Scene: California. Time: 1898-1901

"Fools and fanatics!"

Colonel Worth crumpled the morning paper with a gesture of rage and walked to the window.

Elena followed softly and laid her hand on his arm.

"What is it, Guardie? I thought you were supremely happy this morning over the news that Dewey has smashed the Spanish fleet?"

"And so I am, little girl," was the gentle reply, "or was until my eye fell on this call of the Socialists for a meeting to-night to denounce the war—denounce the men who are dying for the flag. Read their summons."

He opened the crumpled sheet and pointed to its head lines:

"Down with the Stars and Stripes—up with the Red Flag of Revolution—the symbol of universal human brotherhood! Come and bring your friends. A big surprise for all!" The Colonel's jaws snapped suddenly.

[4]"I'd like to give them the surprise they need to-night."

"What?" Elena asked.

"A serenade."

"A serenade?"

"Yes, with Mauser rifles and Gatling guns. I'd mow them down as I would a herd of wild beasts loose in the streets of San Francisco."

"Merely for a difference of opinion, Governor?" lazily broke in a voice from the depths of a heavy armchair.

"If you want to put it so, Norman, yes. Opinions, my boy, are the essence of life—they may lead to heaven or hell. Opinions make cowards or heroes, patriots or traitors, criminals or saints."

"But you believe in free speech?" persisted the boy.

"Yes. And that's more than any Socialist can say. I don't deny their right to speak their message. What I can't understand is how the people who have been hounded from the tyrant-ridden countries of the old world and found shelter and protection beneath our flag should turn thus to curse the hand that shields them."

"But if they propose to give you a better flag, Governor?" drawled the lazy voice. "Why not consider?"

"Look, Elena! Did the sun ever shine on [5]anything more beautiful? See it fluttering from a thousand house-tops—the proud emblem of human freedom and human progress! Dewey has lifted it this morning on the foulest slave-pen of the Orient—the flag that has never met defeat. The one big faith in me is the belief that Almighty God inspired our fathers to build this Republic—the noblest dream yet conceived by the mind of man. Dewey has sunk a tyrant fleet and conquered an empire of slaves without the loss of a single man. The God of our fathers was with him. We have a message for the swarming millions of the East——"

"Pardon the interruption, Governor, but I must hold the mirror up to nature just a moment—your portrait sketched by the poet-laureate of the English-speaking world. He speaks of the American:

The Colonel smiled.

"How do you like the picture?"

[6]"Not bad for an Englishman, Norman. You know we licked England twice——"

"And we kin do it again, b' gosh, can't we?" blustered the younger man with mock heroics.

"You can bet we can, my son!" continued the Colonel, quietly. "The roar of Dewey's guns are echoing round the world this morning. The lesson will not be lost. You will observe that even your English poet foresees at last our salvation.

"Even in spite of the Socialists?" queried the boy, with a grin.

"In spite of every foe—even those within our own household. War is the searchlight of history, the great revealer of national life, of hidden strength and unexpected weakness. I saw it in the Civil conflict—I've seen it in this little struggle——"

"Then you do acknowledge it's not the greatest struggle in history—that's something to be thankful for in these days of patriotism," exclaimed Norman, rising and stretching himself before the open fire while he winked mischievously at Elena.

"It's big enough, my boy, to show us the truth [7]about our nation. Our old problems are no longer real. The Union our fathers dreamed has come at last. We are one people—one out of many—and we can whip Spain before breakfast——"

"With one hand tied behind our back!" laughed the boy.

"Yes, and blindfolded. It will be easy. But the next serious job will be to bury a half million deluded fools in this country who call themselves Socialists."

The Colonel paused and a look of foreboding clouded his face as he gazed from the window of his house on Nob Hill over the city of San Francisco, which he loved with a devotion second only to his passionate enthusiasm for the Union.

Elena sat watching him in silent sympathy. He was the one perfect man of her life dreams, the biggest, strongest, tenderest soul she had ever known. Since the day she crept into his arms a lonely little orphan ten years old she had worshipped him as father, mother, guardian, lover, friend—all in one. She had accepted Norman's love and promised to be his wife more to please his father than from any overwhelming passion for the handsome, lazy young athlete. It had come about as a matter of course because Colonel Worth wished it.

[8]The Colonel turned from the window, and his eyes rested on Elena's upturned face.

"It will be bloody work—but we've got to do it——"

Elena sprang to her feet with a start and a laugh.

"Do what, Guardie? I forgot what you were talking about."

"Then don't worry your pretty head about it, dear. It's a job we men will look after in due time."

He stooped and kissed her forehead. "By-by until to-night—I'll drop down to the club and hear the latest from the front."

With the firm, swinging stride of a man who lives in the open the Colonel passed through the door of the library.

"Norman, I can't realize that you two are father and son—he looks more like your brother."

"At least my older brother——"

"Yes, of course, but you would never take him for a man of forty-eight. I like the touch of gray in his hair. It means dignity, strength, experience. I've always hated sap-headed youngsters."

"Say, Elena, for heaven's sake, who are you in love with anyhow—with me or the Governor?"

A smile flickered around the corners of the girl's eyes and mouth before she slowly answered:

"I sometimes think I really love you both, [9]Norman—but there are times when I have doubts about you."

"Thanks. I suppose I must be duly grateful for small favours, or else resign myself to call you 'Mother.'"

"Would such a fate be intolerable?"

Elena drew her magnificent figure to its full height and looked into the young athlete's face with laughing audacity.

"By George, Elena, if I'm honest with you, I'd have to say no. You are tall, stately, dignified, beautiful from the crown of your black hair to the tip of your dainty toe—the most stunning-looking woman I ever saw. I never think of you as a girl just out of school. You always remind me of a glorious royal figure in some old romance of the Middle Ages——"

"Now I'm sure I love you, Norman—for the moment at least."

"Then promise to go with me on a lark to-night," he suddenly cried.

"A lark?"

Elena's gray-blue eyes danced beneath their black lashes.

"Yes, a real lark, daring, adventurous, dangerous, audacious."

"What is it—what is it? Tell me quick."

[10]The girl seized Norman's arm with eager, childish glee.

"Let's go to that Socialist meeting and beard the lion in his den."

Elena drew back.

"No. Guardie will be furious!"

"Ah, who's afraid? Guardie be hanged!"

"Go by yourself."

"No, you've got to go with me."

"I won't do it. You just want to worry your father and then hide behind my skirts."

"You can see yourself that's the easiest way to manage it. If he has a fit, I can just say that your curiosity was excited and I had to go with you."

"But it's not excited."

"For the purposes of the lark I tell you that it is excited. There's too much patriotism in the air. It's giving me nervous prostration. I want something to brace me up. I think those fellows can give me some good points to tease the Governor with."

"Tease the Governor! You flatter yourself, Norman. He doesn't pay any more attention to your talk than he would to the bark of a six weeks' old puppy."

"That's what riles me. The Governor's so cocksure of himself. I don't know how to answer [11]him, but I know he's wrong. The fury with which he hates the Socialists rouses my curiosity. I've always found that the good things in life are forbidden. All respectable people are positively forbidden to attend a Socialist—traitors'—meeting. For that reason let's go."

"No."

"Ah, come on. Don't be a chump. Be a sport!"

"I'd like the lark, but I won't hurt Guardie's feelings; so that's the end of it."

"Going to be a surprise, they say."

"What kind of a surprise?"

"Going to spring a big sensation."

Elena's eyes began to dance again.

"The woman called the Scarlet Nun is going to speak, and Herman Wolf, the famous 'blond beast' of Socialism, will preside. They are mates—affinities."

"Married?"

"God knows. A hundred weird stories about them circulate in the under-world."

"I won't go! Don't you say another word!" Elena snapped.

Norman was silent.

"Are you sure it would be perfectly safe, Norman?" the girl softly asked.

[12]"Perfectly. I know every inch of that quarter of the city—went there a hundred times the year I was a reporter."

"I won't go!"

"It's the wickedest street in town. They say it's the worst block in America."

"I don't want to see it." Elena laughed.

"And the hall is a famous red-light dancing dive in the heart of Hell's Half Acre."

"Hush! Hush! I tell you I won't—I won't go! But—but if I do—you promise to hold my hand every minute, Norman?"

"And keep my arm around your waist, if you like."

Elena's cheeks flushed and her voice quivered with excitement as she paused in the doorway.

"I'll be ready in twenty minutes after dinner."

"Bully for my chum! I'll tell the Governor we've gone for a stroll."

As the shadows slowly fell over the city, Norman led Elena down the marble steps of his father's palatial home and paused for a moment on the edge of the hill on which were perched the seats of the mighty. Elena fumbled with a new glove.

"Are you ready to descend with me to the depths, my princess in disguise?" he gaily asked.

[13]"Did you ever know me to flunk when I gave my word?"

"No, you're a brick, Elena."

Norman seized her arm and strode down the steep hillside with sure, firm step, the girl accompanying his every movement with responsive joy.

"You're awfully wicked to get me into a scrape of this kind, Norman," she cried, with bantering laughter. "You know I was dying to go slumming, and Guardie wouldn't let me. It's awfully mean of you to take advantage of me like this."

He stopped suddenly and looked gravely into her flushed face.

"Let's go back, then."

"No! I won't."

Norman broke into a laugh. "Then away with vain regrets! And remember the fate of Lot's wife."

Elena pressed his hand close to her side and whispered:

"You are with me. The big handsome captain of last year's football team. Very young and very vain and very foolish and very lazy—but I do think you'd stand by me in a scrap, Norman. Wouldn't you?"

"Well, I rather think!" was the deep answer, half whispered, as they suddenly turned [14]a corner and plunged into the red-light district. His strong hand gripped her wrist with unusual tenderness.

"So who's afraid?" she cried, looking up into his face just as a drunken blear-eyed woman staggered through an open door and lurched against her.

A low scream of terror came from Elena as she sprang back, and the woman's head struck the pavement with a dull whack. Norman bent over her and started to lift the heavy figure, when her fist suddenly shot into his face.

"Go ter hell—I can take care o' myself!"

"Evidently," he laughed.

Elena's hand suddenly gripped his.

"Let's go back, Norman."

"Nonsense—who's afraid?"

"I am. I don't mind saying it. This is more than I bargained for."

The woman scrambled to her feet and limped back into the doorway.

Elena shivered. "I didn't know such women lived on this earth."

"To say nothing of living but a stone's throw from your own door," he continued.

"Let's go back," she pleaded.

"No. A thing like this is merely one more reason why we should keep on. This only [15]shows that the world we live in isn't quite perfect, as the Governor seems to think. These Socialists may be right after all. Now that we've started let's hear their side of it. Come on! Don't be a quitter!"

Norman seized her arm and hurried through the swiftly moving throng of the under-world—gambling touts, thieves, cut-throats, pick-pockets, opium fiends, drunkards, thugs, carousing miners, and sailors—but above all, everywhere, omnipresent, the abandoned woman—painted, bedizened, lurching through the streets, hanging in doorways, clinging to men on the sidewalks, beckoning from windows, singing vulgar songs on crude platforms among throngs of half-drunken men, whirling past doors and windows in dance-halls, their cracked voices shrill and rasping above the din of cheap music.

Elena stopped suddenly and clung heavily to Norman's arm.

"Please, Norman, let's go back. I can't endure this."

"And you're my chum that never flunked when she gave her word?" he asked with scorn. "We are only a few feet from the hall now."

"Where is it?"

"Right there in the middle of the block [16]where you see that sign with the blazing red torch."

"Come on, then," Elena said, with a shudder.

They walked quickly through the long, dimly lighted passage to the entrance of the hall. It was densely packed with a crowd of five hundred. Elena closed her eyes and allowed Norman to lead her through the mob that blocked the space inside the door. At the entrance to the centre aisle he encountered an usher who stared with bulging eyes at his towering figure. Norman leaned close and whispered:

"My boy, can you possibly get us two seats?"

"Can I git de captain er de football team two seats? Well, des watch me!"

The boy darted up the aisle, dived under the platform, drew out two folding-chairs, placed them in the aisle on the front row, darted back, and bowed with grave courtesy.

"Dis way, sir!"

Norman followed with Elena clinging timidly and blindly to his arm. In a moment they were seated. He offered the boy a dollar.

The youngster bowed again.

"De honour is all mine, sir. But you can give it to the Cause when they pass the box."

Norman turned to Elena. "Well, doesn't that [17]jar you? A sixteen-year-old boy declines a tip, and says give it to the Cause!"

The boy darted up the steps of the platform and whispered to the chairman:

"Git on to his curves! Dat's de captain o' de football—de bloke dat's worth millions, an' don't give a doggone!"

A woman dressed in deep red who sat beside the chairman leaned close and asked with quiet intensity:

"You mean young Worth, the millionaire of Nob Hill?"

"Bet yer life! Dat's him!"

The woman in red whispered to the chairman, who nodded, while his keen gray eyes flashed a ray of light from his heavy brows as he turned toward Norman.

The woman wheeled suddenly in her chair, and with her back to the audience bent over a girl who was evidently hiding behind her.

"Outdo yourself to-night, Barbara. Young Norman Worth, the son of our multi-millionaire nabob, is sitting in the aisle just in front of you. Win him for the Cause and I'll give you the half of our kingdom."

"How can I know him?" the girl asked excitedly.

"He's not ten feet from the platform in the [18]centre aisle—front row—clean shaven—a young giant of twenty-three—the handsomest man in the house. Put your soul and your body in every word you utter, every breath you breathe—and win him!"

"I'll try," was the low reply.

The woman in scarlet rose, lifted her hand, and the crowd sprang to their feet to the music of the most stirring song of revolution ever written.

Norman and Elena were both swept from their seats in spite of themselves. Elena's eyes flashed with excitement.

"What on earth is that they are singing, Norman?" she whispered.

"The Marseillaise hymn."

"Isn't it thrilling?" she gasped.

"It makes your heart leap, doesn't it?"

"And, heavens, how they sing it!" she exclaimed.

Norman turned and looked over the crowd of eager faces—every man and woman singing with the passionate enthusiasm of religious fanatics—an enthusiasm electric, contagious, overwhelming. In spite of himself he felt his heart beat with quickened sympathy.

He was amazed at the character of the audience. He had expected to see a throng of low-browed brutes. The first shock he received was the [20]feeling that this crowd was distinctly an intellectual one. They might be fanatics. They certainly were not fools. The stamp of personality was clean cut on almost every face. They were fighters. They meant business and they didn't care who knew it. Some of them wore dirty clothes, but their faces were stamped with the power of free, rebellious thought—a power that always commands respect in spite of shabby clothes. He looked in vain for a single joyous face. Not a smile. Deep, dark eyes, shining with the light of purpose, mouths firm, headstrong, merciless, and bitter, but nowhere the glimmer of a ray of sunlight! He felt with a sense of awe the uncanny presence of Tragedy.

And to his amazement he noticed a lot of men he knew in the crowd—three or four authors, a newspaper reporter evidently off duty, two college professors, a clergyman, three artists, a priest, and a street preacher.

The hymn died away into a low sigh, like the sob of the wind after a storm. The crowd sank to their seats so quietly with the dying of the music that Norman and Elena were standing alone for an instant. They awoke from the spell, and dropped into their seats with evident embarrassment.

A boy of sixteen stepped briskly to the front in answer to a nod from the chairman, and recited a [21]Socialist poem. After the first stanza, which was crude and stilted, Norman's eye rested on the heavy figure of the chairman. He was surprised at the power of his rugged face. Through its brute strength flashed the keenest sense of alert intelligence—an intelligence which seemed to lurk behind the big, shaggy eyebrows as if about to spring on its victim. His heavy-set face was covered with a thick, reddish blond beard and his short hair stood up straight on his head, like the bristles of a wild boar. Of medium height and heavy build, with arms and legs of extraordinary muscle and big, coarse short fingers evidently gnarled and knotted, by the coarsest labor in youth, he looked like a blacksmith who had taken a college course by the light of his forge at night. There was something about the way he sat crouching low in his seat, watching with his keen gray eyes everything that passed, that bespoke the man of reserve power—the man who was quietly waiting his hour.

"By George, a pretty good pet name they've given him—'The Blond Beast,'" Norman muttered. "I shouldn't like to tackle him in the dark."

The woman in red leaned toward the chairman and said something in low tones. He nodded his massive head, smiled, and looked back over his shoulder at the girl sitting behind them. [22]The movement showed for the first time a long ugly scar on the side of his great neck.

"Look at that fellow's neck!" whispered Elena.

"Yes. He had a close call that time," Norman answered. "But I'll bet the other one never lived to tell the story——"

"Sh! 'The Scarlet Nun' is going to speak."

The woman in red rose and walked to the edge of the platform. She stood silent for a moment, her tall, graceful, willowy figure erect and tense. The crowd burst into a tumult of applause. She smiled, bowed, and lifted her slender hand with a quick, imperious gesture for silence.

Norman was struck by the note of religious fervour which her whole personality seemed to radiate. The peculiar scarlet robe she wore accented this impression perhaps, and its strangeness added a touch of awe. The dress gave one the impression of a nun's garb except that its long folds were so arranged that they revealed rather than concealed the beautiful lines of her graceful figure. The colour was the deep, warm red of the Socialist flag—the colour of human blood, chosen as the symbol of the universal brotherhood of man. The effect of a nun's cowl was given by a thin scarlet mantilla thrown over the head, the silken meshes of its long fringe mingling with the waves of her thick black [23]hair. Her face was that of a madonna of the slender type, except that the lips were too full, round, and sensuous and her long eyelashes drooped slightly over dark, lustrous eyes.

"Comrades," she began, in slow, measured tones, "after to-night I retire from the platform to take up work for which I am better fitted. I promised you a big surprise this evening, and you shall not be disappointed——"

A murmur rippled the audience and she paused, smiling into Norman's face with a curious look. She spoke with a decided foreign accent with little moments of coquettish hesitation as though feeling for words. Norman felt an almost irresistible impulse to help her.

"I am going to in-tro-duce to you to-night," she continued, "a new leader, whose tongue the God of the poor and the outcast and the dis-in-herited has touched with divine fire. She is no stran-ger. Twenty years ago she was born beneath the bright skies of Cal-i-for-nia at Anaheim, in the little Socialist colony of Polish dreamers led by Madame Modjeska, Count Bozenta, and Henry Sienkiewicz, the distin-guished author of 'Quo Vadis.' As you know, the colony failed. Her mother died in poverty and she was placed in an orphan asylum until eight years of age, when she was taken back to Poland by her foolish kins-men. [24]Four years later I found her, a ragged, homeless waif, in the streets of Warsaw, alone and star-ving. Since then she has been mine. Amid the squalor and misery of the old world her busy little tongue never tired telling of the glories of Cali-for-nia! Always she sighed for its groves of oranges and olives, its dazzling flowers, its luscious grapes, its rich valleys, its cloud-kissed, snow-clad mountains and the mur-mur of its mighty seas! It was her tiny hand that led me across the ocean to you. I have sent her to school in one of your Western colleges where a great Socialist professor has taught her history and e-con-omics. I have the high honour, comrades, of intro-ducing to you the child of genius who from to-night will be the Joan of Arc of our Cause, Comrade Barbara Bozenta!"

She quickly turned and drew forward a trembling slip of a girl whose big brown eyes were swimming in tears of excitement. A moment of intense silence, and the crowd burst into cheers as the dazzling beauty of their new champion slowly dawned on their understanding. The woman in red resumed her seat, and the girl stood bowing, trembling, and smiling.

The young athlete watched her keenly. Never had he seen such a bundle of quivering, pulsing, nervous, ravishing beauty. He could [25]have sworn he saw electric sparks flash from the tips of every eyelash, from every strand of the mass of brown curls that circled her face and fell in rich profusion on her shoulders and across her heaving bosom. He felt before she had uttered a word—felt, rather than saw—the remarkable effectiveness of the simple, girlish dress which enhanced her dark beauty. She wore the same deep red as the older woman, but the bottom of the skirt was relieved by a row of ruffles edged with white lace. A scarf of white embroidered at the ends with scarlet flowers, was thrown gracefully around her shoulders and hung below the knees. Her round young arms were bare to the elbows, her throat and neck bare to the upper edge of the full bust.

The girl's eyes sought Norman's for an imperceptible instant and a smile flashed from her trembling lips. The cheering ceased and she began to speak. He watched her with breathless intensity, and listened with steadily increasing fascination. Her voice at first was low, yet every word fell clear and distinct. Never had he heard a voice so tender and full of expressive feeling—soft and mellow, sweet like the notes of a flute. There was something in its tone quality that compelled sympathy, that stole into the inner depths of the soul of the listener, and led reason a willing captive.

[26]In simple yet burning words she told of the darkness and poverty, the crime and shame, hunger and cruelty of the old world in which she had spent four years of her childhood. And then in a flight of poetic eloquence, came the story of her dreams of California, the Golden West, the land of eternal sunshine and flowers. And then, in a voice quivering and choking with emotion, she drew the picture of what she found—of Hell's Half Acre, in which she stood, with its brazen vice, its crime, its hopeless misery, its want and despair. With bold and fierce invective she charged modern civilization with this infamy.

"Why do strong men go forth to war?" she cried, looking into the depths of Norman's soul. "Here is the enemy at your door, gripping the soft, white throats of your girls. Watch them sink into the mire at your feet and then down, down into the black sewers of the under-world never to rise again! I, too, call for volunteers. For heroes and heroines—not to fight another—I call you to a nobler warfare. I call you to the salvation of a world. Will you come? I offer you stones for bread, the sky for your canopy, the earth for your bed, and for your wages death! None may enter but the brave. Will you come——?"

The last words of her appeal rang through [27]Norman's heart with resistless power. Her round, soft arms seemed about his neck and his soul went out to her in passionate yearning. He gripped the chair to hold himself back from shouting:

"Yes! I'm coming!"

She sank to her seat before the crowd realized that she had stopped. A shout of triumph shook the building—wave after wave, rising and falling in ever-increasing intensity. At its height the Scarlet Nun sprang to her feet, with a graceful leap reached the edge of the platform, and again lifted her hand. A sudden hush fell on the crowd.

"Now, comrades, the battle-hymn of the Republic set to new music! Mark its words, and remember that we sing it not as a mem-ory, but as a proph-esy of the day our streets may run red with the blood of the last struggle of Man to break his chains of Slav-ery—a proph-esy, remember, not a mem-ory! Read it Barbara!"

The girl was by her side in an instant, and read from memory, her clear sweet voice tremulous with passion:

The crowd burst again into triumphant song, and Norman looked at their faces with increasing amazement. The immense vitality of their faith, the rush of its forward movement, the grandeur and audacity of their programme struck him as a revelation. They proposed no half-way measures. They meant to uproot the foundations of modern society and build a new world on its ruins. Their leaders were fanatics—yes. But fanatics were the only kind of people who would dare such things and do them. Here was a movement, which at least meant something—something big, heroic, daring. His face suddenly flushed and his heart leaped with an impulse.

"In heaven's name, Norman, what's the matter?" Elena asked.

[29]The young poet-athlete looked at her in a dazed sort of way and stammered:

"Did you ever see anything like it?"

"No, and I don't want to again," she replied with a frown. "Let's go home."

"Wait, they are taking up a collection. At least we must pay for our seats."

When the usher passed he emptied the contents of his pocket in the collection-box.

As the meeting broke up, the boy who placed their seats touched Norman on the arm.

"Let me introduce ye to her. I wants ter tell 'er ye er my friend—I've yelled my head off for ye many a day on de football ground. Jest er minute. I'll fetch 'er right down."

The boy darted up on the platform, and Norman turned to Elena:

"Shall we please the boy?"

"You mean yourself," she replied. "I decline the honour."

She turned away into the crowd as the boy returned leading Barbara.

Norman hastened to meet them at the foot of the platform steps.

"Dis is me friend, Worth, de captain of de football team, Miss Barbara," proudly exclaimed the boy.

Barbara extended her soft hand with a warm, [30]friendly smile, and Norman clasped it while his heart throbbed.

"I congratulate you," he said, "on your wonderful triumph to-night."

"You were interested?" she asked, quietly.

"More than I can tell you," was the quick response.

"Then join our club and help me in my work among the poor," she urged, with frank eagerness. "We meet to-morrow afternoon at three o'clock. Won't you come?"

A long, deep look into her brown eyes—his face flushed and his heart leaped with sudden resolution.

"Thank you, I will," he slowly answered.

He joined Elena at the door and they walked home in brooding silence.

Norman stood silent and thoughtful before the fire in the dining-room, the morning after the meeting of the Socialists. His sleep had been feverish and a hundred half-formed dreams had haunted the moments in which he had lost consciousness with always the shining face of Barbara smiling and beckoning him on.

Elena silently entered and watched him a moment before he saw her.

"Still dreaming of the New Joan of Arc, Norman?" she asked with playful banter.

"I'm going to do it, Elena," he said, with slow, thoughtful emphasis.

"What? Marry her without even giving me the usual two weeks' notice?" Elena laughed.

"Now, isn't that like a woman! I wasn't even thinking of the girl——"

"Of course not."

Norman laughed. "By Jove, you're jealous at last, Elena."

"You flatter yourself."

"Honestly, I wasn't thinking of the girl——"

[32]"Well, I've been thinking of her. She haunts me. I like her and I hate her. I feel that she's charming and vicious, of the spirit and flesh, and yet I can't help believing that she's good. The woman who introduced her is a she-devil, and the man who presided over that meeting is a brute. It's a pity she's mixed up with them. What are you going to do—play the hero and rescue her from their clutches?"

"Nonsense. The girl is nothing to me, except as the symbol of a great idea. It stirs my blood. I'm going to join the Socialist Club."

"Of which the fair Barbara is secretary."

"Come with me, and join too. We'll go together to every meeting."

"Have you gone mad?" Elena asked, with deep seriousness.

"I'm in dead earnest."

"And you think your father will stand for it?"

"That remains to be seen. I'm going to tackle him as soon as he comes down to breakfast."

"Well, if I never see you again, good-bye, old pal." She extended her hand in mock gravity.

"I'm not afraid of him."

"No, of course not!"

"You're a coward, or you'd stand by me. Wait, Elena, he's coming now."

"Why stand by? You're not afraid? I'll [33]return in time for the inquest. Brace up! Remember Barbara. Be a hero!"

With a ripple of laughter she disappeared as the Colonel's footsteps were heard at the door.

Norman braced himself for the ordeal. He had never before dared to test his father's iron will. He had grown accustomed to see strong men bow and cringe before him, and felt a secret contempt for them all. They were bowing to his millions. And yet the boy knew with intuitive certainty that beneath the mask of quiet dignity and polished military bearing of the man he facetiously called "the Governor" there slumbered a will unique, powerful, and overbearing. More than once he had resented the silent pressure of his positive and aggressive personality. His own budding manhood had begun instinctively to bristle at its approach.

The Colonel started on seeing Norman, and looked at him with a quizzical expression.

"Was there an earthquake this morning, Norman?"

"I didn't feel it, sir—why?"

"You're downstairs rather early."

Norman smiled. "I've been a little lazy, I'm afraid, Governor. But you know I wasn't consulted as to whether I wished to be born. You assumed a fearful responsibility. You see the results."

[34]The Colonel dropped his paper and looked at Norman a moment.

"Well, upon my word!" he exclaimed. "What's happened?"

"The biggest thing that ever came into my life, Governor," was the low, serious answer.

"What?"

"The decision that hereafter I'd rather be than seem to be, that I'm going to do some thinking for myself."

"And what brought you to this decision?" the father quietly asked.

"I went last night to that Socialist meeting."

"Indeed!"

"Yes," he went on, impetuously, "and I heard the most wonderful appeal to which I ever listened—an appeal which stirred me to the deepest depths of my being. I think it's the biggest movement of the century. I'm going to study it. I'm going to see what it means. What do you say to it?"

The boy lifted his tall figure with instinctive dignity, and his eyes met his father's in a straight, deep man's gaze.

The faintest smile played about the corners of the Colonel's mouth as he suddenly extended his hand.

"I congratulate you!"

[35]"Congratulate me?" Norman stammered.

"Upon the attainment of your majority. Up to date you have written a few verses and played football. But this is the first evidence you have ever shown of conscious personality. You're in the grub-worm stage as yet, but you're on the move. You're a human being. You have developed the germ of character. And that's the only thing in this world that's worth the candle, my boy. It's funny to hear you say that the appeal of Socialism has worked this miracle. For character is the one thing the scheme of Socialism leaves out of account. A character is the one thing a machine-made society could never produce if given a million years in which to develop the experiment."

"And you don't object?" Norman asked with increasing amazement.

"Certainly not. Study Socialism to your heart's content. Go to the bottom of it. Don't slop over it. Don't accept sentimental mush for facts. Find out for yourself. Read, think, and learn to know your fellow man. When you've picked up a few first principles, and know enough to talk intelligently, I've something to say to you—something I've learned for myself."

The boy looked at his father steadily and spoke with a slight tremor in his voice.

[36]"Governor, you're a bigger man than I thought you were. I like you—even if you are my father."

"Thanks, my boy," the Colonel gravely replied, "I trust we may know each other still better in the future."

Under the tutelage of Barbara, the young millionaire plunged into the study of Socialism with the zeal of the fresh convert to a holy crusade.

At first he had listened to her stories of the sufferings of the poor and the unemployed with mild incredulity. She laid her warm little hand on his and said:

"Come and see. If you think that Socialism is a dream, I'll show you that capitalism is a nightmare."

He followed her down the ugly pavements of a squalid street into the poorest quarter of the city. She entered a dingy hall and pushed her way through a swarm of filthy children to the rear room. On a bed of rags lay the body of a suicide—a working-man who had shot himself the day before. The wife sat crouching on a broken chair, with eyes staring out of the window at the sunlit skies of a May morning in California. Her body seemed to have turned to stone and her eyes to have frozen in their sockets. Her hands lay limp in her [38]lap, her shoulders drooped, her mouth hung hopelessly open. She was as dead to every sight and sound of earth as though shrouded and buried in six feet of clay instead of sunlight.

Barbara touched her shoulder, but she did not move.

"Have you been sitting there all night, Mrs. Nelson?" she asked, gently.

The woman turned her weak eyes toward the speaker and stared without reply.

"You haven't tasted the food I brought you," Barbara continued.

The drooping figure stirred with sudden energy, as if the realization of the question first asked had begun to stir her intelligence.

"Yes. I set up all night with Jim. He'd a-done as much fer me. There's nobody else that cared enough to come. Ye know it ain't respectful to leave your dead alone——"

"But you must eat something," Barbara urged.

"I can't eat—it chokes me." She paused a moment, and looked at Norman in a dazed sort of way. "I tried to eat and something choked me—what was it? O God, I remember now!" she cried, with strangling emotion. "They are going to bury him in the potter's field unless we can save him, and I know we can't. He's got an old mother way back East that thinks he's [39]doing well out here. Hit'll kill her dead when she finds out he wuz buried by the city."

"He shan't go to the potter's field," Norman interrupted, looking out of the window.

The woman rose, and tried to speak, but sank sobbing:

"Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!"

When the first flood of grateful emotion had spent itself, she looked up at Norman and said:

"You see, sir, he wasn't strong, and kept losin' his job in Chicago. We'd heard about California all our lives. We sold out everything and got enough to come. For two years we've made a hard fight, but it was no use. Jim couldn't git work. I tried and I couldn't. Folks have helped us, but he was proud. He wouldn't beg and he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't sell his gun. I think he always meant to use it that way when he got to the end, and it come yesterday when they give us notice to git out."

She staggered over to the bed and fell across the body, sobbing:

"My poor old boy. He loved me. He was always good to me. I tried to go with him. But I couldn't pull the trigger! I was afraid! I was afraid!"

When they reached the street, Barbara lifted her brown eyes to Norman's face and asked:

[40]"What do you think of a social system that drives thousands of men to kill themselves like that?"

"To tell you the truth I never thought of it at all before."

"He would have been buried in a pauper's grave but for your help. I brought you here this morning because I knew you would save her that anguish when you understood."

"You knew I would?" he softly asked.

"I wouldn't have let you come with me if I hadn't known it," she answered, earnestly.

"It's funny how many of us live in this world without knowing anything about it," he said, musingly.

"It would be funny were it not a tragedy," she answered, turning across the street to the next block. They paused at the entrance of another narrow hallway.

"My work as secretary of the club includes, as you see, a wide range of calls. I'm a dispenser of alms, the pastor of a great parish, the friend, adviser, and champion of a lost world, and you have no idea what a big world it is."

"I'm beginning to understand. What's the trouble here? Another suicide?"

"No—something worse, I think. A man who was afraid to die and took to drink. That's [41]the way with most of them. None but the brave can look into the face of Death. This man is good to his family until he's drunk. Drink is the only thing that makes life worth the candle to him. But when he's under the influence of liquor he's a fiend. Last night he beat his wife into insensibility. This morning he sent one of the children for me."

They climbed two flights of rickety stairs and entered a room littered with broken furniture. Every chair was smashed, the table lay in splinters, pieces of crockery scattered everywhere, and the stove broken into fragments. Two blear-eyed children with the look of hunted rabbits crouched in a corner. A man was bending over the bed, where the form of a woman lay still and white.

"For God's sake, brace up, Mary!" he was saying. "Ye mustn't die! Ye mustn't, I tell ye! Your white face will haunt me and drive me into hell a raving maniac. I didn't know what I was doin', old gal. I was crazy. I wouldn't 'a' hurt a hair of your head if I'd 'a' knowed what I was doin'!"

He bowed his face in his coarse, bloated hands and sobbed.

The thin white hand of the wife stroked his hair feebly.

[42]"It's all right, Sam. I know ye didn't mean it," she sighed.

Norman sent for a doctor, and left some money.

With each new glimpse of the under-world of pain and despair the conviction grew in Norman's mind that he had not lived, and the determination deepened that he would get acquainted with his fellow men and the place he called his home.

"You are not tired?" Barbara asked, as they hurried into the street.

"No, I'm just beginning to live," he answered, soberly.

"Good. Then you shall be allowed the honour of accompanying me to the county jail, to the poorhouse, to the hospital, and to the morgue—the four greatest institutions of modern civilization. We must hurry. I've another sadder visit after these."

As they hurried through the streets, Norman began to study with increasing intensity the phenomena presented in the development of Barbara's character. The more he saw of her, the more he realized the lofty ideals of her life, the more puerile and contemptible his own past seemed.

At the jail they found a boy who had been convicted of stealing and sentenced to the penitentiary. His old mother was ill. Barbara bore her last message of love.

[43]They stopped at the poorhouse to see a curious old pauper who had become a regular attendant on the Socialists' meetings. He was called "Methodist John," because he was forever shouting "Glory, Hallelujah!" and interrupting the speakers. Barbara was the bearer of a painful message to John. Wolf had instructed her to keep him out of the meetings. She had decided to try a gentler way—to warn him against yelling "Glory" again under penalty of being deprived of a dish of soup of which he was particularly fond. The Socialist Club served this simple, wholesome meal to all who asked for it after its weekly meetings.

John promised Barbara faithfully to stop shouting.

"Remember, John," she warned him finally, "shout—no soup! No shout—soup!"

"I understand, Miss Barbara," he answered, solemnly.

"You see, sir," he said, apologetically, turning to Norman, "I get along all right till she begins ter speak, and when I hears her soft, sweet voice it seems ter run all down my back in little ticklin' waves clean down ter my toes, an' I holler 'Glory' before I can stop it!"

Norman laughed.

"I understand, old man."

[44]"You feel that way yerself, don't ye, now, when she looks down into yer soul with them big, soft eyes o' hern, an' her voice comes a-stealin' inter yer heart like the music of the angels——"

Barbara's face lighted, and a slight blush suffused her cheeks as she caught the look of admiring assent in Norman's expression.

"That will do, John," she said, firmly. "Mr. Wolf was very angry with you yesterday."

"I'll remember, Miss Barbara," he repeated. "And God bless your dear heart fer comin' by ter tell me."

"I suppose he has no people living who are interested in him?" Norman asked, as they turned toward the Socialist hall.

"No. He came from a big mill town in the East. His children all died before they were grown, and he landed here with his wife ten years ago. When she died, he was sent to the poorhouse. He hasn't much mind, but there's enough left to burst into flame at the memory of his children being slowly ground to death by the wheels of those mills. I've seen his dead soul start to life more than once as I've looked into his face from our platform. What an awful thing to see dead men walking about!"

"Yes. People who are dead and don't know it. I never thought of it before." Norman exclaimed.

[45]They stopped in front of a house with a scarlet light in the hall, which threw its rays through a red-glass transom over a door of coloured leaded glass. The shadows of evening had begun to fall, and for the first time the girl showed a sign of hesitation and embarrassment.

"I hate to ask you to go in here with me, and I'd hate worse to have you see me go alone. Yet I have to do it. My work leads me."

"I'm going with you, whether you ask it or not," he firmly replied.

"Then words are useless," she said, simply, as she rang the bell.

A Negro maid opened the door, and smiled a look of recognition. "She ain't no better, miss. She's been crying for you all day."

Barbara led the way up two flights of stairs to a small room in the rear, and entered without knocking. With a bound she was beside the bed on which lay a slender girl of nineteen. A mass of golden blond hair was piled in confusion on the pillow, and a pair of big, childish-looking blue eyes blinked at her through her tears.

"Oh! you've come at last! I'm so glad. It makes me strong to see you. Your face shines so, Barbara! They say I can't live, but it's not so. I shall live! I'm feeling better every day. It's nonsense. The doctors haven't got any sense. [46]I wish you'd get me one that knows something. Won't you, dear?"

"My friend, Mr. Worth, who has called with me, has kindly agreed to send you another doctor, little sister—that's why I brought him to see you."

Norman extended his hand, and grasped the thin, cold one the girl extended. He felt the chill of death in its icy touch as he stammered:

"I'll send him right away."

"Thank you," the girl replied, as a smile flitted about her weak mouth. She turned to Barbara with a look of infinite tenderness.

"I knew you'd come, and I knew you'd save me. You're my angel! When I dream at night, you're always hovering over me."

"I'll come again to-morrow, dearie, when the new doctor has seen you," Barbara answered, as she pressed her hand good-bye.

When they reached the street, Norman asked:

"You knew her before she fell into evil ways?"

"Yes," Barbara answered, with feeling. "She was just a little child of joy and sunlight. She couldn't endure the darkness. She loved flowers and music, beauty and love. She hated drudgery and poverty. She tried to work, and gave up in despair. A man came into her life at a critical moment and she broke with the world. She's been sending all the money she could make the [47]past two years to her mother and four little kids. Her father was killed at work in a mine for a great corporation."

"She can't live, can she?" Norman asked.

"Of course not. I only did this to humour her. She has developed acute consumption—she may not live a month."

Barbara paused.

"I must leave you now—I'm very tired, and I must sleep a while before I attend the meeting to-night. It has been a great strain on me to-day, this trip with you. How do you like our boasted civilization? Do you think it perfect? Are you satisfied with a system which drives hundreds of thousands of such girls into a life of shame? Are you content with a system which produces three million paupers in a land flowing with milk and honey? Do you like a system which drives thousands to the madness of drink and suicide every year?"

"And to think," responded Norman, dreamily, "that for the past two years of my manhood I've been writing verses and playing football! Great God!"

"Then from to-day we are comrades in the cause of humanity?" she asked tenderly, extending her hand. His own clasped hers with firm grasp.

"Comrades!"

Norman had never been a boy to do things by halves. In college, when he went in for football, he made it the one supreme end of life—and won. He incidentally managed to pull through a course in mining engineering. He knew mining by instinct and inheritance from his father. It came easy.

When he had a three months' vacation from football he took up the modelling of a dredge for mining gold from the sands of the beaches. The thing had never been perfected, but after three months' experiment and study he was just on the point of making the castings for the machinery when the football season opened and he dropped such trifling matters for the more serious work of training his men for a successful season. He won the championship and forgot the dredge.

Into the new movement of Socialism he naturally threw his whole personality without reservation. Its daring programme thrilled him. The audacity of its leaders and their refusal to discuss anything less than the salvation of man appealed to every [49]instinct of his nature. He devoured every book on the subject he could find, and in his new-found enthusiasm for humanity accepted as the inspired voice of God their wildest visions of social regeneration.

In his work of charity and organization with Barbara he found everything to confirm and nothing to shake his faith in these theories. When once he caught the idea that all the ills of modern civilization were due directly to the fiendish system of "capitalism" and its "iron law of wages," it was the key which unlocked every mystery of Pain and every tragedy of the Soul. All sin and crime and shame and suffering became the incidents of a social system whose movements were as inexorable as Fate, as merciless as Death. There was but one thing worth talking about, and that was how to destroy modern society, root and branch, and do it quickly, thoroughly and without compromise.

The same daring enthusiasm and capacity for leadership which made him the captain of his football team brought him at once to the front as a Socialist leader. He would have gained this leadership had he been the poorest man among them. It was a gift as his birthright.

But, added to this capacity for daring and successful action, was his wealth and social prestige. [50]He had cast his lot with a class whose avowed purpose was to destroy all social distinctions, to level all wealth to a common standard. And for this reason in particular he was conspicuous and heroic in the eyes of his Socialist comrades.

He found soon after his entrance into their active councils that the woman known to the world as "The Scarlet Nun," to her associates as "Sister Catherine," was the inspiring brain of their movement in the West. This remarkable woman interested him deeply from their first hour's talk. Born in Poland and educated in Germany, she spoke fluently the Russian, German, French, and English languages. She had led two great strikes of women workers in New York and had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced twice to the penitentiary for exciting riots. To her associates she had always remained a saint and a martyr for their cause.

She had been married before her association with Wolf had begun, ten years ago. Her first husband had been divorced, and her marriage to Wolf had been merely "announced" at a Socialist meeting. And yet the young millionaire had never questioned the sincerity of their devotion or the apparent happiness of their union. He was amazed at her learning, her grasp of affairs, the [51]simplicity and refinement of her manners, and the charm of her conversation.

Wolf he found to be a man of wide reading and deep convictions. As he came in daily contact with these two powerful personalities, and watched the singular zeal with which they devoted themselves to their self-appointed task of destroying modern society, he could not divest himself of the impression that they belonged to a religious order and were leading a crusade, as the monks of the Middle Ages led men and women to die to rescue the tomb of Christ from the desecration of Turk and Saracen.

The woman in particular gave him this impression of religious fanaticism. The apparent simplicity and austerity of her life, the tireless zeal with which she planned and worked for the spread of the gospel of Socialism, to his mind gave the lie emphatically to all the stories he had read of her affairs with men.

The only moments of suspicion about her which ever clouded his mind came with the accidental discovery that she had skilfully managed to throw him and Barbara together for a day. It seemed just a little like the old habit of a scheming mamma angling for the rich young man, and deliberately using the beauty of her [52]daughter as the bait with which to land him in the household.

Yet, when he found himself with Barbara he had always dismissed the thought as absurd. Whatever might be the dimly formed design in the back of the older woman's fancy, her brilliant protégé gave no sign of being her accomplice.

Norman had found Barbara a charming but baffling enigma. She walked through a world of sin and shame, filth and mire, with never a speck on the white of her soul or body. She spoke in the simplest and most direct way of things about which the ordinary girl in society would never dare to utter a word, and yet he took it as a matter of course. He grew to feel that she was a mysterious messenger from the spirit world. Yet when he took her arm and felt its warm round lines soft and thrilling against his own, or the warmth of her lithe body pressing close to his side in some lonely or dangerous spot on their rounds of work, he was brought up sharply against the fact that she was both flesh and spirit. Yet the moment he tried to draw nearer to her inner thoughts, he found her a skilful little fencer, an adept in all the arts of the most delicate and subtle coquetry.

He grew at last, however, to know, with unerring masculine instinct, that with all her brave and frank talk about her "fallen" sisters, she hadn't [53]an idea of what their fall really meant. She was as innocent as a child, and when at last she caught the young athlete smiling at one of her apparently frank and learned discussions of the modern degradation of woman, she blushed and became silent. Whereat he laughed, and she became so angry they parted in silence.

Baffled in his efforts to approach Barbara's heart, he threw himself with zeal into the Cause. When two months had been spent in mastering the details of the Socialist programme, in studying its history and the condition of its movement, he called a meeting of the council of the Socialist Club, and fairly took away the breath of the Wolfs and Barbara by the magnitude and audacity of a scheme which he proposed to launch immediately.

He had secured, without consulting any of his associates, an option on a rich, beautiful, and fertile island off the coast of Southern California. It was owned by a corporation which had invested more than a million dollars in its improvement. The enterprise had failed for two reasons—the money had been expended recklessly in the days of the famous land boom, and it had been found impossible to induce labourers to isolate themselves on this lonely spot, sixty miles from the coast of Santa Barbara, with no means of regular connection with the outside world.

[54]His eyes flashing with enthusiasm and his voice ringing with conviction, Norman closed his description of the island of Ventura with a demand for its immediate purchase by the Socialists.

"It can be bought," he declared impetuously, "for $200,000. A million dollars' worth of improvements are already there. I propose that we immediately raise $500,000, buy this island, establish a steamship line, plant a colony of ten thousand Socialists, found the Brotherhood of Man, build a model city, and create a vast fund for the propaganda of our faith."

Barbara's brown eyes danced with excitement, her cheeks flushed, while her little hands clapped approval.

"Good! Good! It's great! It's beautiful! We must do it!" she cried.

Wolf grimly shook his head.

"The idea has failed a hundred times. We must conquer the world by political action—we have the weapon in our hand—manhood suffrage. All colonies fail sooner or later. They are corrupted from outside——"

"Just so!" Norman interrupted. "But this one you can't reach from the outside. We will own the only means of communication. We will inherit all the advantages of modern civilization with none of its drawbacks. We can [55]demonstrate the truths we hold and from our impregnable Gibraltar send out our missionaries to conquer the world. We will not merely dream dreams and see visions; we will make history. We will prove the God that's in man and establish the fact of his universal brotherhood."

"It's a wonderful idea, comrade!" Catherine exclaimed, with enthusiasm. "I congratulate you! We will accept your plan, and I move that we appoint you our agent vested with full power to collect this fund from the enemy!"

The motion was put and carried unanimously, even Wolf voting for it.

Barbara sprang to Norman's side, and grasped his hand:

"Our feud is over! I forgive you for laughing at me. You are a born leader. You've won your spurs to-night. You will raise this money?"

"As sure as I'm living!" was the firm reply.

Norman lost no time in springing his scheme for the establishment of the Socialist colony and headquarters for the propaganda of the new social religion on the island of Ventura. The season he had spent as a reporter gave him the key to the proper launching of a press story which created a profound sensation. It appeared simultaneously in the Sunday editions of all the leading dailies of the Pacific coast, and in forty-eight hours his mail had grown to such proportions that he required two secretaries to assist him in answering it.

He called for a thousand volunteers to join the advance-guard of the coming Brotherhood of Man, each contributing a thousand dollars. He announced a mass meeting and picnic for the Fourth of July, to be held on the big lawn of the Worth country house on the outskirts of Berkeley.

Colonel Worth had readily given his consent to the use of the lawn. He had not tried in any way to interfere with his son's association with the Socialists. He felt sure that in time he would tire [57]of the fad, as he had of football, and in a fatherly way he began to admire the dash and audacity of the boy's plans.

On the morning of the picnic, when Elena expressed her fears of the outcome, the Colonel laughed.

"Don't worry, Elena. He'll come to his senses. It's like a fever. It must run its course. I'm rather proud of the extravagance of his foolishness. A boy who can forget his games and give his life to destroy the foundations of human society and try to rebuild a new world on its ruins—well, there's good stuff in him."

"But if he does something rash?" Elena persisted.

"He won't. With all his extravagance and enthusiasm he's not a fool. I, too, saw visions like that once."

"You, Guardie?"

"Yes, when I was very, very young—a mere boy of thirteen—I joined a colony of Communists."

"I wish I could have seen you at thirteen," Elena cried, with a joyous laugh.

The laugh died suddenly and a frown overspread her face as Norman appeared.

"I want you and Elena to hear our orator to-day, Governor," Norman said, with enthusiasm. "We are going to make it a great day."

[58]"It's already great, my boy—I've just got the news."

"What news?"

The Colonel drew a telegram from his pocket.

"A message from Washington. Sampson and Schley have annihilated the Spanish fleet. Admiral Cervera is a prisoner on board the flagship, and the army is rapidly closing in on the doomed city of Santiago."

He handed the telegram to Norman, who glanced at it in silence and returned it to his father.

"Come to our meeting on the lawn at noon, Governor. We've bigger news than that for you."

"Bigger news?" the older man asked with a quizzical look.

"Yes. A message announcing the dawn of a day when every gun on earth shall be broken to pieces and melted into ploughshares."

The Colonel looked at Norman a moment, smiled, and slowly said:

"I love the young—because I live myself over again in them."

"Then you'll join us to-day?"

"Thanks—no—Elena and I are going to shoot firecrackers—but we won't disturb your crowd. Let them speak to their hearts' content."

The Colonel turned with Elena, and entered the house, which crowned an eminence overlooking [59]the distant bay and city, while Norman hurried down the green sloping lawn to finish the decorations of the speakers' stand.

The crowd had already begun to pour in from Oakland and San Francisco, and more than a hundred delegates from Socialist locals in other cities were expected.

On a little headland which jutted out from the long sloping mountain side on which the lawn was laid out, Colonel Worth had erected a tall steel flag-pole. The big flag which flew from its peak could be seen by every ship that entered or left the bay and for miles on shore in almost every direction.

Around this flag-pole Norman had built the speakers' platform, with every inch of its boards covered with the deep-red bunting symbolic of the Socialist cause. Behind the stand toward the mountains rose a smooth grass-carpeted hillside in semi-circular form, making a natural amphitheatre on which five thousand people might sit in tiers one above the other and distinctly hear every word uttered on the platform.

By noon every inch of this space was packed with a dense crowd of Socialists, their friends, and the curious who had come, drawn by the sensational announcement of the launching of the Socialist colony on the island of Ventura.

In the front row, packed close against the [60]platform, were a number of famous people—conspicuous among whom was an author whose impassioned stories of the coming social upheaval had resulted in fame for himself and a divorce-suit by his first wife. His new wife, the "affinity" who caused the disturbance, sat by his side.

On his left sat a solemn looking poet with bushy, unkempt hair. He had deliberately chosen the title "The Bard of Ramcat." The name Ramcat had been long applied to a shabby section of the outskirts of San Francisco. Here the poet had chosen to dwell and sing of social horrors which existed only in his fertile imagination.

He had won wide fame, however, as the supreme exponent of the "affinity" theory which has always been epidemic among thoughtful Socialists. He coolly informed his wife that he had discovered his true "affinity" in a woman he had installed as her guest. The two affinities accompanied the wife and her child to a steamer for Europe with instructions to obtain a divorce.

The poet married the affinity, and on the birth of a new son and heir acquired the habit of beating her as a form of relaxation from the strain of work. Considerable trouble followed, and he spent a portion of his time in jail. He had once gone barefooted and bareheaded. But since his "affinity" marriage he had been compelled for [61]reasons best known to himself to resume shoe-leather and to buy a hat. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking figure, seated beside his new wife whose strong, intellectual face won the sympathy of all who saw her.

Just behind him sat an ex-clergyman with whom a rich young woman in his congregation had fallen in love. To avoid trouble, the woman of wealth got him to leave the ministry, and bought him from his wife for a good round sum. He became an apostle of the new gospel of Socialism, and secured a position as a professor of economics. When finally he lost this position by his vagaries, his wife hired a hall and set him up in business as an inspired leader of new thought emancipated from the chains of capitalistic tyranny.

Beside the distinguished ex-clergyman Socialistic apostle sat Professor Otto Schmitt, a famous teacher of economics at a Western university. His supreme passion was hatred of women. His one big book was written to prove that woman has no soul, that she is the mere matter on which man by his will acts, that she is not immoral, but merely non-moral, having never possessed even the rudiments of a moral nature. Schmitt had, therefore, maintained that the entrance of women into competition in the economic world presaged the downfall of man and the utter [62]extinction of humanity. For this reason he had joined the Socialists.

Not three feet away from him sat a thoughtful, elderly, short-haired woman who had written a book on the evolution of woman to prove that woman alone is the original unit of creation, man a superfluous and temporary addition, merely the missing link between woman and the monkey, and in the process of human development the male biped would be eliminated. She demanded equal rights with man, and more besides, and she, too, had joined the Socialists.

Yet through all these ludicrous incongruities there ran the single scarlet thread of social discontent which made them one. In every soul rang the stirring cry:

"Down with civilization! Up with the Red Flag!"

A more remarkable group of men and women could scarcely be gathered together on the face of the earth. But the one mark they all bore, distinctly cut deep in the lines of every face on which character had set its seal, and written large in the restless, nervous personality of the young—they all had a grievance, and though their troubles might come from as many different causes as there were men and women present, they united in one thought:

[63]"Modern civilization must be destroyed!"

Every heart beat with this fiery resolution, and every incongruity melted and faded into insignificance before this consuming belief.

And they had gone about this purpose with a deadly earnestness which meant business. Their political campaigns were merely moments when the captain of their ship cast the lead-line to feel the bottom and find his position with certainty before signalling full speed ahead.

They worked all the year round and every day in every year, from one election to the next. They were mastering the tricks of the demagogue in their appeal to the masses, and they kept everlastingly at it. No man is too high, no man too low, for them to reach for him. They couldn't be beaten for they had accepted defeat before they began to fight, and began the next fight before they got up from the ground where they had been knocked down. They had become the one element in American politics to which it was utterly useless to direct any argument of expediency.

The Fourth of July, the Nation's birthday, they were now using to demand its extinction. The fact that our army and navy had just torn the flag of Spain from its last masthead in the Western hemisphere and startled the old world [64]with our sudden advent among the great powers of the earth, stirred in their hearts no emotion save that of contempt. While the souls of millions beat with patriotic pride, they had met to uproot the very ideas from whose soil patriotism sprang into life.

There was no question as to who should be the orator of the day. The fame of Barbara Bozenta had become national from the day of her first speech in San Francisco. Her beauty and eloquence were sufficient to pack any hall at twenty-four hours' notice.

Her delicate face was radiant to-day with unusual elation. She walked with a quick, nervous energy that seemed to lift her whole body into the air. As she ascended the platform and bowed to the tumult of applause, she trembled from head to foot with intensest excitement. As she stood looking over the inspiring scene for a moment, her sensitive nostrils dilated, her brown eyes flashed, and her heart beat with a great throb of personal pride. She had never before faced such an immense throng of excited men and women, and the secret consciousness that she had within her soul the message which would sweep their heartstrings as she willed, lifted her into the clouds.

She felt for the moment that the whole scene [65]was a tribute to her power. The magnificent house whose windows flashed in the sunlight, the vast lawn carpeted with green and set in dazzling flowers, the emerald waters of the bay, and the spires and domes of the distant city set on its proud hills beyond—all were hers to-day! Her voice had called to their standard the young millionaire whose name was now on every lip. Her voice had inspired his dream of the experiment to be made on the island of Ventura which had called this host together. For one big moment she felt the thrill of conscious creative genius, the pain, the joy, the glory of a positive achievement.

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she sank to her seat with a suppressed sob.

When at last she rose to speak, her whole personality was a quivering battery of resistless emotion. Her voice, low and pulsing with magnetic waves of suppressed feeling, caught and chained the attention of the farthest straggler on the edge of the throng. Instinctively they moved closer. Resistlessly she drew them.

She had not spoken two minutes before she was sweeping the hearts of her hearers. Men and women who had come to laugh or scoff, as well as the young and thoughtless who had drifted with the crowd, were all [66]alike caught in the spell and hung breathless on her words.

Every trick and art of persuasive speech were hers without effort. Scorn, pathos, humour, passion, were of the breath she breathed. At times her eloquence reached the highest conception of its might. It was simple thought packed until it took fire. At such moments scores of men leaped to their feet and shouted. Nothing disconcerted her or changed the swift current of her ideas. She was a master-musician whose hands swept a harp of a thousand strings—every string a throbbing human soul.

What matter if her appeal was to the emotions and not to the intellect? Her purpose was to persuade her hearers. And she did it. Her courage, her beauty, her skill, her utter sincerity, commanded the respect of the strongest man who listened. If their intellects were not convinced, no matter—she carried them with her on a storm of resistless emotion.

Suddenly a thing happened which would have destroyed the total impression of the average speech. Old Methodist John, her pauper protégé, had listened with increasing torture, choking down a hundred "Glorys" as they leaped from his soul until at last he could endure no more. At the climax of one of her impassioned appeals [67]the old man leaped to his feet, rushed in front of the speakers' stand and shouted into the face of the chairman:

"Look here! Look here, now, Wolf! Soup or no soup—Glory hallelujah!"

Barbara alone smiled. The crowd took up his shout, and a thousand voices made the heavens ring with its wild music.

Norman whispered to the old man, who sat down, and Barbara swept on in her impetuous triumph without the lapse of a moment's power. She seized the instant's hush which followed the storm of cheering to fire into the minds of her hearers some of the solid shot of the revolutionary programme.

In a voice which swelled to the clarion note of a trumpet she cried:

"The earth for all the people! This is our demand!

"The machinery of all production and distribution for all the people! This is our demand!

"The collective ownership and control of all industry! This is our demand!

"The elimination of rent, interest, and profit! This is our demand!

"A new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic! This is our demand!

"The end of the hell called war, of poverty [68]and shame, of cruelty and crime, the birth of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the beginning of man! These are our demands! This is Socialism! Is this an idle dream? Have you no faith in your fellow man?

"In the grim prison beyond the bay I found one day a woman convict who was little removed from a fiend. I got permission to hang a beautiful picture in her cell—a picture that set her soul to dreaming, that melted her at last to tears, and transformed the beast within her to a gentle, loving, beautiful, human character.

"I believe in man because he alone possesses this power to look through the window of the soul into the infinite and eternal. Here the world's real battles are fought. Here the world's real work is done. Here cowards run and the brave die. This power to recreate the earth, people it with beauty, and fill it with harmony is your birthright.

"Lo, the day of humanity dawns!

"I preach class consciousness that we may destroy all classes. Class must perish and Man be glorified. Man, whose inhumanity to his fellow man has filled the ages with ashes and tears, is coming forth at last purified by suffering, and we shall see his tears turned to smiles upon the faces of a nobler race.

"Why should we rejoice to-day in the death of [69]our fellow man? Nations are but the dung-heaps out of which the fair flower of a world-democracy is slowly growing. Truth is not national, it is infinite. France may fight Germany because two titled fools insult each other, but there can be no war between the laboratories of Pasteur and of Koch. Their work is the common heritage of humanity. Who asks if Humboldt was German or English, whether Spinoza was Jew or Gentile, Darwin English or French? A German wrote 'Faust,' a Frenchman set it to immortal music, and an American girl sang it into the hearts of millions. Who cares to know nationalities? The great belong to the democracy of the world. And I swear that your children will still laugh with the soul of Cervantes in spite of the Fourth of July, Santiago, and Manila!

"Why should you fight one another? When called to war by your rulers, let the liberty-loving spirits of the modern world say to their masters:

"'Go and do your own killing—you who have separated us from our brothers and made the earth a slaughter-pen.'

"If you are court-martialed and shot for this act of heroism remember:

A shout of wild applause rent the air as the last note of Byron's immortal song fell from her beautiful lips. And then, in a low, intense voice, she closed her speech with a thrilling appeal for human brotherhood. To Norman, who hung on her lips, the slight girlish figure seemed transformed before their eyes into a radiant messenger of the spirit. And when the sweet womanly tones at last broke and choked into deep-drawn sobs, his soul and body seemed no longer his own. As her last words sank into his heart: "From to-day let each of us swear allegiance to but one flag, the deep-red emblem of human blood, God's sign of universal brotherhood!" Norman leaped to his feet, sprang on the platform, and while the crowd swayed in a frenzy of applause, hauled down the Stars and Stripes and quickly raised the big red standard of Socialism which was thrown across the speaker's table.

And then the great crowd seemed to go mad. Wave after wave of cheering rose and fell, rose and fell, in apparently unending power. Catherine threw her arms around Barbara in a paroxysm of emotion, while the big figure of Wolf towered [71]above them both, shouting and gesturing like a madman. Barbara at last lifted her hand and, as the storm subsided, began the Marseillaise hymn.

The first stirring notes had just swept the audience when the stalwart figure of Colonel Worth suddenly appeared on the platform, his face a blaze of anger, his magnificent figure erect, every nerve and muscle drawn to the highest tension.

He stepped to the edge of the stand, lifted his head, and his voice rang over the crowd like the sudden boom of a cannon:

"Silence!"

He didn't repeat the word.

The singing stopped, and every eye was riveted on the group that stood on the platform.

The Colonel confronted Wolf, and shot his words at him as though from a machine-gun.

"Who lowered that flag?"

A moment of silence followed. The Colonel spoke with increasing rapidity.

"Who lowered that flag? The man who did it must answer to me!"

Some one behind him moved, and the Colonel turned, confronting Norman.

"I did it, Governor," was the quiet answer.

"You?" the father gasped.

"Yes," said the even, firm voice.

"Haul that red rag down and raise the flag [72]back to its place!" The Colonel's voice was low and thick with rage.

Elena put her hand on his arm and said gently:

"Guardie!"

"Will you do it?" he firmly asked, ignoring Elena, and holding Norman with his gaze.

The young man hesitated an instant, met his father's look with a deadly straight stare, and slowly replied:

"I will not."

A smothered cry from Barbara, half joy, half pain, was the only sound that followed, until the Colonel said:

"Then I'll do it for you."

Amid a dead silence he hauled down the red flag, threw it on the floor, boldly stamped on it, made fast the Stars and Stripes, and quickly raised it to the top of its staff. He turned to the crowd, and in clear-cut, sharp tones of command shouted:

"This is my flag, my house, my lawn. Get off it! And do it quick!"

As the crowd hastened away, he turned to Norman:

"You and I must come to an understanding at once, young man," he said, with angry emphasis.

"I'll meet you in the library in thirty minutes," was Norman's firm reply as he led Barbara from the platform and joined the retreating throng.

The Colonel paced the floor of his library with increasing anger as he waited the return of Norman. Never in his life had his whole being been so abandoned to incontrollable rage. He had always been a man of fiery temper, but an iron will had held his temper in control.

His most intimate business associates had always found him suave, persuasive, and genial in every hour of trial. Never once had they heard a threat or an idle boast fall from his lips. He had the rare faculty of beating his enemies in a fight in which no quarter was asked or given, and coming out of it with his bitterest foe turned into a friend. This was one of the secrets of his fortune—an instinctive leadership among powerful men.

For the first time he realized that he had challenged the one man in all his personal acquaintance about whose character he knew nothing—his own son. For the first time he realized that they were strangers. He had been absorbed in the big affairs of life. He had taken the boy for granted. Since the death of his mother twelve [74]years ago, Norman had spent most of his time at school.

The Colonel had always been in command. His word had been law for so many years, it brought him up with a disagreeable start to find that the one man with whom his life was bound, and in whom his hopes centred, could dare thus to defy and flaunt his wishes. It was the most disgusting, enraging fact he had ever encountered. The longer he confronted the situation the more furious and blind his anger became.

Elena had timidly entered the room, and stood watching him gravely before she spoke.

"Has he returned from that woman yet?" the Colonel asked with sudden energy.

"No, and I hope he will stay all day," she answered slowly.

"But he won't," the father snapped.

"I'm sure he will not," the girl sighed. "I don't like you to-day, Guardie."

"You, too, side with these fanatics then?"

"No. I hate them—hate everything they say and do and stand for. I loathe the very sight of them. But you were unfair to Norman."

"Unfair? How?"

"You allowed him the widest liberty to do as he pleased, think as he pleased, associate with whom he pleased, and then all of a sudden you sprang [75]on that platform and insulted him before his invited guests."

"How could I dream that he would commit such an act of insane treason before my very eyes?"

"You make no allowance for the spell of Barbara Bozenta's eloquence. I don't like her, but she's a wonderful little woman, and I envy her her power over men."

"I'll end this folly to-day," was the Colonel's firm announcement.

"I'm not so sure," Elena warned.

"I'll show you!"

She came close and laid her hand on the Colonel's arm.

"Will you promise me one thing, Guardie?" she asked, tenderly.

The anger faded from the strong face, and his voice sank low.

"I'm afraid I've never been able to refuse you anything, child. It's on your account, I think, I'm most angry with Norman to-day."

"You promise?" she repeated.

"Yes, what is it?" he said, bending to kiss her smooth, white forehead.

"Promise to put all anger out of your heart and talk to Norman as a father, not as an enemy—won't you?"

[76]"An enemy?" the Colonel slowly asked.

"Yes. I thought you were going to strike him once. It would have been horrible. I never could have forgiven you for that. You've always been my hero, Guardie—I never saw you give way to anger before. I don't like it. You'll talk to him lovingly and tenderly as a father, won't you?"

"Yes, dear, for your sake, I will," he answered.

"Then I'll tell him to come. I asked him to wait outside until I saw you."

She turned and quickly left the room. In a moment Norman entered and stood facing his father.

The Colonel flushed with anger at sight of the insolence with which the younger man calmly surveyed him.

"Well, sir," the father said, at length, "have you nothing to say to me after what has occurred to-day?"

"I was under the impression that you had something to say to me," was the cool answer.

By an effort of will the older man crushed back an angry retort, smiled, and said:

"Sit down, please—I've a good deal to say to you."

Norman threw himself lazily into a chair, and continued to watch his father with a curious [77]expression of half-amused contempt. The Colonel stood in silence, evidently struggling with his emotions, and feeling for the right word with which to begin.

Norman anticipated him.

"Honestly, now, Governor, just between us, don't you think you were a little bit absurd to-day?"

"Absurd?" his father broke in with rising accent.

"Just a little childish about a piece of red, white, and blue cloth?"

"Perhaps so, my boy," was the answer. "Just about as absurd as you were over the red rag you lifted in its place. Why did you do it?"

"On the impulse of the moment, to express my feeling of contempt for war, and my faith in my fellow man."

"Exactly. So I acted on the impulse of the moment to express my contempt for that crowd of fools and fanatics—my loyalty and faith in my country."

"I can't understand how a man of your age, poise and pride, culture and power, could be so foolish. A sixteen-year-old school-boy on the Fourth of July, yes! But you——"

"Norman," the Colonel interrupted, in even tones, "I'm sorry I've been too busy for us to get acquainted. It's time we began. It may [78]interest you to know that I, too, hate war—learned to hate it long before your Socialist orator was born—learned it in the grim University of Hell—war itself. Socialism has no patent on the hope of universal peace. I am a member of a peace society. I have always believed the Civil War should have been prevented. All the Negroes on this earth are not worth the blood and tears of one year of that struggle. Whether it could have been prevented God alone knows. When it came I volunteered—a drummer-boy at fourteen—and marched to the front beneath the flag you tore down to-day."

"I never thought of that, Governor—honestly, I never did!" the boy exclaimed.

"I went in," the Colonel continued, "with my head full of silly rubbish about the glory of war. When I beat the call to my first charge, and saw the men I knew and loved shot to pieces, and heard their groans and cries for water, I had no more delusions. I worked on the field that night until twelve o'clock, helping the men who were wounded—enemies as well as comrades. I learned the brotherhood of man and the meaning of red blood in the big, tragic school of life, my son. Many a boy in gray, whom I had fought, died in my arms while my heart ached for his loved ones in some far-away Southern home.

[79]"But I knew the war had to be when once it was begun. I was fighting for the flag I loved—and I grew to love it better than life. To you it may be a bit of red, white, and blue bunting; to me it is the symbol of truth and right, liberty and human progress.

"My people in western North Carolina were all slave-holders and loyal to their state, except my father. He hated slavery, loved the Union, and moved on westward before the war. I saw them bury him in the flag you tore down to-day, my boy.

"Many a night I've lain on the ground looking up at the stars before the dawn of a day of battle and seen visions of that flag flying triumphant in the sky. I've seen the men who carried it shot down again and again, and another snatch it from their dying grasp and bear it on to victory.

"I grew not only to love it, but to believe in it with all the passionate faith of my soul. I believe in its destiny, in its sublime mission to humanity. The older I've grown and the more I've seen of my fellow man, the wider I've travelled in foreign lands, the deeper has become my conviction that our flag symbolizes the noblest, freest ideal ever born in the soul of man; that we have but to live up to its standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the kingdom of human brotherhood is already here.

[80]"After the war, I joined the regular army, not because I loved war, but because there seemed nothing else for me to do at the time. I was absolutely alone in the world. At twenty-five I was in command of a company on the frontier. I had not been in battle since the end of the Civil War, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by a horde of hostile Indians, and I had to turn my machine guns on them and mow them down. The slaughter was something terrific. As the last charge was made I saw a young squaw retreat in the face of a withering fire, walk backward facing our men, holding a bundle of something behind her body. She fell at last, riddled with bullets. I rode up where she lay, and found the bundle to be a little Indian baby boy. He was unhurt, and stretched out his hand to me in friendly baby greeting. I found the squaw quite dead, and discovered the child was not her own. She was simply trying to save it for the tribe. I took the child and educated him. But he went back to the free life of the plains. I found him again, and made him the gamekeeper of our mountain preserves."

"You mean Saka?" Norman asked.

"Yes. That night as I lay in my tent I saw war as it is—a hideous, savage nightmare. From that moment I hated the service, hated its [81]iron laws of discipline, its cruel machinery devised for suppressing the individuality of its members. I saw that night a larger vision of life. I made up my mind to create, not to kill—to build up, not to tear down. I left the army and mastered mining.

"Your leather-lunged agitators say that I stole my millions from the earnings of the men who worked for me. A more stupid lie was never uttered. I invented improved mining machinery. I made deserts blossom and gave employment to thousands of men who couldn't think for themselves. I did their thinking for them, and set their tasks. I have made millions, and have added tens of millions to the wealth of the West."

"If labour is the creator of all wealth can one man ever earn a million dollars?" Norman interrupted.

"Manual labour is not the creator of wealth. The brain which conceives is the creator of wealth. The hand which executes these plans is merely the automaton moved by a superior power."

"Yet nothing could be accomplished without it," persisted Norman.

His father lifted his hand with a gesture of command.

[82]"We'll not discuss the theory of Socialism to-day, my boy. I grant you have plausible arguments which skilful demagogues are using with more and more efficiency. I don't object to your study of this subject. I'm rather pleased at the serious turn your energies have taken. What I do object to is your continued association with the kind of people who made up that crowd to-day—people who make the agitation of the revolutionary programme of the Socialists a daily profession, people who are seeking to destroy modern civilization itself."

"You will have to come down to earth, Governor," Norman said, "in your indictment of these people. The time has gone by when you can scare anybody with a few high-sounding phrases. If modern civilization is rotten, it ought to be destroyed, and who cares if it is?"

"The issue between us, my boy," the Colonel continued, gravely, "is not an academic one. It is not open to discussion. Some of the people you are associating with have criminal records. If they continue their present wild harangues they will be shot down like dogs in the streets. I cannot afford to have my name even under the suspicion of sympathy for them, through you. Do you understand me?"

[83]"I think I do," Norman replied, holding his father's steady gaze.

"You are my son and the heir of my fortune. But you must remember that I am the master of this establishment."

"I am aware of that fact, sir," the boy replied, in cold tones.

"I trust that it will not be necessary, then, for me to repeat to you my first positive order—that you will immediately sever your connection with the Socialist Club, and never again appear in public or private with the three people who were on that platform to-day."

"It will not be necessary for you to repeat your order," the young athlete replied, with a curious smile and a slight tightening of the lips.

"I thought as much."

Norman laughed, and the Colonel's eyes began to blaze.

"What do you mean, sir?" he sternly asked.

"That it will be unnecessary for you to repeat your order, for the very simple reason that I'm a man. I've the right to do my own thinking, and I propose to do it."

With a quick stride the Colonel confronted the young rebel, his breath quick and laboured, his face aflame with unbridled rage.

"You dare thus to defy my wishes?"

[84]"If you put it that way, yes."

The Colonel stepped to the door and opened it.

"You will obey my order or get out of this house never to enter it again. Take your choice!"

"You mean it?" the younger man asked, with sullen emphasis.

"Exactly what I say," was the cold reply.

Norman turned without a word, seized his hat, and left the room. As he reached the end of the corridor, and placed his hand on the front door, his father's voice rang out suddenly:

"Norman!"

He paused, and looked back without taking his hand from the knob.

"You can't be such a fool!" the Colonel cried.

"It looks that way, Governor!"

He opened the door, softly closed it, and was gone.

Norman's break with his father created a sensation. The flag episode, coming on the Fourth of July and at the very hour when the guns of the forts were thundering their celebration of the fleet's victory at Santiago, presented the dramatic contrast which stirred the indignation of the public to unusual depths. The morning papers devoted from four to five columns to the story. The remarkable speech of Barbara Bozenta was reported in full, with a sketch of her life, interspersed with portraits of the Wolfs, of Norman, Elena, his father, the palatial home on Nob Hill, and the country estate where the stirring little drama had been played.

The Socialist cause received a tremendous impetus. The very violence of the editorial assaults on their programme reacted in their favour. Thousands of men who did not know the meaning of the word Socialism began to read and think and discuss its principles. Their meetings were crowded, and the fame of the little [86]brown-eyed Joan of Arc became so great it was no longer possible for her to pass through the streets without an escort.

All sorts of stories about the relations of the famous millionaire and his son filled the air. Some were printed, others were vague rumours. A sensational paper published the story that they had actually come to blows, and had fought a duel in the big library which might have ended fatally for one or both but for the timely interference of Colonel Worth's ward, Elena Stockton.

Norman became at once the hero of the Socialist's cause. His appearance at a meeting was the signal for pandemonium to break loose. He secured employment on a sensational daily paper, and his signed articles were made a feature.

Colonel Worth was so enraged over the vulgar notoriety with which the incident had overwhelmed him that he denied himself to all callers, refused to speak to a reporter or to allow a word to be uttered in confirmation or denial of any stories printed or rumoured.

He issued orders that Norman's name should never again be spoken in his house.

When he made this announcement to Elena her full, red lips, quivered and she looked at him reproachfully.

[87]"I mean it, Elena," he said, sternly.

The girl spoke in tenderness.

"I don't believe you, Guardie. It isn't like you at all. I'll not mention his name to a servant, but I will to you."

"I don't want to hear it!"

"That's because you know you've done a great wrong."

"I accept the responsibility. It's done, and that's the end of it."

"Nothing ends until it ends right, Guardie," spoke the soft, even voice.

"I know it's hard on you, dear," the Colonel responded, with feeling. "It was for your sake I made the issue. If he has turned from you for a loud-mouthed vulgar agitator, he's not worth a thought. Forget that he lives. I'm going to leave my fortune to you."

"I don't want it at the price, Guardie," she replied, slipping her arm around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. "I couldn't be happy with such a fortune. What you've done hurts me more than it hurts Norman."

"Yes, yes. I know that you love him, child, but your happiness could not be found among a crowd of criminals and revolutionists."

"I'm not thinking of myself," was the low [88]response as she withdrew from his arms, "I was thinking of you."

"Of me?"

"Yes. You've broken my idol. To me you were the one perfect man in the world. I didn't know you. I didn't know that you were hard and cold and cruel and selfish and proud."

"I'm not, Elena."

"You allowed Norman to drift into any crazy theory that might strike his fancy. And the moment he fails to agree with your views you turn like a madman and drive him into the streets."

"He went of his own accord. I gave him his choice."

"And I admire his pluck. It was a manly thing to do."

"It was the act of a fool."

"Yet, you know, Guardie, in your heart of hearts you admire him for it. He showed you that he was made of the same stuff as his father."

The Colonel scowled, and the girl took courage.

"I'm going to meet him this evening——"

"I forbid it!"

"You can't help it," she cried, as the tears slowly gathered. "I'm going to tell him you wish to see and talk with him again."

"On one condition only—his absolute obedience to my wishes."

[89]"I love him all the more for defying you—love him better than I ever did in my life. And—and, Guardie—I don't love you any more. You are cruel and unjust."

With a sob she turned and left the room.

Elena's tears had shaken the Colonel's confidence in his position as nothing else could possibly have done. Since she had finished her course in college two years before, and he had come in daily contact with her strong personality, a most intimate and perfect sympathy had grown between them. He had never before known her intuitive judgment to be wrong. Her impressions of character especially he had found singularly accurate, her sense of right and her good taste nearly perfect.

He retired to his room at night with a deep sense of uneasiness. His anger had cooled, and in its stead a feeling of depression slowly settled. From every nook and corner came memories of the boy he had driven from his door. His pictures hung on the walls and stared at him from every piece of furniture on which a frame could be placed. He had learned photography as a pastime years before the kodak was invented, and most of the pictures he had taken himself.

One photograph in particular, which stood by the [91]clock on the mantel, set in a heavy frame of hammered gold, which he had made himself from the product of his first mine, riveted and held his attention. His first impulse was to tear these pictures all down and throw them in the fire. He had picked this one up first, to carry out his furious impulse, but something held his hand and he placed it back in its old place with the grim exclamation:

"No! It's the act of a coward. I've got to live with my memories—or surrender at once."

Again and again his eye came back to this picture. He had taken it twenty-three years ago in a little bedroom in a dirty hotel of a desolate, God-forsaken mining town in Nevada. How well he remembered it! He was poor then, and had just begun the first big fight of his life for wealth and power. The boy was four weeks old, and he had insisted on taking the picture of the mother with the baby in her arms. He had carefully posed her, standing by the window looking down into the child's upturned face. It had turned out a remarkable likeness of both—the young mother's face wreathed in smiles, tender and frail and happy, with the great joy of the dawn of motherhood shining in her eyes.

He looked at it long and tenderly. And, as a [92]thousand memories of life crowded his soul, he suddenly exclaimed:

"God in heaven! What does she say to-day if she knows what I've done?"

His eyes blinked, and the tears blinded them.

He kissed the picture and buried his face in his hands as a sob of anguish shook his frame.

"The girl's right. My boy's my boy after all. I'm wrong!"

When the Colonel had greeted Elena at breakfast next morning he quietly asked:

"You met Norman?"

"Yes."

"I shall be glad to see him when he comes."

Elena threw her arms impulsively around his neck.

"Now you're a darling! Now you're big and strong and good and great again—and I love you."

The Colonel stroked her hair slowly, and asked with a smile:

"What time is he coming?"

"He's not coming." Elena laughed.

"Not coming?" the colonel repeated blankly.

"No. You're going to see him."

"Indeed!"

"You see, Guardie, he is a chip off the old block."

"It begins to look like he's the whole block," the Colonel remarked, dryly.

"Can you blame him after the way you acted?"

[94]"I can't say I do, much. I like a boy of spirit——"

"And individuality—that's your own pet idea Guardie."

The Colonel was silent a moment.

"Yes. I like his grit. Where will I find him?"

"At his desk at work in the newspaper office."

"I'll call him up and make an appointment."

The Colonel seized the telephone, called the newspaper office, and asked for Norman. He waited for several minutes before any one reached the 'phone. He scarcely recognized the short, sharp business accent of Norman's voice:

"Well, well, what is it?"

The Colonel cleared his throat.

"Here! Here! Get a move on you—what's the matter—I'm in a hurry!"

"This is your father, Norman——"

"Get off the wire or quit your kiddin'—what do you want?"

His father laughed.

"I beg your pardon, Governor, honestly I didn't recognize your voice until you laughed. I'm awfully glad to hear it again. What can I do for you?"

"Well, I must say I like your impudence. What can you do for me? I want to see you right away. Shall I call at your office?"

[95]A pause ensued, followed by audible smiles at both ends of the wire.

"Of course not, sir. It seems a long time since I left home but I've not forgotten the way. I'll come over as soon as I can leave my desk."

Two hours later he entered the library with a boyish laugh and grasped his father's hand.

The Colonel pressed it with deep tenderness.

"You must forgive me, boy. I wasn't fair to you the other day."

Norman tried to laugh, and stammered awkwardly:

"Well, when I hear a man of your age and experience say a thing like that, Governor, I begin to fear I'm not quite as big as I thought I was."

"Then we're both in the right mind now, to begin all over again, are we not?"

"It's with you, sir," was the quick reply.

"Suppose I can convince you that you have entered on a mistaken mission—that your programme is foolish, impossible, and dangerous?"

"Do it, and I'll join you in trying to put an end to Socialism."

"Before I begin, let me ask you a very personal question."

"As many as you like, Governor," was the frank response.

[96]"Are you mixed up in any way personally with the young woman who spoke here that day?"

"We're comrades in the cause of humanity—that's all."

"You're sure that it is not her personal influence over you that has made you a Socialist?"

"Only in so far as she has made me think and feel."

"You have not made love to her?"

"Certainly not. I'm engaged to Elena."

"Then it ought to be easy for us to understand each other. Come down out of the clouds of theory now, and tell me exactly how you are going to save humanity, and let's see if we can't work together for the same end. A great purpose like yours ought not to separate father and son—you can't defend such platitudes as this, for example, which one of your orators got off last night—listen!"

The Colonel took the morning paper from the table and read:

"Remember in this supreme hour that capitalism has you and your loved ones by the throats, is stealing your substance, draining your veins, and reducing you inch by inch to the potter's field. Every sweating den cries out to you as from the depths of hell to gird up your loins and march forth in one solid phalanx to strike [97]the blow that shall sound the knell of capitalistic despotism, and set the star of hope in the skies of the despairing and dying thousands of your class who are at the mercy of the vampires of soulless wealth. How long shall capitalism be allowed to work its devastation, spread its blighting curse, destroy manhood, debauch womanhood, and grind the flesh and blood and bone of childhood into food for Mammon?"

The Colonel paused.

"Such appeals to passion can only end in riot, bloodshed, and prison bars. You don't write such rot as that yourself, and yet the men you are following preach it."

"I'm not following just now, Governor—I'm trying to direct this tremendous impulse, this enthusiasm for humanity, called Socialism, into a practical experiment that will demonstrate the truths of their faith, and from this white city of a glorified human life send out our missionaries to conquer the world. Give me ten thousand earnest men and women on the island of Ventura, isolated from contact with the corruption of the outside, and I'll show you a miracle more wonderful than if they had risen from the dead."

"And what are the foundations on which you propose to build this heaven on earth?"

"Squarely on these principles: From every man [98]according to his ability; to every man according to his needs; and to every child born the right to laugh and play and grow to a strong manhood and womanhood. We are not civilized so long as there is one child sobbing to be freed from the tomb of the modern workshop, so long as there is one man willing to work and not able to find it, so long as there is one soul striving upward who is crushed to earth, so long as one man lives in idleness and luxury while his neighbour starves, so long as there's one spot of this earth on which a man lives by tearing the bread from the lips of another."

"Hasn't your imagination been caught by beautiful phrases, my boy?" asked the father. "In your new State of Ventura you will give to each man according to his needs?"

"Yes."

"And who will decide how much each one needs—the man who feels the need or the state?"

"The state, in the last resort."

"Exactly. And who will determine how large the service required of each man? Who will decide the question of ability?"

"The state, of course."

"Are you not cutting out a pretty big job for the state, remembering that the state is nothing [99]more or less than a lot of ordinary second-rate politicians named Tom, Dick, and Harry, who individually or collectively haven't as much sense as you or I?"

"In the new world it will be different."

"Then you are going to import a new breed of men and women?"

"No, we will simply give the God in man a chance to be."

"But how about the beast that's in man—the elemental instinct to fight and kill—to take the woman he desires by the force of his hands and muscle?"

"When man is free and strong and happy he can have no motive to kill or play the beast."

"That remains to be seen, my boy! Your assertion does not change the nature of man. Another problem in your scheme I can't solve is wages."

"We will abolish wage slavery."

"Yes, yes, I know; but man must work—all men must work in your new state?"

"Certainly."

"And the man who refuses to work?"

"Will be made to work according to his ability."

"Just so. We live under the wage system now—the system of free contract by which labourer [100]and employer agree. Under your system contract would be abolished, and men would do what they are told to do—a system of command instead of contract—is it not so?"

"I should say just the opposite. Men are forced to work now at tasks they loathe and for pay that is insufficient. Under our state they would be free to choose the work for which they are fitted."

"And suppose they all choose one job?"

"The state would assign their work in the last resort."

"There you are, once more, bowing down to the same Tom, Dick, and Harry. And you cannot see that Socialism would impose on man the most colossal system of slavery, the most merciless because the most impersonal, the world ever saw?"

"No, I cannot. Give me a chance on one spot of earth free from the corruption of your present system, and I'll show you that man is a child of God, that deep in every human soul is planted the sense of brotherhood, justice, and human fellowship."

"And you will abolish private property?"

"Except what each man earns or makes for himself."

The Colonel laughed aloud.

[101]"Can he earn a wife, or make one for himself?"

"No; nor own one as a slave."

"You can never abolish private property, my boy, so long as any man has the right to say, 'This woman is mine.' The home is the basis of modern civilization. If you destroy it the home will not survive. If the home survives it will kill Socialism. The two things can't mix."

Norman laughed.

"And you think capitalism is building ideal homes with its drudgery that kills woman—its poverty that starves the man and drives the girl to a life of shame?"

"Our conditions are not ideal, my son. But they are growing better with each generation. Because all homes are not ideal, you propose to abolish the institution. There are ten million homes in America. Perhaps a million of them are unhappy. Can we mend matters by destroying them all?"

"Socialism proposes to build the highest ideal of home ever seen on earth, founded on love—and only love."

The Colonel smiled sadly.

"I see I'm too late. You've got it bad. Socialism is a contagious disease, imported from the old world—a brain disease, the result of centuries of wrong and oppression. Its reasons [102]for existence in this country are purely imaginary. If it were possible for you to build the new State of Ventura of which you dream——"

"Dream! We are going to do it, I tell you, Governor! We have a hundred thousand dollars already pledged. We hold to-morrow night a great mass-meeting at which five thousand Socialists will be present. Four hundred thousand dollars more will buy the island and give a capital of three hundred thousand with which to begin."

"Then I can't persuade you to give up this madness?" the Colonel asked, tenderly.

"It's my life," Norman answered firmly.

The father slipped his arm around the tall, strong figure.

"All right! Remember now, from this moment on, one thing is settled for good and all. My boy's my boy, right or wrong, good or bad, wise or foolish——"

The Colonel's voice broke, and his grip tightened.

Norman looked out of the window, blinked his eyes, and said in low tones:

"I understand, sir!"

As Elena entered the library the two men fell suddenly apart as though ashamed of the weakness of affection before a woman.

The girl pretended not to have seen, but her face was radiant.

The Colonel paused as he turned to leave the room:

"You will keep up your newspaper grind, my boy?" he asked.

"No. I'll jump at the chance to do the big thing. I'll give my whole time to it."

"Well, I suppose you're right. The way to do a thing is to do it."

As the father passed Elena he softly whispered:

"Your face shines like an angel's!"

"I am very happy," was the low answer.

Norman hastened to her side, and seized both her hands.

"I owe this to you, my stately queen."

"He would have come to the same conclusion himself. I only hastened it a little by a suggestion," she replied.

[104]"I have my own idea about the way you expressed it," he said with a jolly laugh. "Look here, Elena, I hope you don't believe that I have been disloyal to you in my association with Barbara Bozenta?"

The girl straightened her superb figure, and broke into a laugh of mingled humour and irony.

"Well, I've a confession to make, Norman. I've been disloyal to you."

"You—disloyal—to me!" he gasped.

"Yes. I've felt of late as though you were a big, sick baby on my hands, and I've grown tired of the charge."

"Well, upon my soul!" he exclaimed.

"Our engagement is at an end."

"Elena!"

"I'll keep your beautiful ring"—she touched it affectionately—"for the memories that will always bind us as brother and sister. Besides, it will deceive your father for a while. He has enough to worry him just now."

Before Norman could pull himself together, or utter a protest, she had turned and left him gasping with astonishment.

Norman resumed his place in his father's home and began a systematic, persistent, and enthusiastic campaign to raise the funds to purchase the island of Ventura and establish the ideal Commonwealth of Man.

On the day of the big mass-meeting of Socialists, who had gathered from every state of the Golden West, Elena found her guardian seated alone on the broad veranda overlooking the Bay of San Francisco. A look of deep trouble clouded his strong face.

"You are worried?" she said, seating herself by his side.

"Yes, dearie," was the moody answer.

"Over Norman's meeting?"

"Yes. The boy's set his heart on this big foolish enterprise. His failure is a certainty. I don't know what may follow."

"You are sure he can't raise the money?"

"Absolutely. The disappointment will be a stunning blow to his pride."

"You know that if he did succeed in raising the [106]money, and establishing his brotherhood of man, the scheme would end in failure?"

"As clearly as I know I am living."

"Would you be sorry if the dream should be realized?"

"On the other hand, I'd shout for joy to find the human race capable of such a miracle."

Elena gently touched his hand. "Then, Guardie, there's but one thing to do," she said, with a deep, spiritual look in her blue eyes.

"What?"

"Give Norman a round million dollars to make the experiment."

The Colonel looked at her in amazement, and suddenly sprang to his feet, pacing the floor with feverish steps. He stopped at last before the girl and studied her.

"Don't let Norman know who gave the money," she continued. "It will be a big, noble, beautiful thing to do—and—it will save him."

"What a wonderful woman you are, Elena!"

He paused and looked at her steadily. "I'm going to do it!"

When Norman returned at midnight from the mass-meeting his face was flushed and his eyes sparkled.

[107]"It's done, Governor! It's done!" he fairly shouted.

"You mean the half million was subscribed?" the Colonel asked.

"Yes, and more!" he went on, excitedly. "We have succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. We had subscriptions for a hundred thousand. Fifty thousand more was subscribed at the meeting by the delegates, and just as we were about to adjourn Judge Clark, a famous lawyer, rose and announced the gift of a round million to the cause by a group of friends whose names he refused to make known."

"And what happened?" Elena asked.

"It's hard to tell exactly. The first thing I did was to jump over three rows of seats, grab the lawyer, and yell like a maniac. We carried him around the room, and shouted and screamed until we were hoarse. The scene was indescribable. Strong men fell into each other's arms and cried like children."

"And you could get no hint of the identity of the men who gave the money?" Elena inquired.

"Not the slightest. The deed of gift was made to me through the lawyer as trustee. I don't like one or two conditions, exactly, but it was no time to haggle over details."

"What were the conditions?" Elena interrupted, with a glance at the Colonel.

[108]"That the title to the island of Ventura should be vested in me personally for two years. And five hundred thousand dollars should remain a fund in my hands as trustee to administer its income for the same period. At the end of one year, or of two, I may transfer the whole to the Brotherhood, or reconvey it to the original donors. I think it gives too much power into one man's hands—but I'll hold it a sacred trust."

The young enthusiast's face glowed with thrilling purpose, and his eyes were shining with unshed tears, as he laid his hand on his father's shoulder and exclaimed:

"Ah! Governor, you didn't have faith enough in your fellow man! You said it couldn't be done!"

"I congratulate you, my son," the Colonel gravely said, "and I wish for you the noblest success."

"There's no such word as fail." Norman cried. "No sleep for me to-night! I return to the Socialist Club for a celebration. I just came to tell you personally of our triumph. The deed is done, and the Brotherhood of Man is a thrilling fact!"

With swift, joyous stride he threw himself into the hall and bounded down the steps.

"Suppose after all, Guardie, he should succeed?" Elena exclaimed.

[109]"They'll start with many things in their favour," the Colonel responded. "The island of Ventura is said to be the most fertile and beautiful spot of earth in the West. No adverse influences can reach them from without. Five thousand men and women, inspired by a sublime faith in themselves, may under such conditions surprise us. If Socialism is possible on an island of a hundred thousand acres, it's possible on a hundred thousand square miles, and its faith will conquer the world. We'll give them two years before we visit them, and see what happens."

"Suppose they do succeed!" Elena repeated, musingly.

The success which attended the launching of the new Brotherhood of Man with its million-dollar endowment fund was phenomenal.

The announcement that the books were ready for the enrollment of the pioneer group of two thousand who should locate the enterprise on the island of Ventura brought twenty-five thousand applicants.

The first shock Norman's faith in man received was to collide with the army of cranks who came in troops to join. Every creed of Christendom, every cult of the heathen world, every ism of all the philosophies of the past and the present came in droves. They got into arguments with one another in the waiting-rooms of the Socialist headquarters, and sometimes came to blows. Each conceived the hour for establishing his own particular patent for saving the human race had come. It was an appalling revelation to Norman to find how many of these schemes were at work in the brains of people who were evidently incapable of taking care of themselves.

[111]The first week he attempted to hear each one with courtesy and sympathy. But after wasting six days in idiotic discussions of preposterous schemes he was compelled to call on the Wolfs for advice.

Both Wolf and his wife had begun to call Norman "Chief" from the moment of their first burst of enthusiasm over the gift of the million. At times the young dreamer looked at the massive face of the older man with a touch of suspicion at this sudden acceptance of his premiership. And yet both Wolf and Catherine (she insisted that he call her Catherine) seemed so utterly sincere in their admiration, so enthusiastic in their faith in his ability, they always disarmed suspicion. Catherine's repeated explanation of this faith when Norman halted or hesitated was always flattering to his vanity, and yet perfectly reasonable.

"My boy, we take off our hats to you! A man can't do the impossible unless he tries. We didn't try. You did. The trouble with Herman, and with every man of forty, is that he loses faith in himself. We get careful and conservative. We lack the dash and fire and daring of youth. I envy you. I salute you as the inspired leader of our Cause—you've done the impossible! And you've just begun. We can only hope to help you with our larger experience."

[112]At the end of a week of futile and exhausting palaver with this army of cranks who infest the West, Wolf, carefully watching his opportunity, turned to Norman and said:

"I've been waiting for you to see things a little more clearly before I say something to you—I think it's time."

"What is it?" the young leader asked.

Wolf hesitated a moment as if feeling his way.

"Something he should have said sooner," exclaimed Catherine.

"There's but one way, comrade. Kick these fools into the street!"

"But don't we begin to weaken the moment we do a thing like that? We accept the brotherhood of man——"

"Of man, yes," the old leader broke in, "but these are not men—they are what might have been had they lived in a sane world. They are the results of the nightmare we call civilization. The kindest thing you can do for a crank is to kill him. You are trying to do what God Almighty never undertook—to make something out of nothing. You know, when he made Adam he had a ball of mud to start with."

"I'm afraid you're right," Norman agreed.

"When the Brotherhood is established with picked men," Catherine added, "we can take [113]in new members with less care. Now it is of the utmost importance that we select the pioneer group of the best blood in the Socialist ranks—trained men and women who believe with passionate faith what you and I believe."

"Then do it," Norman said, with emphasis. "I put you and Wolf in charge of this first roll. I've more important work to do in organizing the business details of the enterprise."

A look of joy flashed from Wolf's gray eyes into the woman's as he calmly but quickly replied:

"I'll do the best I can."

"You ought to know by name every true Socialist on the Coast," Norman added.

"I do, comrade, and I'll guarantee the pioneer group."

"Let all applicants for membership hereafter pass your scrutiny," were his final orders.

He rose from his desk with a sigh of relief as Barbara entered the room, her cheeks flushed with joy, her eyes sparkling with excitement from the ovation she had just received from the crowd which packed the corridor.

His first impulse was to ask her to accompany him to the country, rest and play for a day. His heart beat more quickly at the thought, but as the question trembled on his lips, his eyes rested [114]on Wolf's shaggy head bending over the piles of papers on his desk, and a grim fear shadowed his imagination. Elena's laughter suddenly echoed through his memory. He recalled his father's questions. A frown slowly settled on his brow, and a firm resolution took shape in his mind.

"No woman's spell to blind your senses! Clear thinking, my boy! You're on trial before the man who gave you life. You're on trial before the men whose faith gave you a million dollars to put you to the test. Success first, and then, perhaps, the joy of living!"

Barbara felt the chill of a sudden barrier between them, and looked at him with a little touch of wounded pride.

He merely nodded pleasantly and hurried from the room.

He gave his whole energies at once to the larger business of the enterprise. The title to the property was searched with the utmost thoroughness and found to be perfect. Enormous sums of money had been spent on the island by the bankrupt wild-cat real-estate company which had bought it in for improvement and exploitation. They had built a magnificent hotel with accommodations for one thousand five hundred guests, had planted vineyards, established a winery [115]planted vast orchards of plums, apricots, olives, peaches, and oranges, built flour mills, an ice factory, and had started a number of mining and manufacturing enterprises. When the bubble burst the company was bankrupt and the lawyers got the rest. A careful inventory showed to Norman that they had acquired a property of enormous value. The improvements alone had cost $1,250,000, and they were worth twice that sum now to the colony.

He chartered a corporate society, known as "The Brotherhood of Man," for the purpose of legalizing the new social State of Ventura when it had passed the experimental stage and he could surrender to it the title and money held in trust under the deed of gift. Two hundred thousand dollars was paid in cash for the island, and the remaining capital held for work. A steamer was purchased to serve the colony by plying between the island, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.

The Wolfs advised Norman that no mail service be asked or permitted.

"The reasons are many, comrade," the old leader urged. "The first condition of success in this work is the complete isolation of the colony from outside influences. If modern civilization is hell, you can't build a heaven with daily communication between the two places."

[116]"Every man and woman who enters," Catherine added, "must sign a solemn contract to remain five years, enlist as soldier, and communicate with the outside world only by permission of the authority of the Brotherhood."

"I see," laughed Norman. "I must have the Czar's power to examine suspected mail if treason or rebellion threatens."

"Exactly," cried Wolf.

"A large power to put in one man's hands!" Norman protested.

"There's not a man or woman going to that island who wouldn't trust you with life, to say nothing of a mail pouch," Catherine declared, with a look of genuine admiration.

"You think such drastic measures to prevent communication with the outside world will be needed?" Norman argued.

"Let us hope not," Wolf quickly replied. "But it's better to be on the safe side. The history of every experiment made in Socialism by the heroes and pioneers of the cause in the past shows that failure came in every case from just this source. We will start under the most favourable conditions ever tried. Our island will be a little world within itself. Cut every line of possible communication with modern competitive society, and we can prove the [117]brotherhood of man a living fact. Open our experiment to the lies and slanders of our enemies from without, and they can destroy us before the work is fairly begun. Our colony would be overrun with hostile reporters from the capitalist press, for example——"

"You're right," exclaimed Norman.

"Let every volunteer enlist in the service of humanity for five years," repeated Catherine, "agreeing to hold no communication with the world. Make that agreement one impossible for them to break, and our success is as sure as that man is made in the image of God. All we ask is a chance to prove it without interference."

"I agree with you," cried Norman, at last. "Five years' service, with every bridge burned behind us—we'll fight it out on that line."

A look of triumph came from beneath Wolf's shaggy brows as his eyes rested again on the smiling madonna-like face of the woman by his side.

On a beautiful Sunday morning in May, 1899, the steamship Comrade slowly swept through the Golden Gate with two thousand enthusiastic Socialists crowding her decks, shouting, cheering, laughing, crying, singing their joy and faith in the new world of human brotherhood for which they had set sail.

The flag of the republic flew from her stern because the law of the port of entry required it. But from her huge prow rose a slender steel staff, above the tips of her funnels and masts, on which flew the blood-red ensign of Socialism, while from every masthead huge red steamers fluttered in the sky.

At noon on the following day the eager eyes of the pioneers sighted the island of Ventura. At first a tiny white and blue spot on the horizon, and then slowly out of the sea rose its majestic outlines, until at last the ship drew in so close to the towering mountains of its shore line the colonists could almost touch the stone walls with their hands.

[119]The captain was evidently at home in the sparkling blue waters which rolled lazily against the perpendicular cliffs.

Norman had climbed over the piles of freight, cordage, and anchors, and taken his stand beside the flagstaff on the ship's prow, his soul enraptured with the thrilling adventure on which he had embarked.

He had made two trips to the island before, but never had he seen it rise from the sea in such matchless glory as to-day.

Far up in the sky loomed the mountain peaks still covered with snow, while the rich hills and valleys to the southward rolled laughingly in their robes of green.

Five miles down the coast the ship turned her nose inshore, and slowly ploughed her way through a narrow channel which opened between two hills. She quickly cleared the channel and rounded another headland, when a shout rang from her decks. Straight before them, across a beautiful landlocked bay, which formed a perfect harbour, rose the huge hotel, the home of the Brotherhood. The central building was crowned by two tall towers, and the long wings which stretched toward the sea pierced the skyline with a dozen minarets of quaint Moorish pattern. From the flagpole on the [120]lawn, from each graceful tower and each shining sun-kissed minaret, flew the scarlet ensign of Socialism.

When the ship swept in alongside the pier the building loomed from its hilltop higher apparently than the mountain range behind it.

Barbara clapped her hands as she ran to Norman's side.

"Look! Look at those flags! Aren't they glorious? Nobody will haul them down here, will they?"

Norman lifted his eyes and looked in silence for a moment. A stiff breeze was blowing from the southeast, and the two huge banners of scarlet stood straight from their staffs on the towers and seemed to fill the sky with quivering flame.

"Glorious!" he said, at last. "They speak the end of strife, the dawn of love and human brotherhood!"

The Wolfs had preceded them to the colony with a select band of enthusiasts, stored the first supplies, and set the place in order to receive as welcome guests the first shipload of pioneers.

When the throng of joyous, excited comrades had landed, they formed in line and marched up from the pier. The wide, white, smooth road led through a wilderness of flowers which [121]had grown in wild profusion since they had been abandoned two years before. The Wolfs led the procession, with Barbara and Norman by their side.

When they reached the big circle of scarlet geraniums in the centre of the floral court between the two wings of the great building they stopped, and Catherine began in her clear, thrilling soprano voice the Marseillaise hymn. The pioneers crowded around her tall, commanding figure and sang with inspired emotion. Every heart beat with high resolve. The heaven of which they had dreamed was no longer a dream. They were walking its white, shining streets. Their souls were crying for joy in its dazzling court of honour. The old world, with its sin and shame, its crime and misery, its hunger and cold, its greed and lust, its cruelty and insanity, had passed away, and lo! all things were new. The very air was charged with faith and hope and love. A wave of religious ecstasy swept the crowd. They called each by their first names. Strong men embraced, crying "Comrade!" through their tears. The older ones had made allowances for the glowing accounts of the island. They expected some disillusioning at first. Yet their wildest expectations were far surpassed. Such beauty, such grandeur, such wealth of nature, such magnificence [122]of equipment, were too good to be true, and yet they were facts.

The island of Ventura was enchanted. The impression it gave each heart of the certainty of success was the biggest asset of real wealth with which the colony began its history.

During the first enchanted days every man woman and child entered the strange new system with a determination to see only its beauty, its truth, its sure success. Service was the order of the day. Men who had never before worked with their hands asked the privilege of the hardest tasks.

The whole colony swarmed to unload the ship. They refused to allow the crew to touch a piece of freight or handle a piece of baggage.

The only difficulty Norman found was to systematize their work under the captain's direction.

The day following they "swarmed" again to clear the lawn of weeds and restore the labyrinth of walks and beds of flowers in the great court. Merchants exchanged the yardstick for the rake and hoe. Preachers laid aside their sermons to wield a spade, and returned from their tasks in the evening with song and laughter.

Among the women the spirit of sacrifice and enthusiastic service was even higher. Many who loved flowers begged the privilege of using the [124]pruning-knife and some even seized a hoe and worked with unwearied zeal.

Others, who had never seen the inside of their own kitchens, rolled up their sleeves, donned white aprons, entered the great cooking-room of the hotel, and made pots and kettles fly. Beautiful girls who had spent lives of comparative ease took turns in waiting on the tables, and all worked with a spirit of joy which robbed labour of its weariness.

By common consent Norman had assumed the general directorship of the colony, and by common consent the Wolfs were accepted as his chief advisers. This arrangement was formally voted on and unanimously approved at the first night's assembly of the Brotherhood in the big dining-hall of the building, which they now christened the "Mission House of the Brotherhood of Man."

On accepting the position of general manager of the Brotherhood the young leader rose and faced the people with deep emotion.

"Comrades," he began, in trembling tones, "I thank you for the confidence you have shown in me. I shall strive to prove myself worthy of your faith, and I hope within a year that we shall make such progress in the development of our new social system that I shall be able to convey then the full title to this glorious island to your permanent organization."

[125]A round of applause greeted this announcement.

"I'm sure our preliminary work will be completed within a single year. I am not a man of many words, but I hope to prove myself a man of deeds. I shall consult you in every important step to be taken, and for this purpose the General Assembly of the Brotherhood will be held in this hall every Friday evening. On Monday evening a ball will be given for the pleasure of our young people, and every Wednesday evening a social reception. Let us make these three evenings the source of inspiration for our daily tasks."

Norman closed his brief speech in a burst of genuine enthusiasm. Scores of young men and women crowded to the platform and grasped his hand.

When the last echoes of the evening's celebration had died away, Catherine led Barbara into her room.

Wolf sat quietly smoking by the window.

"What on earth's the matter?" the girl asked. "You drag me to your room half dressed, in the dead of night, and speak in whispers. I thought we'd done with the dark and scheming ways of the world."

"And so we have, my child," laughed Wolf. [126]His cold gray eyes lighted with sudden warmth as they rested on Barbara's dainty little figure. Its exquisite lines could be plainly seen through the silk kimono as she walked with languid grace and threw the mass of dishevelled curls back from her shoulders.

"Sit down, dear," Catherine said, with a smile. "We have something of the utmost importance to say to you."

"I am to go abroad as an ambassador to some foreign court. Don't say that—I like it here."

"No. We are going to propose that you establish a court here," Wolf interrupted.

"Establish a court!" Barbara exclaimed. "How romantic!"

"In short, my child, it's absolutely necessary for you to become, not merely the power behind the throne with our young Comrade Chief, you must assume the throne itself."

"But how?" the girl asked.

"As if you didn't know!"

"I honestly don't. My eloquence is of little use here. We are all persuaded. Besides, our Comrade Chief has acquired the habit of thinking for himself."

"Just so," observed Wolf. "And we want you to do his thinking for him."

"What do you mean, Catherine?" Barbara [127]asked, her brow suddenly clouding, as she looked straight into her foster-mother's eyes.

"That you must win young Worth."

"Deliberately set out to make him love me?" the girl exclaimed with scorn. "I'll do nothing of the kind."

"You must, my dear," Wolf pleaded earnestly. "It's all for the Cause. It's in this boy's power to make or wreck this great enterprise. We have a kingdom here whose wealth and power may become the wonder of the world. It may be wrecked by the whim of one man. A thousand difficulties must be faced before we can have smooth sailing. The one thing above all to be done is to secure from young Worth the deed to this island. He must be convinced of the success of the scheme, and he must be convinced before he faces some of the most serious problems that are sure to arise—problems which will demand a strong arm and a cool, clear head to handle. The boy means well, but he can never meet these issues. Win his love and everything will be easy. Slowly and patiently I will perfect the organization we must have to succeed."

"I fail to see the necessity of such a shameless act on my part. No man here is so enthusiastic as our young leader. He is sure to make the deed. You heard his promise to-night."

[128]"He intends to do it, I grant," Catherine argued. "But what Herman and I clearly see is that he will sooner or later be overwhelmed with difficulties. He may quit in disgust at the very moment when a strong policy could save the Cause. We want to be sure. He is a new convert. His enthusiasm is now at white heat. We are afraid of what may happen when it cools."

"With your great brown eyes looking into his," Wolf broke in, "and your little hand in his, it can't cool!"

"I don't think he cares for me in that way at all," the girl protested. "He has held himself quite aloof from me of late."

"All the more reason why your woman's pride should be piqued to make the conquest," urged Wolf.

"I have no such vulgar ambitions," was the short answer.

"Of course you haven't, child," Wolf said in serious tones. "We understand that. But we ask this of you as a brave little soldier of the Cause. It's the one big, brave thing you can do."

"I might have to let him kiss me," she said, with a frown.

"Well, he's a handsome youngster—it wouldn't poison you," laughed Catherine.

[129]"I hate it! I think I hate every man on earth sometimes," she answered.

Wolf laughed and looked at her with quiet intensity.

"Come, dear, you can do this for the Cause we both love," Catherine urged.

"I might have to let him put his arm around me——."

Catherine seized her hand, looked at her steadily for a moment, and slowly said:

"The woman who would not give both her body and her soul for the Cause of Humanity, if called on to make the sacrifice, is not worthy to live in the big world of which we've dreamed."

Barbara's face flushed and her eyes sparkled.

"You believe this?" she asked, sternly.

"With all my soul," was the fierce answer.

Barbara hesitated a moment, and firmly said:

"Then I'll do it!"

When Norman came down to the office next morning, the clerk handed him a note. A glance at the smooth, perfect handwriting told him at once it was from Barbara. He opened it with a smile of pleasant surprise and read with increasing astonishment:

Norman found her alone, seated beside a little table in the bower, her face wreathed in mischievous smiles.

She rose and extended her hand:

"Permit me to introduce you to your new secretary."

"I assure you my delight is only equalled by my surprise," he answered, with boyish banter.

"Yes, I thought it best to take you by surprise. Now that it's all settled, I trust we will get on [131]well." She looked at him with demure and charming impudence.

Norman burst into laughter.

"I'm sure we will!" he answered. "All I require is industry, patience, wisdom, tact, knowledge, sacrifice, absolute obedience, and a joyous desire to assume full responsibility for my mistakes!"

"All of which will come to me," she responded, with mock gravity. "Permit me!"

She led him to the chair she had placed beside the table, and poured a cup of coffee for him.

Norman watched her with keen enjoyment. "I've never seen you in this mood before," he said, quietly.

"You like it?"

"Beyond words! I'm afraid I'll wake up directly and find I'm dreaming. I'm sure now, when I look into your eyes, sparkling with fun, that you are a flower nymph, and that your home has always been a rose bower on the sunny slope of a southern hillside."

"Perhaps I'm just teasing you. Perhaps I won't work," she said, glancing at him from the corners of her brown eyes.

"Then you'll find it a serious joke," he answered, firmly. "Resignations are not in order. You have chosen your profession. As general [132]manager I have given my approval. That settles it, doesn't it?"

"If you are pleased, yes," she answered, gravely.

"I am more than pleased. I've been afraid to ask you to do this work for me—though I've had it in mind."

"Why afraid?"

"I don't know. I somehow got the impression lately that you didn't like me personally."

"How could you think such a thing!" she protested.

"Just a vague impression—caught, perhaps, from little gestures you sometimes made, little frowns that sometimes came to your brow, little flashes of hostility from your eyes."

"I didn't mean it, comrade!" she said, demurely, while her eyes danced and her mouth twitched playfully.

"And you've fully weighed the cost?"

"Fully."

"You know that you will be forced to spend most of your time in my office?"

"I'll try to endure it," she laughed.

"Without a frown or a hostile look?"

"Unless you provoke it."

Norman ate in silence for five minutes, listening to Barbara's girlish chatter while she bubbled over [133]with the spirit of pure joy. Her whole being radiated fun and laughter as the sun pours forth heat and light. He wondered where this magic secret of joyous womanhood had been hidden in the past.

"What a revelation you've been to me this morning," he said, musingly, as he rose from the table.

"How?" she asked.

"I thought you were all seriousness and tragedy, eloquence and pathos."

"We're in paradise now. The shadows have lifted."

"And I find you a little ray of dancing sunlight."

"So every girl would be if she had the chance."

"And we're going to give them the chance here, little comrade!" he cried, with enthusiasm.

"I'll help you!" she earnestly responded, extending her hand with a tender look into the depth of Norman's soul.

The first business before the Assembly of the Brotherhood was the permanent assignment of work. The enthusiasm which swept the Socialists through the first week of joyous life could not last. No one expected it. The novelty of their surroundings, the surprise and elation of every one over the beauty and richness of their newly acquired empire, carried the pioneers over the opening days as in a dream. It all seemed like a great picnic—like the long-hoped-for holidays in life of which they had dreamed and never realized, yet which somehow had come to pass.

But the time was at hand to face the first big, sober reality of the new social system. The dining-hall was packed. Every member of the Brotherhood was present.

The orchestra played a lively air in a vain effort to revive the spirit of festivity with which every meeting had hitherto buzzed.

But an evil spirit had entered the Garden of Eden, and joy had fled. Over every heart hovered a brood of solemn questions. What will be my [135]lot? Will I be allowed to choose my work? Or will they tell me what to do? Will it be dirty and disagreeable, or pleasant and inspiring?

Norman sat in his chair of state as presiding officer, bending over a mass of papers which Barbara had spread before him. She leaned close, and a stray hair from one of her brown curls touched his forehead. He trembled and stared blankly at the papers, seeing only a beautiful face.

"You understand?" she asked. "I've placed under each department the number of workers needed."

"Yes, yes, I understand!" he repeated, looking at her, blankly.

"I don't believe you've heard a word I've spoken to you," she said, reproachfully.

He was about to answer when the music stopped. Norman lifted his head with a start, rose quickly and faced the crowd.

"Comrades," he began, "the time has come for us to make good our faith in one another. You have proven yourselves brave and faithful in our struggle with the infamies of the system of capitalism. We call now for the heroes and heroines of actual work. We are entering, under the most favourable auspices, on the most important experiment yet made in the social history of the world. We are going to prove that mankind is one vast [136]brotherhood—that love, not greed, can rule this earth.

"In our temporary organization we wish to outline the forms on which we will later found the permanent State of Ventura. At present we will organize four departments—Production, Distribution, Domestic Service, and Education.

"I am going to ask each one of you, by secret ballot, to choose your permanent work."

A cheer shook the building.

Norman flushed with pleasure, and continued quickly:

"It shall be my constant aim as your general manager under our temporary organization to give you the widest personal liberty consistent with the success of our enterprise.

"Before preparing your ballots for choice of your work, I shall have to ask that each head of a family and each unmarried man and woman first pass by the platform and draw lots for the assignment of your rooms in our Mission House. There have been some complaints already, I'm sorry to say, on this question. Some wish to live on the first floor, some on the top, but everybody wants to live on the south side of the house with the glorious views of the sea, and nobody wishes to live on the north side. There is but one way to determine such a question in our ideal state. Fate must decide.

[137]"The numbers of each room and suite are in the basket. The bachelors will be assigned to the right wing, the girls to the left wing, the married ones to the centre of the building.

"Please form in line on the left and march toward the right aisle past the platform."

"Mr. Chairman!" called Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat.

Norman rapped for silence, and those who had risen resumed their seats.

"I protest, Mr. Chairman," continued the poet, "against the cruelty of such a process. The weak and the aged should be given their choice first."

"We left them all behind us!" Norman cried, with a wave of his hand. "There are no weak and aged in this crowd. We belong to the elect. We have found the secret of eternal youth."

Another cheer swept the crowd, the poet subsided with a sigh of contempt, and the people quickly filed past the platform and drew their lots for permanent rooms in the building. The larger suites had been subdivided, so that the entire pioneer colony of two thousand found accommodations under one roof.

When the crowd had resumed their seats, and the last cry of triumph over a successful draw and the last groan of disappointment over an unlucky lot had subsided, Norman rose and made the [138]most momentous announcement the Brotherhood had yet heard:

"In the Department of Production we need hod-carriers, bricklayers, carpenters, architects, teamsters, and skilled mechanics for the foundry and machine-shops, saw-mill, and flour mills. On the farm and orchard we need ploughmen and harvesters for grain and hay, gardeners, stablemen, and ditchers.

"In our Department of Domestic Service we need cooks, seamstresses, washerwomen, scrubbers and cleaners, waiters, porters, bell-boys, telephone girls, steamfitters, plumbers, chimney-sweeps, and sewer cleaners.

"In the Department of Education we need artists and artisans, teachers, nurses, printers and binders, pressmen and compositors, one editor, scientists and lecturers, missionaries, actors, singers, and authors.

"Now you each of you know what you can do best. Choose the work in which you can render your comrades the highest service of which you are capable and best advance the cause of humanity. Write your name and your choice of work on the blanks which have been furnished you."

The orchestra played while the ballots were being cast and counted.

[139]The chairman at length rose with the tabulated sheet in his hand and faced his audience.

"Comrades," he said, with a twinkle in his eye, "that old saying I'll have to repeat, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!' Beyond the shadow of a doubt we shall have to try this election again. If I didn't know by the serious look on your faces that you mean it I'd say off-hand that you were trying to put up a joke on me."

He paused, and a painful silence followed.

"Give us the ballot!" growled the Bard.

Norman looked at the list he held, and in spite of himself, as he caught the gleam of mischief in Barbara's eye, burst into laughter and sat down.

Wolf ascended the platform, glanced over the list and whispered:

"It's a waste of time. Call for the election of an executive council with full powers."

"We'll try once more," Norman insisted, quickly rising.

"Comrades, I'm sorry to say there is no election. We must proceed to another ballot, and if the industries absolutely necessary to the existence of any society are not voted into operation, we must then choose an executive council with full power to act. I appeal to your sense of heroism and self-sacrifice——"

[140]"Give us the ballot! Read it!" thundered the offended poet.

"Yes, read it!"

"Read it!"

The shouts came from all parts of the hall. The crowd was in dead earnest and couldn't see the joke.

Once more the young chairman raised the fateful record of human frailty before his eyes, paused, and then solemnly began:

"In the first place, comrades, more than six hundred ballots out of the two thousand cast are invalid. They have been cast for work not asked for. They must be thrown out at once.

"Three hundred and sixty five able-bodied men choose hunting as their occupation. I grant you that game is plentiful on the island, but we can't spare you, gentlemen!

"Two hundred and thirty-five men want to fish! The waters abound in fish, but we have a pound-net which supplies us with all we can eat.

"Thirty-two men and forty-six women wish to preach.

"We do not need at present hunters, fishermen, or preachers, and have not called for volunteers in these departments of labour.

"Three hundred and fifty-six women wish to go on the stage, and one hundred and ninety-five [141]of them choose musical comedy and light opera. I think this includes most of our female population between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five!"

A murmur of excitement swept the feminine portion of the audience.

"Allow me to say," he went on, "that the most urgent need of the colony at this moment cannot be met by organizing a chorus, however beautiful and pleasing its performances would be. We need, and we must have, waitresses and milkmaids. The chorus can wait, the cows cannot.

"I asked for one editor. One hundred and seventy-five men and sixty-three women have chosen that field. Seventy-five men and thirty-two women wish to be musicians."

"We have looked in vain among the ballots for a single hod-carrier, or ploughman, ditcher, cook, seamstress, washerman or washerwoman, stableman, scrubber, or cleaner. The Brotherhood cannot live a day without them. Remember, comrades, we are to make the great experiment on which the future happiness of the race may depend. Let us forget our selfish preferences and think only of our fellow men. I call for heroes of the hod, heroines of the washtub and the scrubbing-brush and milk-pail, knights of the pitchfork, spade, and shovel. Let hunters, fishermen, [142]preachers, and chorus-girls forget they live for the present.

"This is not a joke, comrades, though I have laughed. It's one of the gravest problems we must face. It has been suggested that we hire outside labour to do this disagreeable work for a generation or two. The moment we dare make such a compromise we are lost forever. We must solve this problem or quit. A second ballot is ordered at once."

Again the orchestra played, the ushers passed the boxes, the vote was taken, and all for naught. Not a single hero of the hod appeared. Not a single heroine of the washtub, the scrubbing-brush, or the milk-pail.

The young chairman's face was very grave when Barbara handed him the results.

She bent and whispered:

"Away with frowns and doubts and fears! There's a better way. A leader must lead. Their business is to follow."

Norman's face brightened. He turned to the crowd, and in tones of clear, ringing command announced:

"Comrades, I had hoped you could choose your work of your own accord. The attempt has failed. Six divisions of labour, each of them absolutely essential to the existence of society in any form [143]above the primitive savage, have not a single man or woman in them."

"We must elect an executive council of four who shall sit as a court of last resort in settling the question of the ability of each comrade and the work to which he shall be assigned. Under our temporary charter the general manager will preside over this court and cast the deciding vote. Nominations are in order for the other four. We want two men and two women in this council. In all our deliberations woman shall have equal voice with man."

The Bard made a speech of protest against the action about to be taken, in the sacred name of liberty.

"This act is the first step on the road to a tyranny more monstrous than any ever devised by capitalism!" he shouted, with hands uplifted, his long hair flying in wild disorder.

Tom Mooney, an old miner, who had met Norman and become his friend during a visit to one of his father's mines, sprang to his feet and made a rush for the excited poet. Confronting him a moment, Tom inquired:

"Kin I ax ye a few questions?"

"Certainly. As many as you like."

"Kin ye cook?"

"I cannot."

[144]"Kin ye wash?"

"No!"

"Kin ye scrub?"

"No, sir."

"Ever swing a hod?"

"I have not."

"Ever milk a cow?"

"No!"

"Are ye willin' to learn them things?"

"I didn't come here for that purpose."

"Then, what t' 'ell ye kickin' about?" Tom cried, and, glaring at the poet, he thundered fiercely:

"Set down!"

The man of song was so disconcerted by this unexpected onslaught, and by the roars of laughter which greeted Tom's final order, that he dropped into his seat, muttering incoherent protests, and the balloting for the executive council proceeded at once amid universal good humour.

A dozen names were proposed as candidates, and the four receiving the highest votes were declared duly elected.

The election resulted in the choice of Herman Wolf, Catherine, Barbara Bozenta, and Thomas Mooney.

Tom was amazed at his sudden promotion to [145]high office, and insisted on resigning in favour of a man of better education.

Norman caught his big horny hand and pressed it.

"Not on your life, Tom. You've made a hit. The people like your hard horse-sense. You will make a good judge. Besides, I need you. You're a man I can depend on every day in the year."

"I'll stick ef you need me, boy—but I hain't fitten, I tell ye."

"I'll vouch for your fitness—sit down!"

The last command Norman thundered into Tom's ears in imitation of his order to the poet, and the old miner, with a grin, dropped into his seat.

As Norman was about to declare the meeting adjourned, the steward ascended the platform and whispered a message.

The young leader turned to the crowd and lifted his hand for silence.

"Comrades, a prosaic but very important announcement I have to make. I have just been informed that there is no milk for supper. The cows have been neglected. They must be milked. I call for a dozen volunteer milkmaids until this adjustment can be made. Come, now!—and a dozen young men to assist them. Let's make [146]this a test of your loyalty to the cause. All labour is equally honourable. Labour is the service of your fellow man. Who will be the first heroine to fill this breach in the walls of our defence?"

Barbara sprang forward, with uplifted head, laughing.

"I will!"

"And I'll help you!" Norman cried, with a laugh. "Who will join us now? Come, you pretty chorus-girls! You wouldn't mind if you carried these milk-pails on the stage in a play. Well, this is the biggest stage you will ever appear on, and all the millions of the civilized world are watching."

A pretty, rosy-cheeked girl joined Barbara.

An admirer followed, and in a moment a dozen girls and their escorts had volunteered. They formed in line and marched to the cow lot with Norman and Barbara leading, singing and laughing and swinging their milk-pails like a crowd of rollicking children.

When they reached the pasture where the cows were herded, Norman asked Barbara, with some misgivings:

"Honestly, did you ever milk a cow?"

"Of course I have," she promptly replied. "I spent two years on a farm once. Do you think [147]I'd make a fool of myself trying before all these kids if I hadn't?"

"I didn't know but that you made a bluff at it to lead the others on. What can I do, for heaven's sake?"

Norman looked at her in a helpless sort of way while Barbara rolled up her sleeves. For the first time he saw her beautifully rounded bare arm to its full length. He stood with open-eyed admiration. Never had he seen anything so white and round and soft, so subtly and seductively suggestive of tenderness and love.

"For heaven's sake, what do I do?" he repeated, blankly.

"Get some meal in that bucket for my cow, and see that her calf don't get to her—I'll do the rest."

Norman hustled to the barn with the other boys, got his bucket of meal, placed it in front of the cow Barbara had selected, and stood watching with admiration the skill with which her deft little hands pressed two streams of white milk into the bucket at her feet.

"Goodness, you're a wonder," he cried, admiringly. "But where's the calf I'm supposed to be watching?"

"I think that's the one standing close to the gate in the next lot watching me with envy. The [148]first time the gate's opened he'll jump through if he gets half a chance—so look out!"

"I'll watch him," Norman promised, without lifting his eyes from the rhythmic movement of the bare white arms.

He had scarcely spoken when a careless boy swung the gate wide open, and the lusty calf, whose soft eyes had been watching Barbara through the fence, made a break for his mother. In a swift, silent rush he planted one foot in Barbara's milk-pail, knocked her over with the other, switched his tail, and fell to work on his own account without further concern. It was all done so suddenly it took Norman's breath. He sprang to Barbara's side and helped her to her feet.

Norman grabbed the calf by the ear with one hand and by the tail with the other, and started toward the gate.

The animal suddenly ducked his head, plunged forward, jerked Norman to his knees, and dragged him ten yards before he could regain his feet. The young leader rose, tightened his grip, and started with a rush toward the gate, but the calf swerved in time to avoid it, gaining speed with each step, and started off with his escort in a mad race around the lot, galloping at a terrific speed, bellowing and snorting at every jump.

[149]The others stopped their work to laugh and cheer as round and round the maddened little brute flew with the tall, heroic leader galloping by his side.

Norman had no time to call for help. He couldn't let go and he couldn't stop the calf.

As he made the second round of the lot, upsetting buckets, smashing milk-pails, and stampeding peaceful cows, a boy yelled through the roars of laughter:

"Twist his tail! Twist his tail an' he'll go the way you want him!"

Norman misunderstood the order, loosened the head and grabbed the tail with both hands. With a loud bellow the calf plunged into a wilder race around the lot, dragging his tormentor now with regular, graceful easy jumps. He made the rounds twice thus, single file, amid screams of laughter, suddenly turned and plunged headlong through an osage hedge, and left Norman sitting in a dusty heap on the ground among the thorns. He rose, brushed his clothes sheepishly, and looked through the hedge at the calf which had turned and stood eyeing him now with an expression of injured innocence.

Barbara came up, wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.

"I've learned something new," Norman quietly [150]observed. "All labour may be equally honourable. It's not equally expedient. I wish you'd look at that beast eyeing me through the fence! It's positively uncanny. I believe he's possessed of the devil. I don't wonder at that belief of the ancients. I've tackled many a brute on the football field—but this is one on me!"

The brilliant young leader of the new moral world led the procession of milkmaids back to the house as the shadows of evening fell, a sadder but wiser man for the day's experience.

Three members of the executive council, Norman, Barbara, and Tom, began at once the task of assigning work. The problems which immediately faced the council were overwhelming, but they were urgent and could admit of no delay. The absolute refusal of every member of the Brotherhood to do the dirty and disagreeable work brought at once two issues to a crisis. Either labour must be voluntary or involuntary. The people who did this work must be induced to agree to perform it or they must be forced to do it by a superior authority without their consent.

They could only be led to choose this work by inducements of an extraordinary nature—the payment of enormously high wages and the shortening of each day's work to a ridiculous minimum.

If wages were made unequal, the old problem of inequality would remain unsolved. For equal wages no man would lift his hand.

Confronted by this dilemma the executive [152]council decided at once to fix wages on an unequal basis rather than reduce its unwilling members to a condition of involuntary labour, which is merely a long way to spell slavery.

When this decision was announced, Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, once more lifted his voice in solemn protest:

"I denounce this act in the name of every principle which has brought us together," he cried, with solemn warning. "You have established a system far more infamous than the unequal wages of the old society where the law of the survival of the fittest is the court of last resort. You have opened the door of fathomless corruption by substituting the whim of an executive council for the law of nature. It is the beginning of jealousy, strife, favouritism, jobbery, and injustice."

"Then what's a better way?" Old Tom asked, with a sneer.

"It's your business to find a better way," cried the man of visions.

Tom glared at the poet with a look of fury and Norman whispered to the old miner:

"Remember, Tom, you're sitting as a judge in the Supreme Court of State!"

"Can't help it. I never did have no use for a fool. Ef he can't tell us a better way, let 'im shet up."

[153]Barbara pressed Tom's arm, and he subsided.

The court at once entered into the question of wages for domestic service.

It had been agreed, at the suggestion of the Wolfs, that they should spend their time in quietly investigating the qualifications of each member of the Brotherhood for the work to be assigned, and make their reports in secret to the majority of the court, which should sit continuously until all had been decided.

Neither Norman, Barbara, nor the old miner suspected for a moment the deeper motive which Wolf concealed behind this withdrawal from the decision of these cases. They found out in a very startling way later.

The chief cook demanded a hundred dollars a month.

Old Tom snorted with contempt. Norman smiled and spoke kindly:

"Remember, Louis, you only received $75 a month in San Francisco. Here the Brotherhood provides every man with his food, his clothes, and his house. Wages are merely the inducement used to satisfy each individual that labour may still be done by free contract, not by force."

"Well, it'll take a hundred a month to satisfy me," was the stolid reply. "I didn't come here to cook. I could do that in the old hell we lived [154]in. I came here to do better and bigger things. I can do them, too——"

"But we've fixed the salary of the general manager at only seventy-five dollars a month, and you demand a hundred?"

"I do, and if the general manager prefers my job, I'll trade with you and guarantee to do your work better than it's being done."

"Yes, you will!" old Tom growled, as he leaned over Barbara and whispered to Norman.

"Make it thirty dollars a month, and if he don't go to work—leave him to me, I'll beat him till he does it."

"No, we can't manage it that way, Tom. We must try to satisfy him."

"Hit's a hold-up, I tell ye—highway robbery—the triflin' son of a gun! Don't you say so, miss?" Tom appealed earnestly to Barbara.

"We must have cooks, Tom—and we want everybody to be happy."

"Make him cook, make him—that's his business—I'd do it if I knowed how. He's got to take what we give 'im. He can't git off this island. He enlisted for five years. If he deserts, court-martial and shoot him."

In spite of old Tom's bitter protest, Norman and Barbara succeeded in persuading the chief cook to accept eighty-five dollars a [155]month—an advance of ten dollars over the highest wages he had ever received before.

When the eighteen assistant cooks lined up for the settlement of their wages a new problem of unexpected proportions was presented. They had listened attentively to the case of the chef, and their chosen orator presented his argument in brief but emphatic words:

"We demand the exact wages you have voted the chef."

"Well, what do ye think er that?" old Tom groaned to Norman. "Hit's jist like I told ye. Hit's a hold-up."

"We must persuade them, Tom," the young leader replied.

"Let me persuade 'em!" the old miner pleaded.

"How?" Barbara asked, with a twinkle in her brown eyes.

"I'll line 'em up agin that wall and trim their hair with my six-shooter. I won't hurt 'em. But when I finish the job I'll guarantee they'll do what I tell 'em without any back talk. You folks take a walk and make me Chief Justice fer an hour, and when you come back we'll have peace and plenty. Jest try it now, and don't you butt in. Let me persuade 'em!"

Norman shook his head.

"Keep still, Tom! We must reason with them."

[156]"Ye 're wastin' yer breath," the miner drawled in disgust.

"Don't you think, comrades," Norman began, in persuasive tones, "that your demands are rather high?"

"Certainly not," was the prompt reply. "We come here to get equal rights. We don't want to cook. I'm a born actor, myself. I expected to play in Shakespeare when I joined the Brotherhood. Anybody that wants this job can have it. If we do your hot, dirty, disgusting, disagreeable work while the others play in the shade we are going to get something for it."

"Even so," the young leader responded, "is it fair that an assistant cook should receive equal wages with the chef?"

"And why not? Labour creates all value. The chef's a fakir. We do all the work. He never lifts his hand to a pot or pan. He struts and loafs through the kitchen and lords it over the men. Let him try to run the kitchen without us, and see how much you get to eat! We stand on the equal rights of man!"

"But my dear comrade——"

"Don't use them words," old Tom pleaded, "jest let me make a few remarks——"

Barbara pinched Tom's arm and he subsided.

"Can't you see," Norman went on, "that we [157]are paying the chef for his directive ability, for his inventive genius in creating new dishes and making old ones more delicious? You but execute his orders."

"We stand square on our principles. Labour creates all values. The chef never works. We make every dish that goes to the table. If it has any value we make it. We demand our rights!"

The court agreed on fifty dollars a month, and the men refused to consider it.

"We prefer to work in the fields, the foundry, the machine-shop, the mills, the forests, anywhere you like except the kitchen. Let the chef do your work. Good day!"

They turned and marched out in a body and sat down in the sunshine.

In vain Norman argued and pleaded. They stood their ground with sullen determination.

A final clincher which the young leader could not evade always ended the argument. The spokesman came back to it with dogged persistence:

"What did you mean, then, when you've been drumming into our ears that labour creates all value? We do all the work, don't we?"

The upshot of it was the eighteen assistant cooks marched back into the hall, stood before the judges, and all were granted equal wages with the chef.

[158]Whereupon the chef sprang to his feet and faced the court with blazing eyes.

"You grant these chumps—these idiots—wages equal to mine? Not one of them has brains enough to cook an egg if I didn't tell him how. Their wages equal to mine. I resign!"

Tom spoke vigorously:

"Now will ye leave him to me?"

Norman and Barbara looked at each other in angry and helpless amazement.

The old miner leaped to his feet, made his way down from the platform, and with two swift strides reached the chef. He leaned close and whispered something in the rebel's ear. There was a moment's hesitation and the chef turned, signalled to his assistants, and amid cheers marched to the kitchen.

Tom resumed his seat beside Barbara with a smile, quietly saying:

"That's the way to do business, ladies and gentlemen!"

"What did you say to him?" Barbara asked.

"Oh, nothin' much," was the careless answer.

"I hope you didn't threaten him, Tom?" Norman asked with some misgiving.

"Na—I didn't threaten him. I spoke quiet and peaceable."

"But what did you tell him?" the young leader persisted.

[159]"I jest told him I'd give him two minutes ter git back ter the kitchen or I'd blow his head off!"

"I'm afraid our table will feel the effects of that remark, Tom," Barbara said, doubtfully.

Next to the question of cooks the most urgent issue to be settled was the case of the scrubbers, cleaners, and drainmen. The women who had been assigned to the tasks of scrubbing the floors, washing the windows and dishes, had watched the triumphs of the cooks with keen appreciation of their own power. It was easy to see that the more disagreeable and disgusting the character of the work, the more extravagant the demands which could be made and enforced. The scrubbers and dishwashers boldly demanded one hundred dollars a month and six hours for a working day, and refused with sullen determination to argue the question.

To Barbara's mild and gentle protest their answer was complete and stunning:

"You have assigned us this dirty job. Do you want it at any price?" asked their orator. "I'll take yours without wages and jump at the chance."

Tom lost all interest in the proceedings and drew himself up in a knot in his chair. Now and then a growl came from the depths of his throat.

[160]Once he was heard to distinctly articulate:

"This makes me tired."

The court begged and pleaded, cajoled, argued in vain with the stubborn scrubwomen. Not an inch would they move in their demands. The floors were becoming unspeakably filthy. They had not been scrubbed since the arrival of the colony.

Norman turned to Barbara.

"Put the question solemnly to ourselves—we don't want the job at any price, do we?"

"I couldn't do it!" she admitted, frankly. "Then what's the use? We must be fair. It's worth what they ask."

The court granted the demands and the scrubwomen and dishwashers marched to the kitchen and once more the chef tore his hair and cursed the fate which brought him to such disgrace as to work with stupid subordinates at equal wages and gaze on dishwashers and scrubwomen whose wages exceeded his own.

The climax of all demands was reached when the drainman demanded a hundred and fifty dollars a month and four hours for each working day.

Norman looked at him in dumb confusion. He knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth and he had no answer.

[161]The drainman bowed low in mock humility, but the proud wave of his hand belied his words.

"My calling was a humble one in the old world, Comrade Judges," he said. "I came here to climb mountain heights and find my way among the stars. You have sent me back to the sewers. I always felt that I had missed my true calling. I've always wanted to be a poet——"

The Bard shook his mane and groaned.

"I don't want this job at any price. But the sewers are choked. They have not been cleaned for two years. It must be done. I've named my price. I'll gladly yield to any man who envies my luck. If such a man is here let him speak—or forever hereafter hold his peace."

With a grandiloquent gesture the drainman swept the crowd with his eye, but no man responded.

The court granted his demand.

The Bard leaped once more to his feet and entered his protest. This time old Tom listened with interest. His concluding sentence rang with bitter irony:

"Against these absurd decisions I lift my voice once more in solemn protest. We came to this charmed island to abolish all class distinctions. You have destroyed the old classes based on culture, achievement, genius, wealth, and power. [162]You have created a new aristocracy on whose shield is emblazoned—a dish-rag and scrubbing-brush encircled by a sewer pipe! I make my most humble bow to our new king—the drainman! I hail the apotheosis of the scrubwoman!"

"Say, you give me a pain—shut up" thundered Tom.

The singer collapsed with a sigh and the crowd laughed.

The foreman of the farm brought two men before the court and asked for important instructions.

"Comrade Judges," he began, "I had two men assigned to me a week ago whom I don't want and won't have at any price. I return them to the Brotherhood with thanks. You can do what you please with them."

"What's the matter?" Norman asked, with some irritation.

The foreman shoved and kicked a man in front of the judges.

"This fool——"

"You must not use such language, Mr. Foreman," Barbara interrupted.

"I beg your pardon, Comrade Judges," he apologized. "This coyote I put on a mowing-machine yesterday. He said he knew how to run it. He broke it on a smooth piece of ground [163]the first hour. I gave him another and he wrecked it before noon. It will take the labour of five men two days to repair the damage he has done. I don't want him at any price."

"What have you to say?" Norman asked the accused.

"It wasn't my fault. The thing broke itself."

"But how did it happen twice the same day, sonny?" Tom asked.

"I dunno. Hit jist happened," was the dogged answer.

"I've another scoundrel——"

"You must not use such language," Barbara broke in.

"Again begging the pardon of Comrade Judges," the foreman continued: "This dog"—he kicked another slovenly looking lout before the judges—"tore to pieces the shoulders of two pairs of horses with careless harnessing before I found him and kicked him out of the stables. Those four horses can't work for a month. We'll have to pay at least $500 for two teams right away to take their places, or lose a crop of hay."

Tom glared at the culprit.

"What did ye ruin them horses' shoulders fer?"

"I didn't know it," was the sulking answer.

[164]"He's a liar!" cried the foreman. "He put the same collars on their galled necks three days in succession and beat them unmercifully when they couldn't pull the load."

"What do you say, Tom?" Norman asked.

The old miner glared at the last culprit and his grim mouth tightened:

"Wall, you kin do as ye please, but any man that'll abuse a hoss will commit murder. I'd put the fust one in the cow lot to shovellin' compost. This one I'd quietly lynch—no public rumpus about it—jest take 'im down by the beach, hang 'im to one of them posts on the pier, shoot 'im full of holes, and drop 'im into the sea to be sure he don't come back to life."

Norman conferred with Barbara a moment and rendered the decision:

"Mr. Foreman, the first man is transferred from the field machinery to the compost-heap in the barnyard. The second man who disabled the horses will assist in cleaning the sewers. Their wages will remain the same as before."

A round of applause greeted this decision.

The Bard renewed his attack with unusual zeal. Standing before the court and shaking his long hair he cried:

"At last the climax of tyranny! Two comrades condemned without a jury and without [165]defense! I congratulate you. In one day you have established an aristocracy of filth and created a penal colony without a hearing or appeal. We are making progress."

The old miner grunted, Barbara smiled tenderly at Norman, and the court adjourned.

Norman found it necessary for the executive council to sit continuously for the adjustment of disputes and the settlement of new problems which arose at every step of progress in the new moral world.

He had condemned the sins of the old world of capitalism with cocksure certainty. Now that he had been made a supreme judge with power to adjust the rights and wrongs of his fellow man, he was appalled at the magnitude of the task of substituting an ideal for the reign of natural law under which civilization had been slowly evolved.

There were two men in the Brotherhood whom he grew early to hate with cordial, thorough, murderous hatred—Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, who always denounced every decision as unjust, and a tall, hooked-nosed, stoop-shouldered, scholarly looking man named Diggs, who invariably sat near him and at every conceivable opportunity asked questions. These questions were always put in an innocent, friendly [167]way, but when Diggs looked at him through his gleaming spectacles Norman always got the impression that an imp of the devil had suddenly popped up through the floor.

The first day after the general assignment of work Diggs rose before the council, adjusted his glasses, and drew a piece of paper from his pocket. Norman knew before he spoke that the document bristled with questions. Diggs's glasses had always fascinated him, but to-day they seemed of unusual thickness and enormous size, and their concave surfaces seemed to flash light from a thousand angles.

Diggs adjusted them on his hook-nose with deliberation and glanced carefully over his notes before speaking.

Norman turned to Barbara with a sigh.

She pressed his hand in silent sympathy.

"Don't worry!" she whispered.

Norman's breath quickened as he answered the pressure of the soft, warm fingers but he managed to move his chair and break the effects of her spell without revealing to her the effort it cost. Each hour of their association he felt the cords he dare not try to break tighten about his heart. He determined each day to put the thought from him. Over and over again with grim resolution he repeated his vow:

[168]"I'll keep a clear head. I've got to decide this issue on its merits. I owe it to my generous friends who made it possible."

He had avoided her for the last few days. She guessed the cause intuitively and knew that he was fighting with desperation to escape the net she was slowly weaving about him. She began to watch the struggle now with a curious fascination in which cruelty and tenderness were equally mixed. The idea of surrendering her own heart had never once entered her pretty head.

Her life had been lived in a strange war with human society. Man had always appeared to her imagination as an enemy. She had never trusted one—least of all Wolf, the big, impassive animal who had dominated the life of her foster-mother.

With deliberate and cruel art she had set out to master the heart of the man who sat by her side. The task was accepted as part of her work. She had enlisted as a soldier in the Cause. She had received the orders from headquarters. When the deed was done she would turn to a greater task. She had expected to be bored by his idiotic love making. Now her curiosity was beginning to be piqued by his silence. She began vaguely to wonder each moment what [169]kind of pictures she was making in his mind. Her brown eyes searched the depths of his soul in a dumb way that sent the blood rushing to Norman's heart, but each time he had eluded her.

He sat in moody silence now, giving no response to her words of cheer. She roused him from his reverie with a plaintive protest.

"What's the matter? Have I, too, offended?"

He turned quickly and crushed her hand in his strong grasp:

"For heaven's sake don't you get into the habit of asking me questions! How could you offend? Your face is my lighthouse set on the cliffs, calm, serene, joyful. I couldn't get through a day without you."

A smiling answer was just trembling on her lips when Diggs began to speak.

"Now for the human interrogation point," Barbara laughed.

"Comrade Judges," Diggs began, with guileless good humour, "while we are shaping the form of our ideal State for its permanent organization I wish to submit some questions which may help us in our search for truth."

"Questions," Norman whispered, "which any fool can ask, but the angels of God can't answer."

"But we will answer them!" she flashed, with defiant courage.

[170]"We agree," Diggs went on, "that society must be governed in some way. There must be rulers, but how shall we choose our rulers, and with what powers shall we clothe them? We can begin to see that the head of our social system must at times exercise the full powers of the State. Into whose hands can this enormous power be entrusted, and how shall he be called to account?"

Diggs paused, and Norman flushed at this question, for he took it as a personal thrust. He had occasion to change his mind later.

"How can we," the questioner went on, "retain our democratic liberties as law makers as we grow in numbers? Now we can all meet in general assembly. When the State numbers even five thousand this will not be possible. Will not our politics become even more corrupt than the old system, seeing how enormous the power over the smallest details of life which these legislators possess?

"As our society grows—and thousands are now clamouring for admission—how is wealth to be distributed? Who shall determine, in this larger society, who shall be common labourers, who poets, artists, musicians, preachers, managers? Who shall appoint editors? And who shall call them to account if they publish treason against the State? What shall be done with the [171]ever-increasing number of the lazy, dishonest, and criminal members of the community?

"Who shall determine how much mental work is equivalent to so much manual labour, seeing how vast is the difference in the value of one man's brain product over another's? How can men who are not artists, poets, or musicians determine the value of such work? Or how can one poet be just to his rival if he be made the judge? When our theatre is opened, who shall select the actors? Who shall decide whether they are incompetent? Who shall decide on the selection of the star? What shall be done with an actor, for example, who should spit in the face of a judge deciding adversely? Suppose a man offends the judge? Shall he be punished? If so, who shall do it?

"How can we prevent a man from losing his wages playing poker with his neighbour if he does so joyfully?

"What shall be done with a man who works outside regular hours and accumulates a vast private fortune?"

"Say, ain't you worked your jaw overtime now?" old Tom broke in rudely. "We'll take them things up when we come to 'em. We got somethin' else to do now—set down!"

"These are only friendly suggestions for thought [172]as we develop our ideal," Diggs answered, with smiling good nature, as he resumed his seat.

"What makes me want to kill that man," Norman muttered to Barbara, "is the unfailing politeness and unction with which he asks those questions."

"Patience! patience!" was the low, musical reply. "These little things will all adjust themselves."

Methodist John pressed to the front and poured out to the judges a story of wrong and asked for justice.

"Miss Barbara," he began, in plaintive tones, "you was always good to me in the other world, but since we've got here even you don't seem the same. Everybody's hard and cold. They hain't got no sympathy here for a poor man. In the other world I missed my callin'—I was born for the ministry. I come here to serve the Lord. And now they make me work so hard I ain't even got time to pray. I ask for a licence to preach the gospel. Just give me a chance. They've put me to feedin' hogs and tendin' ter calves. I ain't fit for such work. I want to call sinners to repentance, not swine to their swill. I tell ye I've been buncoed. It ain't a square deal. I left the poorhouse to come with you to heaven and, by gum, I've landed in the workhouse——"

[173]"And ef yer don't shet up and git back ter yer work," Tom thundered, "you'll land in the hospital—you hear me!"

"I ain't er talkin' to you, you cussin, swearin', ungodly son of the devil," the old man answered.

"Come, come, John," Norman interrupted, as he held Tom back. "We can't grant your request. We are not ready to undertake religious work yet."

"Well, God knows ye need it!" John muttered, as the crowd pushed him away.

At the door Catherine greeted him as he passed out, whispered encouraging words, and sent him back to his tasks more cheerful. She had taken her stand thus each day; and, while Wolf was busy quietly mingling with the men outside getting the facts as to the progress of each department, the tall graceful woman of soft voice and madonna face was fast becoming the friend and sympathizer of each discontented worker. She had now assumed the task of peacemaker after each harsh decision had been rendered, and did her work with rare skill—a skill which promised big results in the dawning State of Ventura.

Uncle Bob Worth, an old Negro, bowed low before the judges. He had been a slave of Norman's grandfather in North Carolina and had joined the colony out of admiration for the young leader.

[174]"Marse Norman," he solemnly began.

"Don't call me 'master,' Bob," Norman interrupted. "Remember that we are all comrades here."

"Yassah! Yassah! Marse Norman, I try to 'member dat sah, but 'pears ter me dey's somefin' wrong bout dis whole 'comrade' business, sah! I'se er 'comrade' now but I'se wuss off dan I eber wuz. 'Fo' I come here I wuz er butler, and I wuz er gemmen—yas-sah, ef I do hat ter say it myself—and I allus live wid gemmens an' sociate wid gemmens. I come out here wid you ter be a white man an' er equal. Dat's what dey all say. I be er equal 'comrade.' I make up my mind dat I jine de minstrel band, pick de banjer, an' sing de balance er my life. Bress God, what happen. Dey make me a hod-carrier and make me 'sociate wid low-down po' white trash. I ain't come here ter be no 'comrade' wid dem kin' er folks. Dey ain't my equal, sah, an' I can't 'ford to 'sociate wid 'em. What's fuddermo, sah, carryin' a hod ain't my business—hit don't suit my health an' brick-dust ain't good fur my complexion, sah!"

Tom grunted contemptuously.

Norman smiled and shook his head.

"Sorry, Comrade Bob," he replied. "We haven't men enough to organize the minstrels yet. [175]We must rush the new building. We have thousands of new members clamouring to join. We have nowhere to house them."

"Yassah, an' I 'spec' dey'll be clamourin' ter unjine fo' long," old Bob muttered, as he passed on to be comforted by Catherine's soothing words.

Saka, the Indian, whom Colonel Worth had educated, had followed Norman. He demanded a return ticket to the Colonel's hunting lodge.

It was promptly refused. Catherine attempted to soothe his ruffled feelings. He snapped his fingers in her face and grunted.

The Brotherhood of Man saw Saka no more for many moons, but the crack of his rifle was heard on the mountain side and the smoke of his tepee curled defiantly from the neighbouring plains.

The chef appeared before the court in answer to numerous complaints about the table.

"I must have the law laid down for the tables, Comrade Judges," he demanded. "One man wants one thing and another refuses to eat at the table where such food is served. A dozen men and women ask only for bread, vegetables, and nuts. They refuse to eat meat. They refuse to allow me to cook it or any one else to eat it if they can help it. They make my life miserable. I want permission to kick them out of the kitchen. They [176]demand the right to inspect my pots and pans to see if meat has touched them. They must go or I go. I will not be insulted by fools. If you do not give me permission to kick these people out of the kitchen I will do so without permission. You can take your choice."

The cook mopped his brow and sat down with a defiant wave of his arm.

A woman who had been a leader of the W.C.T.U. pressed forward before the cook's demand could be considered.

"And I demand in the name of truth, purity, righteousness, justice, faith, and God, that no more wine be allowed on the table. I demand that we burn the wine house and issue an order to the cook never again, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to use a drop of alcohol in the food he serves to the Brotherhood——"

"And I also demand, Comrade Judges," the cook interrupted, "the right to throw that woman out of the kitchen and have her fined and imprisoned the next time she dares to interfere with my business. She got into the pantry yesterday and destroyed five hundred mince pies because she smelled brandy in them."

"Yes, and I'll do it again if you dare to poison the bodies and souls of my comrades with that hellish stuff!" she cried, triumphantly.

[177]"I'd like to know," the cook shouted, "how I'm to do my work if every fool in creation can butt into my business?"

"Softly! Softly!" Norman warned.

"I mean it!" thundered the chef. "This woman swears she will wreck the dining-room if I dare to place wine again on our bill of fare. I want to know if she's in command of this colony? If so, you can count me out!"

"And while we are on this point, Comrade Judges," spoke up a mild-looking little man, "I have summoned a neighbour of mine to appear before you and show cause why he should not cease to have sauerkraut served at breakfast. He sits at my table. I've begged him to stop it. I've begged the cook to stop cooking the stuff, but he bribes the cook——"

"That's a lie," shouted the chef.

"I saw him do it, your honours," the little man went on. "I'm a small-sized man or I'd lick him. I tried to move my seat but they wouldn't let me. I pledge you my word when he brings that big dish of steaming sauerkraut to our table it fogs the whole end of the dining-room. The odour is so strong it not only stops you from eating, you can't think. It knocks you out for the day."

"Is it possible," Norman inquired, "that there [178]is a human being among us who eats sauerkraut for breakfast?"

"There's no doubt about it, comrade," promptly responded a tall, strapping-looking fellow, with a dark, scholarly face, as he stepped to the front.

"That's him!" cried the little accuser. "I made him come. Told him I'd organize a party to lynch him if he didn't. He won't dare deny it. I can prove it."

"I have no desire to deny that I eat sauerkraut, you little ape," he replied with scorn. "I come of German ancestry, comrades. My great-grandfather helped to create this nation. He was a pure-blooded German. I inherit from him my personal likes and dislikes. Sauerkraut is the best breakfast food ever served to man. It is a pure vegetable malt. It is wholesome, clean, healthful, and keeps the system of a brain worker in perfect order. I eat it with ham gravy and good hot wheat biscuits. It is some trouble for the cook to prepare this particular kind of soft tea-biscuit for me. I paid him a little extra for this bread—not the kraut. I suggest to your honours that you make sauerkraut a standard breakfast diet as a health measure. They may kick a little at first, but I assure you it will improve the health and character of the colony. If this little chap who [179]accuses me were put on a diet of kraut for breakfast it might even now make a man of him. I not only have nothing to apologize for, I bring you good tidings. I proclaim sauerkraut the only perfect health food for breakfast, and I suggest its compulsory use. The man who sits next to me eats snails. I think the habit a filthy and dangerous one. If you are going into this question, do it thoroughly. Let us fix by law what is fit to eat, and stick to it. I'll back sauerkraut before any dietary commission ever organized on earth."

The council appointed a commission to conduct hearings and make a rigid code of laws establishing the kind of foods for each meal.

Again Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, rose, shook his long hair and cleared his throat.

Norman lifted his hand for silence.

"I anticipate the poet's words. You solemnly protest against the further establishment of a tyranny which shall dare prescribe your food from day to day. I grieve over the necessity of these laws and mingle my tears with yours in advance. But, in the language of a distinguished citizen of the old republic, 'we are confronted by a condition, not a theory.' The council stands adjourned."

The Bard poured his bitter protest into [180]Catherine's patient ears and left with a growing conviction of her wisdom.

The woman with the drooping eyelids stood watching his retreating figure while a quiet smile of contempt played about her full, sensuous lips.

Within a week it was necessary to appoint a commission to formulate an elaborate code of laws regulating various nuisances which had developed in the community.

A kitchen-boy insisted on playing a cornet in his room. He didn't know a musical from a promissory note but he swore he'd become a musician before he died. His efforts came near proving fatal to his neighbours before he was suppressed.

Several women had pet parrots. The people who lived near by strenuously objected. The parrots had to go.

A sailor had brought a monkey whose manners were not appreciated by any one except his master. The monkey had to go. Cats were arraigned for trial and a fierce battle raged over the question of allowing them in the building. The question was finally put to the popular vote in the assembly and the cats won by a good majority. But strict laws regulating the kind of cats, their number, and their care, were put into force.

[182]Dogs won by a large majority when they were finally put on trial.

The commission on nuisances had finally to make a code of laws regulating table manners and the conduct of all social gatherings.

The one question which all but precipitated a civil war was the problem of dress. Inequality of wages meant, of necessity, inequality of dress.

A desperate effort was made by a large number to force the community to adopt a uniform for both men and women. It was fiercely opposed. Every woman who believed herself good looking refused to listen to any argument on the subject.

It was necessary at once, however, to formulate some sort of code. A number of men had been coming into the dining-room in their shirt sleeves. Some of them apparently never combed their hair or changed their linen. A number of women had gotten into the habit of coming into the dining-room in loose wrappers of variegated colors and without corsets.

The Bard of Ramcat was particularly severe in his public criticism of these women in the general assembly of the Brotherhood.

"In the name of beauty, I protest!" he cried. "Beauty is an attribute of God. It is woman's first duty to be beautiful, and if she isn't, at least to make man think she is. I insist that she shall [183]have the widest liberty in the choice of dress. Only let her be careful that she is beautiful!"

The poet was heartily applauded, and a resolution was passed which embodied his ideas, approving the widest freedom of choice in dress, approving especially unconventional forms of dress, provided always the ideal of beauty was held inviolate.

In his speech advocating the immediate passage of the resolution the Bard urged every woman to outdo herself in the struggle for supreme beauty of appearance at the weekly ball on Friday evening.

His resolutions and speech bore surprising fruit.

When the festivities were at their height a crowd of fifteen pretty girls suddenly swept into the brilliantly lighted ball-room in tights! The sensation was so instantaneous and overwhelming the music stopped with a crash. The orchestra thought somebody had yelled fire.

The girls in their beautiful but unconventional dress tried to appear unconcerned. But even the Bard was appalled at the results.

The pretty young chorus-girls had taken him at his word. They had always cherished a secret desire to live in an unconventional real world, where they could have a chance to be [184]themselves, without the hideous skirts of conventional society veiling their beauty. They had brought these costumes with them and joined the new moral world in the firm faith that their ideal would be realized. It had come very slowly, but it had come at last.

They donned their beautiful costumes with hearts fluttering in triumphant pride. But they had huddled into a corner of the ball-room in a panic of fright at the insane commotion their honest efforts to promote beauty had caused. One by one every woman in skirts save Barbara and Catherine left the room. The married ones seized their husbands and pushed them out ahead.

Norman, who was dancing with Barbara, broke down and burst into a paroxysm of laughter.

Some of the girls began to cry, but others made a brave effort to face the crowd of eager, giggling boys who pressed nearer.

The Bard approached with a serious look on his noble brow, deliberately put on his glasses and surveyed the crowd.

"My dear girls," he began, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the sincerity and honesty of your efforts to express beauty in unconventional form, but really this is beyond my wildest expectation."

[185]Catherine drove the rude boys out of the room and closed the windows, while Barbara kissed the tears away from the hysterical innovators and led them back to their rooms.

The next morning the general assembly held an unusually solemn meeting at which it was voted by a large majority to settle at once and forever the question of dress by adopting a Socialist uniform of scarlet and white for the women, and for the men a dull gray suit with scarlet bands on the sleeve, a scarlet stripe and belt for the trousers.

The discussion was brief and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, protested in vain.

From the night of the ball at which the group of chorus-girls made their sensational entrance in tights, Norman had his hands full. Disorder had rapidly grown in the Brotherhood. Two distinct parties began to line up for a desperate struggle for supremacy, the one standing for the widest liberty of the individual members of the community, the other demanding the stern enforcement of law and order and the formulation of a complete and strict code of rules for the government of daily conduct.

Among the men assigned to various tasks there gradually appeared a number who slighted their work. From carelessness they drifted into utter incompetency and downright laziness. Groups of these loafers began to hang around the house daily.

When they had spent the last penny of their credit at the general store of the community, they began to steal. Not a day or night passed but complaints of thefts were made from every department of the colony. One of the most serious of [187]these burglaries was the robbery of the winery of an enormous quantity of the most valuable wines.

Drunkenness had already become one of the serious problems of the Brotherhood, and the right to buy of the steward had been denied a large number of men and several women. These people began at once to show signs of intoxication. It was plain that the thieves had hidden this wine and that they were carrying on a secret traffic with those to whom it had been forbidden.

With the increase of reckless drunkenness another evil grew with alarming rapidity, the carousing of boisterous men and women. One of them very quickly passed the limits of tolerance. She was in many respects the most beautiful girl in the colony, barely nineteen years old, with luxuriant blond hair, and big, wide, staring baby-blue eyes. She had with it all a smile so saucy, so winsome, so elfish, and yet so innocent, it was impossible for the average man or woman to think ill of her. To every appeal of Barbara she merely showed her pretty white teeth in a winsome smile, promised her anything she asked, and proceeded to do as she liked.

At last her room was declared an intolerable nuisance by a committee appointed to enter the complaint on behalf of her neighbours on the floor on which she lived. The night before this [188]committee appealed to Barbara two boys had fought a desperate fist duel in this room. The noise had roused the neighbours, and the case could no longer be ignored by the executive council.

Barbara was sent to this room with full power to deal with the offender.

"Good heavens," cried the girl, her big blue eyes opening wide with injured innocence, "how could I help it? They're both in love with me. I don't care a rap for either one of them, but they got to fighting, and I couldn't stop them. I threw a pitcher of water on them, but they kept right on. I'd have called the police, but there was none to call. It wasn't my fault."

"But my dear Blanche," pleaded Barbara, "can't you see that you are bringing scandal and disgrace into the colony?"

"It's not me!" the pretty lips pouted. "It's these old women who are talking. Let them shut their mouths and attend to their own business. I'm not bothering them."

"You deny the accusations they bring against your good name?" Barbara said, with some surprise.

"Of course I deny them," she snapped. "I've got to have some fun, haven't I? I can't help it that a dozen boys come to see me and nobody ever sees the old tabbies who lie about [189]me, can I? I can't help it that they are old and ugly, can I?"

Barbara had ceased to listen to the glib tongue, whose lying chatter tired her. She looked about the room with increasing amazement. It was stuffed with presents of every conceivable description. Costly rugs adorned the floor. Soft pillows filled the couch by the window. Dainty and expensive works of art adorned her mantel, and the richest and most beautiful underwear lay in a smoothly laundered pile on her luxuriant bed.

"And how did you get all these costly and beautiful things, my dear?" Barbara asked, with a touch of sarcasm.

The big blue eyes opened wide again with wonder.

"Why, the boys who are in love with me gave them. Why shouldn't they? I can't help it that they are foolish, can I? God made them so."

"And you accepted these rich and costly things in perfect innocence of the evil meaning others might put on them?"

"Of course! How can I keep their tongues from wagging? Life's too short. I have but one life to live. I can't waste it worrying over nothing."

[190]For the first time in her career Barbara stood face to face with naked evil—with a liar to whom a lie was good—a radiantly beautiful girl to whom shame was sweet.

For a moment the thought was suffocating. She looked out of the window at the infinite blue sea until the tears slowly blinded her. The first doubt of her theory of life crept into her heart and threw its shadow over the ideal of the new world she had built.

She took the girl's hand, slipped her arm around her neck, kissed the soft, shining hair, and sobbed:

"Poor little foolish sister! I'm afraid you've broken my heart to-day."

"I haven't done a thing! Honestly, I haven't!" the lusty young liar rattled on and on, in a hundred silly, vain protests, which Barbara never heard.

She left the room at length with a sickening sense of defeat, though the girl had promised her on the honour of her soul never again to give the slightest cause for complaint.

Many a day she had trudged through the streets of the great city, after hours of nerve-racking struggles with sin and shame and despair in the old world, but she had always come home at night with a heart singing a battle-hymn of victory. She knew the cause of all the pain, and [191]she had given her life to right the wrong. Nothing daunted her, nothing disconcerted her. In the end triumph was sure, and while she felt this there could be no such thing as failure.

She stood before the full meeting of the executive council, honestly reported the case, and for the first time tasted the bitterness of defeat, helpless, complete, and overwhelming. While she was talking a peculiar expression in Wolf's cold gray eyes suddenly caught her attention and fixed her gaze on him with a curious fascination and horror. Wolf was quick to note her look, recovered himself and smiled in his old fatherly, friendly way.

"Don't worry, comrade. We've got to meet and settle such questions. They are merely the inheritance of civilization. It will take a little time, that's all."

But as Barbara's gaze lingered on the heavy brutal lines of Wolf's massive figure and she caught again the gleam of his gray eyes a sickening sense of foreboding gripped her heart.

As questions of discipline became more and more pressing old Tom refused to sit as an active judge in the executive council.

Norman protested in vain against his decision to retire for a while.

"I can't do no good settin' thar listenin' to them fools," the miner declared. "They make me sick. Besides, ye all vote me down when I tells ye what to do, and things keep on goin' from bad to worse. Jest let me git out and move around among the boys a little. I think I can do some good. You folks is all too chicken-hearted to run this Brotherhood. Love and fellowship is all right, but ye've got ter mix a little law and common sense before ye can straighten the kinks out of this here community."

Norman gave his consent reluctantly, and was amazed at the end of a week to observe a remarkable improvement in the spirit of the colony. Loafers disappeared, stealing all but ceased, drinking and fighting were on the decrease.

One by one old Tom had taken the loafers with [193]him on a long walk up the beach. He was usually gone about an hour and always came back laughing and chatting with his friend in the best of humour. Invariably the loafer went to work.

In the same way he took a walk with each one of a crowd of wild, unmannerly boys, whose rudeness at the table and whose horse-play about the building had become unendurable. The effects of these walks seemed magical. Always the pair returned in a fine humour and the most marked revolution was immediately noted in the conduct of the offender.

Norman asked the old man again and again for the secret of his power.