Chewing gum, candy, popcorn, figs—even cigarettes—and Winona the first vice-president and recording secretary of Newbern's anti-tobacco league! War was assuredly what Sherman had so pithily described it, for she now sent the vender back to replenish his stock of cigarettes, and bought and bestowed them upon immature boys so long as her coin lasted. Their laughter was noisy, their banter of one another and of Winona was continuous, and Winona laughed, even bantered. That she should banter strangers in a public place! She felt rowdy, but liked it.
There was a call from the front of the train, and the group about her sprang to the platform as the cars began to move, waving her gracious, almost condescending adieus, as happy people who go upon a wondrous journey will wave to poor stay-at-homes. Winona waved wildly now, being lost to all decorum; waved to the crowded platform and then to the cloud of heads at the window above her.
From this window a hand reached down to her—a lean, hard, brown hand—and the shy, smiling eyes of the boy who reached it sought hers in something like appeal. Winona clutched the hand and gripped it as she had never gripped a human hand before.
"Good-bye, sister!" said the boy, and Winona went a dozen steps with the train, still grasping the hand.
"Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye—all of you!" she called, and was holding the hand with both her own when the train gathered speed and took it from her grasp.
She stood then watching other windows thronged with young heads as the train bore them on; she still waved and was waved at. Faint strains of the resumed chorus drifted back to her. Her face was hurting with a set smile.
She stumbled back across the platform, avoiding other groups who had cheered the passing train, and found sanctuary by a baggage truck loaded with crates of live chickens. Here she wept unnoticed, and wondered why she was weeping. Later, in her own train, she looked down and observed the white-ribboned badge which she had valiantly pinned above her heart that very morning. She had forgotten the badge—and those boys must have seen it. Savagely she tore it from its mooring, to the detriment of a new georgette waist, and dropped it from the open window.
That night she turned back in her journal to an early entry: "If only someone would reason calmly with them. Resist not evil!" She stared at this a long time, then she dipped a new pen in red ink and full across it she wrote "What rotten piffle!" That is, she nearly wrote those words. What she actually put down was "What r-tt-n piffle!"
To Wilbur Cowan, in recounting her fall from the serene heights of pacifism, she brazenly said: "Do you know—when that poor boy reached down to shake hands with me, if I could have got at him I just know I should have kissed him."
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur in amazed tribute.