Chapter 6

Suddenly she found herself upon her knees in the soft grass, and the hot, angry tears of desperation and rage at herself were softened. Her heart was lighted up with the glow of dawn and sang its prayer to God; a thrilling, lifting little prayer of confidence and wonder. The words that the night before would not form themselves for her now sprang up ready in her soul--the words of all the children of earth, to Our Father Who Art in Heaven--paused an instant to bless her lips, then sped away to God in His Heaven. Fear was gone, and doubt, and anxiety. She would save Jeffrey, and she would save the poor, befooled people from ruin. God had told her so, as He walked abroad in the _Glow_ of _Dawn_.

Two long hours more she waited, but now with patience and a sure confidence. Then Rafe Gadbeau came out of the hut and strode down the path to his pony.

Ruth rose stiff and wet from the ground and ran to the door, and called to Jeffrey. The only answer was a moan. The door was locked with a great iron clasp and staple joined by a heavy padlock. She reached for the nearest stone and attacked the lock frantically. She beat it out of all semblance to a lock, but still it defied her. There was no window in the hut. She had to come back again to the lock. Her hands, softened by the months in the convent, left bloody marks on the tough brass of the lock. In the end it gave, and she threw herself against the door.

Jeffrey was lying trussed, face down, on a bunk beside the furnace where they boiled the sugar sap. His arms were stretched out and tied together down under the narrow bunk. She saw that his left arm was broken. For an instant the girl's heart leaped back to the rage of the night when she had almost prayed for her rifle. But pity swallowed up every other feeling as she cut the cords from his hands and loosened the rope that they had bound in between his teeth.

"Don't talk, Jeff," she commanded. "I can see just what happened. Lie easy and get your strength. I've got to take you to French Village at once."

She ran out to bring water. When she returned he was sitting dizzily on the edge of the bunk. While she bathed his head with the water and gave him a little to drink, she talked to him and crooned over him as she would over a baby for she saw that he was shaken and half delirious with pain.

Brom Bones was standing munching twigs where she had left him. He had never before been asked to carry double and he did not like it. But the girl pleaded so pitifully and so gently into his silky black ear that he finally gave in.

When they were mounted, she fastened the white collar of her jacket into a sling for the boy's broken arm, and with a prayer to the heathen Brom Bones to go tenderly they were off down the trail.

When they were half way down the trail Jeffrey spoke suddenly:

"Say, Ruth, what's the use trying to save these people? Let's sell out while we can and take mother and go away."

"Why, Jeff, dear," she said lightly, "this fight hasn't begun yet. Wait till we get to French Village. You'll say something different. You'll say just what you said to the Shepherd of the North; remember?"

Jeffrey said no more. The girl's heart was weak with the pain she knew he was bearing, but she knew that they must go through with this.

All French Village and the farmers of Little Tupper country were gathered in front of Arsene Lacomb's store. Rafe Gadbeau was standing on the steps haranguing them. He had stayed with his prisoner as he thought up to the last possible moment, so he stammered in his speech when he saw a big black horse come tearing down the street carrying a girl and a white-faced, black-headed boy behind her. Rogers, the railroad lawyer beside him, said:

"Go on, man. What's the matter with you?"

The girl drove the horse right in through the crowd until Jeffrey Whiting faced Rogers. Then Jeffrey, gritting his teeth on his pain, took up his fight again.

"Rogers," he shouted, "you did this. You got Rafe Gadbeau and the others to knock me on the head and put me out of the way, so that you could spread your lies about me. And you'd have won out, too, if it hadn't been for this brave girl here.

"Now, Rogers, you liar," he shouted louder, "I dare you, dare you, to tell these people here that I or any of our people have sold you a foot of land. I dare you!"

Rogers would have argued, but Rafe Gadbeau pulled him away. Gadbeau knew that crowd. They were a crowd of Frenchmen, volatile and full of potential fury. They were already cheering the brave girl. In a few minutes they would be hunting the life of the man who had lied to them and nearly ruined them.

A hundred hands reached up to lift Ruth from the saddle, but she waved them away and pointed to Jeffrey's broken arm. They helped him down and half carried him into Doctor Napoleon Goodenough's little office.

Ruth saw that her business was finished. She wheeled Brom Bones toward home, and gave him his head.

For three glorious miles they fairly flew through the pearly morning air along the hard mountain road, and the girl never pulled a line. Breakfastless and weary in body, her heart sang the song that it had learned in the Glow of Dawn.

IV

THE ANSWER

The Committee on Franchises was in session in one of the committee 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!