"Alsace!" cried the French-Canadian. "Attendez, mais attendez; the great day come. Together we take her back. It is an obligation, Mossieu'. Vive la belle alliance!"
"Your people claim there isn't an alliance," Whitney said to Andrew.
"I don't know. This is certain: if our friend's attacked, we step into the ring."
There was a sudden movement in the crowd, which pressed closer upon the newspaper office opposite, and a cry was raised as a lighted car came clanging down the street:
"Hold that driver up!"
The car slowed, but still came on, until a well-dressed citizen stepped quietly in front of it.
"Stop!" he said. "You can't get through."
The car stopped and as the passengers got out, a window in the tall building opposite was opened. A bulletin board was hoisted in, and for the next two minutes the crowd stood silent and motionless. Andrew felt his nerves tingle and noted that Whitney's face was tense, though his interest in the matter could hardly be personal. There was something that stirred the imagination in the sight of the intent, quiet throng that awaited the result of a crisis not of their making. They had had no say in the quarrel that began far off in the obscure East; but one could not doubt that they meant to make it their own. Their stern gravity caused Andrew a half-conscious thrill of pride.
After all, they sprang from British stock and he knew what kind of men they were. He had seen the miles of wheat that covered the broken, prairie waste, cities that rose as if by magic in a few months' time, and railroads flung across quaking muskegs and driven through towering rocks, at a speed unthought of in the mother country. He had heard the freight-trains roaring through the great desolation between the Ottawa and the Western plains, where no traffic would ever be found, and had wondered at the optimism which, in spite of tremendous obstacles, had built eight hundred miles of track to link the St. Lawrence to the rich land beyond. These Canadians were hard men who tempered with cool judgment a vast energy and enthusiasm, and the mother country's foes would have to reckon with them.
There was a strange, dead silence, as the board was replaced and the bold black letters stood out in the lamplight. So far as Andrew could afterward remember, the bulletin read: