back to her table, a little pale perhaps, but never any less skillful, any less flirtatious. And there were the greatest ladies of High Town that enlisted like the little manicurist for night work and did it as faithfully.
Dick found that not only the women were working but that the war spirit among them was hot, even fierce. He dropped in one afternoon to the Woman’s Club to hear the story that an Eastern journalist, lately returned from a trip along the front, had to tell. As he watched the audience, a large proportion of whom were knitting—for Sabinsport’s Woman’s Club had come to the point where it was stipulated, when bringing on a lecturer, that he should not object to knitting—he recalled the discussion he had had a couple of years before with Ralph.
Ralph had insisted loudly that it was nonsense to talk in America about war, that the women would not stand for it, that they would riot first. Dick had answered, “Ralph, that is something you read in a book. If you knew women and knew history, you would know that when the test comes, they not only will ‘stand for’ war, but they will be violent supporters of war.” Ralph had accused him of being out of touch with the modern world, of not knowing anything of the “New Woman.” This conversation ran through his mind now as the speaker told the story of the first gas attack by the Germans, of the deadly effect it had had on the unprepared English, and then remarked that the English now had a more deadly gas invention than anything that had come out of Germany. He was almost startled by the applause which rang through the room. Practically every woman took part in it; the knitters dropping their work to clap.
The speaker went on with stories of how our troops made their first attack. “Nineteen dead Germans,” he said, “to six dead Americans.” Again the room rang with long clapping and cries of, “Good boys! Good boys!” Not a tear, not a bowed head; but pride—fierce pride, and vengeance.
“I was right,” thought Dick. “Ralph read it in a book, not out of life.”
Again and again Dick noted profound changes in individuals in the three months in which he had been gone. None of them moved him so deeply or gave him so much joy as that in Mary Sabins, who was now regularly installed as a nurse’s aide in the hospital at camp. Her face wore the look of one who had struggled to a high mountain and from the top was looking into a new and glorious world.
Mary had been a very unhappy woman in the months since Young Tom had left her for France. It was not only the shock of his going, but it was the still greater shock that her husband had refused to use his authority at her request and forbid the boy’s going away. For the first time in their married life of some twenty-five years, a strain had come between them. Tom Sabins could not understand why Mary did not feel his pride in the boy’s courageous and adventurous spirit. She should not understand why he did not resent the invasion of their snug and comfortable world.
When the war came she was still further bewildered by the change that came over Tom. Every business and social occupation that had engrossed him, the pleasures to which he had been so devoted, he threw them aside as completely as the boy had thrown over college and home. It was Tom Sabins that had been asked to head the draft board of the community, and Mary had never seen him so engrossed or so interested in anything. “Why, why should he give his days to men of whom she had never heard? Why should he be so eager, so enthusiastic, so indefatigable, in this work?” Mary watched him with resentful eyes.
Dick had talked frequently with Nancy about their friend, and the two had tried their best to interest her in some form of camp work; but she had refused peremptorily to be enlisted. And here she was now, going regularly day by day to the hospitals.
“Tell me about Mary Sabins,” he asked Nancy, the first Monday afternoon after his return that he was able to go to the farm.
“You know, of course,” Nancy said, “that just after you left Young Tom was invalided home. He went into the Foreign Legion when our forces took over the ambulance service, and got a nasty wound in the cheek and shoulder almost at once. It was nothing dangerous, however, but it was very hard for Tom to make Mary believe this, and she raved at her inability to go to him. He got on famously and soon was allowed to come back. You never saw any one so exultant as Mary was when Tom first came. It seemed to her, I think, that her old world, at least part of it, was restored; but it was pitiful to see how soon she discovered that Young Tom’s notions of life were utterly changed, that the interests which had absorbed them in the old days had no meaning now; that his one thought was of the war, and his one hope was to return to it.
“I saw her get two or three staggering blows, utterly unconscious, of course, on the boy’s part. One night I was there, and he was talking about American girls, the nurses and canteen workers. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know women could be so wonderful. You haven’t any idea of it until you see them working over there. They are not afraid of anything. You cannot tire them out. Maybe they will drop, but they won’t give in. Afraid? Why, the Germans bombed the front line hospital I was in, just after I got mine, and those girls never turned a hair, never looked up, never hustled, just went about laughing and cheering us up. They killed two of them—the murderers! And there wasn’t a woman there that did not stick. It’s great. It’s great to know that women can be like that.’
“You should have seen Mary’s face. It was tragic, and Tom was so unconscious. Then, her second blow came when she knew that he was going back. You see, she hadn’t an idea but what this would mean that that was the end of it. I think she had some notion that he would not want to go back; that getting hurt would kill this strange, unfamiliar thing that possessed him. Mary is like so many of us American women. Certainly I used to be so—afraid somebody will get hurt—afraid of suffering. Why, I cannot see that you can know much about life unless you suffer, and see suffering. Mary could not understand it. When Young Tom really was all right, which was very soon, he went out and enlisted—enlisted in the Marines.
“Mary went all to pieces. Of course Tom stood by the boy. A week after he was gone, she came out here one afternoon. ‘Nancy Cowder,’ she said, ‘do you think I could be used at the camp?’
“‘Oh, Mary,’ I told her, ‘if you only would go to the camp, we need you so.’ She looked at me in such a curious way.—‘Need me? What for?’ ‘The boys need you,’ I said. ‘We cannot do for them the hundredth part of what we ought. Boys like Young Tom need you. You should be doing here, Mary,’ I said, ‘just what other American women will be doing for Young Tom.’
“‘I think I must try,’ she said. ‘I have discovered I have lost my husband and I have lost my son. I don’t understand what they are talking about. I don’t understand what they feel. They have no interest in me and no interest in what I do. I don’t know that I can ever get them back. But I must have something to do.’
“Well, I sent her into the city for a course as a nurse’s orderly. She made a great discovery there. And, oh, the things she has learned since she has been working in camp. You can see from her face that it’s a new Mary. And Tom—Tom is the happiest man in the world, though Mary, I think, doesn’t know it, yet. The clouds have not all cleared off her mountain top, but she is there. War is a dreadful thing, a hideous, wicked thing, but there are some of us that have discovered the greatness of life through it.”
A new attitude toward the conduct of the War had come in Sabinsport, too, Dick remarked. When he had left, the town had been alive with disheartening rumors of failure, graft, inefficiency. The meetings of the War Board were given over to them. Captain Billy, than whom nobody in all of Sabinsport was more desirous that the country should make a record for itself in the war, was doing his utmost to prevent that end by decrying loudly everything that was attempted. Mr. John Commons was having the time of his life. Never had he been able to reduce so many people for so long a time to despairing doubt of all human institutions as at present. He could scoff, and not be contradicted, at the absurdity of an untrained, democratic body raising a great army. He could sneer, without answer, at the notion of the United States—soiled as its hands were with stealing from the Red Man, from lynching the negro, from gobbling up innocent Panama—setting out on a crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.” Mr. John Commons was certainly having a wonderful time, when Dick went away.
But all this had changed. To his amazement, he found that criticism of the Government, any doubt of a war enterprise, any reluctance to accept at full face value any request of the Government, was met in Sabinsport with a fierce declaration that it was all German propaganda.
“What has happened?” he asked Reuben Cowder. “What turned the town in this direction? When I went away, the easiest thing in the world was to get a hearing for a criticism, sympathy for a sneer. What has done it?”
“Well,” said Cowder, “Sabinsport discovered that it was being ‘worked.’ You know I have always suspected that that was true. You remember how we talked, back in 1915 at the time of Labor’s National Peace Council, how I told you that no such organization could thrive in Sabinsport when there was plenty of work without outside feeding. And you know how for a year or so after that went to pieces, pro-German talk was not very popular. After we went into the War it revived. The town was alive with distrust, and I was sure, just as I was about Labor’s Peace Party, that there was somebody feeding it. You take the negroes; why, they almost came to the point of revolt here against the war. Nancy had a cook out at the farm that came home from one Sunday afternoon meeting to tell her that she ’wan’t goin’ to save food any more; that all the United States wanted it for was to make slaves of the negroes again, that if Germany came over here, she would keep them free.’ There was a regular campaign here against the Liberty Loan and thrift stamps. And when the women took their registration for service, the idea was spread around among all the more ignorant people that the women were being registered in order to be taken to France to cook and work for the soldiers.
“Now, things like that don’t start out of the air, and I set out to find out where it came from. I got a clever fellow here that I have had before when trouble was brewing in the wire mill, to sort of sound out things, you know. Well, he had not been here long before he came to me and said, ‘Mr. Cowder, Uncle Sam has told me to get off this job, wanted me to tell you that you need not worry, that they were looking after it.’ They must have been confounded smart, these Secret Service people, for I’ve never yet been able to find out who they were, except one, nor what they did. But this is what happened.
“Along the first of March, a fine looking chap came into my office one day, and asked to see me alone. As I shut the door, he showed me his badge—Secret Service. ‘Mr. Cowder,’ he said, ‘I want to notify you that about a half a dozen men in your munition plant, one of whom you have trusted greatly—Mr. Max Dalberg—will disappear from this town, day after to-morrow; or, if not, the next day. I would like to tell you the facts, but I am under orders to divulge nothing, even to you. I think you and your plant will be safer if you know nothing of it. We would like to have you make no comments, but carry on your work as if nothing had happened. That’s what the Government asks of you.’
“Well, Ingraham, you know how I felt about Max. I would have trusted him as soon as any man in this town, much further than I would Otto Littman. As a matter of fact, it has been Otto that I suspected all the time, as you know. But Otto is here. Moreover, the same young man that warned me about Max came back a week later and said to me that he thought that it would be an act of justice and humanity to support Otto Littman in the town, not to let suspicion drive him away. I cannot make head or tail of it, Ingraham. Only this I know, that Max did disappear, along with half a dozen of the best workmen we had; that Otto is still here. Moreover, the rumors, the criticisms that filled the air, have stopped. That fellow told me they would. He told me that it was out of my own factory that these things had been coming. The town somehow got wind that something had been going on, that the suspicion and criticisms which ran through the streets were spread by German agents, and to-day a criticism which is perfectly well founded has no chance at all. You cannot even joke about the conduct of the war without running the danger of arrest. Why, the funniest thing happened here the other day to John Commons. You know Katie Flaherty, of course—takes care of you, doesn’t she? Well, Katie overhead John Commons criticizing a report that the Government was going to forbid the use of starch in collars, make us all wear soft collars. ‘Ha, ha,’ Commons said, ‘I suppose they want the starch to stiffen up the backbone of the soldiers.’ Katie was so incensed that she promptly went to the Chief of Police and reported Commons. He was waited on, and it took some real explanation and expostulation on his part to keep out of jail. It tickled the town to death, and John has not been nearly so voluble since.
“Yes, there’s a great change come over our spirit, and I would give a good deal to know just what was done, what became of Max, what he was planning, and how they got him.”
What became of Max, what he had planned, how they got him, was known to only one person in Sabinsport. Offhand you would have said that that was the last person to keep a secret, for it was Katie Flaherty.
Since Mikey’s death, the real occupation of Katie Flaherty’s life had been hate of the race that she now considered her personal enemy. Dick had sometimes chided her for this bitterness. “God forgive us all, Mr. Dick,” she would say, “I have been saying we ought to love everybody. Take the Jews, now. See how they have gone into the war, how loyal they are to the United States. I tell the boys we ought not to lay it up against them any longer that they are Jews. But a German, Mr. Dick, that’s different. He won’t salute the flag. And look at the things they do—sinking the ships like they did. Think of all our grand, lovely young men drowned in the sea—the dirty Germans—sticking a ship in the ribs in the night. I can’t stand it to think of ’em dead. I’m that foolish about the boys, I can’t see one in the streets I don’t cry, old fool I am. I won’t never go to another parade, Mr. Dick. You’d been that ashamed of me if you’d seen me at camp when they came marching up the field, the thousands of ’em, the grandest boys you ever seen. I couldn’t see for cryin’ and it wasn’t still cryin’ I did. I did it out loud—but nobody laughed, only a strange man patted me on the back and a woman went white and said, ‘Stop it!’ fierce like, ‘Stop it!’ so I came home. I’ll never go to another parade.
“And to think the Germans have the heart to kill ’em—boys like ours. I’m fer drivin’ ’em out of the country. They’re all spies. There’s the butcher over on the South Side, Johann he calls himself. Think of that Johann in the United States—a regular old German, talkin’ about the ‘faterland’—can’t say it in English.”
“Come, now,” Dick said to her once. “Johann has been in this country for forty years.”
“What’s that, Mr. Dick? They’re all the same; you can’t make Americans out of ’em.”
She developed a suspicion of strangers that was almost a mania, and was forever watching for evidence of intrigue. One morning she came in to serve Dick’s coffee, with a big envelope in her hand. She was handling it gingerly as if it was something that might explode. With great solemnity she opened it. “Look here, Mr. Dick. It’s a spy I found. I’m sure of it.” Out of her envelope, she pulled a big red valentine, and dramatically turned the back to him. On it was written in bold black letters the words, “Don’t buy a Liberty Bond. The Kaiser says so.”
“Why, Katie,” Dick said, “that’s no spy’s work, that’s a joke.” But it took much explanation for Katie to see it. “Don’t buy a bond”—that to her was treason. “The Kaiser says so,” more treason. Finally she gave in to Dick’s persuasion, and she went off saying, “It’s a fool I am,” but Dick always had a feeling that he had not quite convinced her.
Katie’s watchfulness and her self-imposed task of bringing every suspicious person to justice was known to everybody in Sabinsport. It had long been known particularly well to the strange young man who had appeared in Reuben Cowder’s office early in March and warned him of approaching changes in the force at his munition factory. Other things concerning Katie were known to this same young man, and one of them was that she had a room to rent on her first floor.
The floor opening onto the upper level, ever since Mikey went away, had been rented by Mr. Max Dalberg. Downstairs, opening onto the lower level by a little side door, was an extra room which Katie had said recently for the first time to herself she would rent if she had a chance. She had not put out a shingle but she had told her neighbors, so it was not surprising that one morning when she was busy in the rectory that there should have been a knock at the door, a call for Mrs. Flaherty, an inquiry about a room to rent, and a bargain promptly made.
Katie took to the applicant—a jolly, clean, keen-eyed American boy, older than Mikey but with something about him that suggested Mikey. Himself a grand fighter, too, Katie had said to herself. Her new tenant was John Barker, by name.
“I’m only at home through the daytime, Mrs. Flaherty,” he said. “I’m in the mines, an engineer, running night shifts. I won’t be in before eight or half-past in the morning for I get my breakfast over there. I want a quiet place to sleep through the day, and I will be off by five in the afternoon. If you want any references I can give them, and here’s a week’s rent in advance.”
And Katie, to whom paper references meant little, and the look in a man’s eye everything, had said, “It’s all right, Mr. Barker, I will have the room ready to-night and you can come in in the morning. You will find the key with Mary O’Sullivan next door.”
And Katie that night, when she went home, made the little room clean and tidy, put the key to the outside door with Mary O’Sullivan, describing her new tenant with enthusiasm.
He proved a good tenant, none better. He came as regularly as the morning and went as regularly. His presence in the house was quite unknown to the gentleman who occupied the top floor, and who had long congratulated himself on his luck in having a lodging over which he had such absolute control. As a matter of fact there was only one entrance to his upper floor, save that on the street. A rude little staircase ran up from the kitchen into a tiny square hall, and a door opened into the room which had been Mikey’s. It was by this door that every afternoon, when Katie came home from Dick’s, she went upstairs to make the rooms. Max’s habits were very regular—exemplary person that he was. He was at the munition works at seven and never left until five. His doors were carefully locked behind him. He had no need to concern himself about anything in Katie Flaherty’s house.
But in this secure dwelling, strange things were going on in those hours when Max was at his laboratory and Katie at the rectory. Every morning, promptly at 8:30, a quiet, tired looking young engineer unlocked the side door of Katie Flaherty’s house, and drew his curtains.
But once the curtains were drawn, an extraordinary transformation took place. The fatigued face became relaxed, the heavy, dirty boots were replaced by the softest of slippers; two very dangerous looking weapons were slipped into his belt; and in the big pockets of his soft sack coat something that looked like a pair of handcuffs. And then, with keys in hand, he quietly slipped up the back stairs, opened this door and began an investigation of the belongings of Mr. Max Dalberg, Reuben Cowder’s “wonder of the laboratory.”
And the things that he found! You could tell that by the glint of victory in his eye, by the moments when he would straighten himself and address the air in a whisper, “Could you beat it?” When he would noiselessly tap his thigh and say, “It’s the completest thing I ever heard of.” The young man was making out a pretty case in Max’s secure chamber, little by little, from the papers and photographs which he examined with such scrupulous care day by day, always leaving them exactly as he found them, taking infinite pains not to leave behind him any trace which might make Max suspicious that his privacy had been invaded, and he gathered the proofs of as fine a piece of destructiveness as any planned within the borders of the United States by the band of plotters that Germany had sent out.
What young Mr. Barker found was simply this—a carefully laid scheme, every detail worked out with German efficiency, to blow up simultaneously every munition plant in that great district around Sabinsport, where now literally millions of dollars’ worth of shells and shrapnel and wires and guns were being made for the Allies.
Max had been very ambitious. He had not been simply content with doing away with his own plant. He had placed in every one of the neighboring towns agents that he could depend upon. By months of the most careful plotting and arrangement, he had coached them in their part. Oh, it was to be a dramatic piece of frightfulness. The very day was fixed. Two weeks from the time that young Mr. Barker finished photographing the last piece, at ten o’clock at night, there was to be one grand explosion, running along the river for miles, back into the hills north and south—a piece of destruction that would not only rip every wheel apart but shake the valley, tumble down its buildings, set fire upon fire, drive men and women from their homes, murder, destroy. It was the monstrous German imagination for destruction at its highest—a great conception. Again and again young Mr. Barker had to stop in wondering admiration at the perfection of the scheme. “God!” he said, “and to think we have got him!”
But now the time had come when he had to have help—the help of Katie Flaherty. He knew he could count on her. He realized nothing would ever quiet the pain in Katie’s heart but to get her German, to give blow for blow. And so one day, after records and photographs were complete, after they had been spread before certain high authorities in a near-by city, Katie had another call from her roomer. It was the first time she had seen him in weeks.
“And what is it, Mr. Barker? Is something going wrong? Did I forget your towels?” she had greeted him.
“Not at all, Mrs. Flaherty,” he said cheerfully. “You never forget anything. You are the best landlady I ever had. But there’s something on my mind, and I want your help. May I have a talk with you?”
And, seated in the kitchen of the rectory, he laid before her the outline of what he had discovered. He showed her the big silver badge that he wore beneath his coat, and told her what he wanted. Briefly, it was her coöperation in arresting Max. She had listened, amazed, unbelieving, and then, as the truth dawned upon her, horrified. And when her help was asked, her whole bitter hatred blazed up in a passion of desire. Here was her chance! She’d get her German. But how were they going to do it?
“Do you ever go up to his door of an evening?” he asked her.
“Every night at nine o’clock, I rap and give him his pitcher of fresh water, and sometimes, when I have it, a bit of fruit. He has always been such a quiet, gentle soul, playing his piano and singing his songs—I can’t believe it’s true.”
“It’s true, Mrs. Flaherty,” said young Mr. Barker.
“What is it you want?”
“Simply this. I will not leave as usual to-morrow afternoon. I will be in my room. At nine o’clock, there will be a knock at your door, and you will let in two men, with a hearty, ‘How do you do, I am glad to see you.’ Then I will ask you, Mrs. Flaherty, to go ahead of us up to the door, knock and give Mr. Max his pitcher of water. And then, Mrs. Flaherty, we will take care of him. Can you put it through?”
She looked him in the eye, and young Mr. Barker had not the shadow of a doubt but that he could count on her.
It is doubtful if Mrs. Flaherty could have ever told you what she did in the thirty-three or thirty-four hours between the time that Mr. Barker closed the door of the rectory kitchen and the hour when she admitted two stalwart strangers, with an Irish laugh and greeting that, if the windows above had been open, could certainly have been heard.
The windows were not open. If they had been, Katie might have heard an angry altercation going on. When she and the three men, fifteen minutes later, slipped up the stairs as noiselessly as so many cats, they heard it; and Katie knew the voice that was raised to meet the lower, cruel tones of Max. It was Otto Littman’s.
How well she knew it! For thirty years Katie had given her services at every dinner that the older Mrs. Littman gave. She had helped at every birthday party. She had known Otto from the time he was put in his mother’s arms. And her heart almost stood still. The hand that held the tray almost trembled as she realized that this was Otto—the son of her good friends, the only Germans in all Sabinsport she had never suspected—who was talking. She did not know what he said, but young Mr. Barker knew. He knew from what he heard that Otto had gotten some inkling of the horror devised, that he was protesting, threatening, declaring that whatever it cost him, even if it were his life, he would reveal the horrible thing. Either Max must call it off, or he, Otto, would stop it. And the even, calm tones of Max had said, “Too late, Otto. It’s you that will be silenced, not—”
At that moment young Mr. Barker gave a nod to Katie, who, knocking loudly, called out in the most natural and cheerful of tones—so natural and cheerful that he said to himself, “Isn’t she a wonder?”—“Here’s your water, Mr. Dalberg, and an apple.”
And Max Dalberg, intent only on keeping up an appearance, opened his door, and, as she stretched out her tray, there appeared in his face over her shoulders the muzzles of two vicious looking guns. At the same instant the door was thrown open and two powerful individuals had him by the arms, and cuffs on his hands and cuffs on his feet.
It had all been done so quickly and so quietly that neither Max nor Otto had uttered a sound. Nor did any one for a moment. Katie slipped down stairs. Young Mr. Barker in his level voice said, “Mr. Littman, I have heard your conversation, so have these gentlemen. We all understand German. It lets you out. You may go.”
Otto, looking him in the eye, said, “I am willing to take my punishment. You will find me at home when you want me. I have some letters which may help you; they are all at your disposal.”
The exit of Mr. Max Dalberg from Sabinsport was very quiet. An automobile drove up to his door on the upper level, as it often did in the evening, and three gentlemen came out of the house. If there had been anybody to watch, they would have noticed that the one in the middle was being supported. They might have thought him ill. He was helped into the car, and thus departed from Sabinsport the “wonder of the laboratory” of the munition plant. And thus ended his magnificent dream of frightfulness, for at the same hour that he was being quietly conveyed in a comfortable car out of Sabinsport, various other gentlemen in various other towns belonging to this grandiloquent scheme were undergoing the same experience.
Katie slipped back to her kitchen, and her face was wonderful to see. It was the face of the righteous warrior with his enemy’s head in his hands. It was the look that all the Celtic Flahertys and O’Flahertys from the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, through the days of the Cæsars, through all of the centuries of England’s injustice to Ireland, had worn. It was the greatest moment of Katie Flaherty’s life.
There was only one fly in her ointment—she could not talk about it. She could not tell Mary O’Sullivan or Mr. Dick. The hardest thing that could ever come to her was the seal upon her lips. It was not that Katie wanted to talk about her part in this thing, that had nothing to do with it. But it was to tell of the battle, to tell of the defeated enemy; it was to tell of the revenge! It was a wonderful story, and all her Irish imagination cried out to depict it to her neighbors. But she had given her promise to young Mr. Barker, and, clever man that he was, he had put a flea in her bonnet which he knew would ensure absolutely closed lips. “You will not, Mrs. Flaherty, give one hint of what has happened. Your roomer upstairs is not the only German connected with this business. The capture of others depends upon absolute secrecy about what has happened to Mr. Dalberg.”
So Katie, in this cruel trial of silence, was sustained by the hope that she might get another German scalp.
This was the reason that, when Dick came home, no hint of what had happened was given him, though there were mornings when Katie Flaherty would gladly have given her good right arm to have been able to have opened her lips and pictured the whole magnificent scene.
Now, it is not to be supposed that interested and heartened as the Rev. Richard Ingraham really was in all these changes that had come over Sabinsport, that they either satisfied his heart or filled his mind. Night and day, one thought absorbed him, stronger than all others, one feeling mounted higher and higher. He thought he had put behind in the weeks of rest in the South—his love for Nancy Cowder. He thought he had had it out with himself. He believed he had made his renunciation, that he could come back, work with her in camp and town, go out as usual to the farm on Monday afternoons, meet her easily and naturally everywhere, even see outwardly unmoved the day come which he believed thoroughly would come, when she would marry Otto Littman. And, though it is improbable that he could have gone through the ordeal with anything like the control and certainty that he had persuaded himself was possible, yet such is my confidence in the man that I believe he would have put it through if, when he returned, he had not divined, rather than learned, that there had been a great change in the relations of Otto and Nancy.
It was not a change, so far as he could judge, from which he had a right to draw hope. He told himself again and again that, on the contrary, the change probably only meant that later, when the war was over perhaps, when suspicion of Otto had passed and Nancy was released from her labors in the camp, that again they would seek each other; yet the fact that at this moment they were not seeking each other, that so far as he could make out, they were not seeing each other, gave Dick an unreasoning encouragement. In spite of himself, his dreams came back. In spite of himself he saw more and more of Nancy Cowder.
What had happened with Otto, he could not make out. Otto still remained in town. It was certain that Reuben Cowder, as well as other leading men who once had shunned him, were taking pains to support him. It was evident that a great burden had been raised from Rupert Littman’s heart. Never had he been so affectionate, so proud of Otto as now. That is, at the very head of Sabinsport business, where suspicion of Otto had first begun, there had been a great change. These men, if you asked them, would tell you that they knew it to be a fact, from the very highest authority, that Otto Littman had rendered the Secret Service of the United States a tremendous service; they knew it to be a fact that he had run the danger of losing his own life in order to save the lives of others. That was as far as they would go—as a matter of fact, that was as far as they could go. But the authority on which these facts were stated was so unimpeachable that there was not a man of them that doubted, and there was not a man of them that was not doing his best for Otto.
But this had not won him Nancy Cowder, Dick found. A change had come over the girl. She was much quieter. But that might be because of her continuous work at the camp; work which she never left, which, whatever the effort and the strain called for, she always gave. Reuben Cowder was anxious about his daughter, with good reason, and one of his first requests of Dick on his return was to try to bring her to her senses.
And yet Dick in his foolish heart argued that it was not the work at all, that her pallor came from pain over a break with Otto; and though many a night he had wild fancies that this was not so, he always told himself in the morning that he was wrong, that it was only a matter of time when the breech between them would be healed, that it was his business to keep away from her.
And so, through weeks of labor, Nancy and Dick steadily went their ways, each unconscious of what was in the heart of the other, each valiantly resolved that they would make no sign that would hurt the other, and yet daily each growing closer to the other.