And so Dick, with one eye on Katie’s furtive wiping of her eyes, drank his coffee, wondering as he did it at the amazing intuition that affection gives. Katie and Mikey had discerned—so he told himself—what nobody in Sabinsport but Ralph knew, and he had said enough to Ralph to explain his understanding. What was it that ran from soul to soul and opened to the unlettered what was closed to the most highly trained, he asked himself. But they are Irish, and the Irish have a sixth sense—one that looks into hearts.
But it was not divination, it was simply the keen and affectionate eye of Katie on him through all those terrible August and September days at the beginning. She saw what Dick did not realize, the beaten stoop to his shoulder, the despairing look in his eye when he came back from his effort to enlist. Many was the night during the days of that first approach to Paris that Katie had gone home to tell Mikey, “He’s dyin’ of grief, he is. He looks at his paper in the morning and drops his head in his hands and groans. He don’t eat and he don’t talk. The big battle is killin’ him. I peeps in now and then to his study and he is sittin’ lifeless like, thinkin’ and thinkin’. Mikey, he’s dyin’ for love of France, could you beat it?”
And Mikey, much perplexed, watched his hero and took excruciating pains to keep the brakes on himself, not to do anything to worry Mr. Dick. When the battle was over and the Germans turned back, Dick’s joy was so great that Katie herself began to rejoice. For Katie Flaherty, the war dated from that first week of September, 1914. Also from then dated what was to become the dominating passion of her life—her hatred of Germany.
Mikey’s sudden departure was quickly known in Sabinsport, and Katie did not hesitate to make the most of the fact that he had gone for love of Mr. Dick. It had its romantic value, that runaway. It made Katie a town heroine. Certain well-to-do gentlemen in the banks, Cowder and Mulligan among them, sent her a purse. There was much talking to her in the streets as she did Dick’s marketing, and nightly on the porch of the little house on the south bank of the river where she lived a group of friendly neighbors came in to cry or to exult according to Katie’s humor.
Dick was not long in sensing that Mikey’s action was making opinion in Sabinsport, much as Patsy’s adventures in Belgium had done. The very children caught it, and Richard Cowder stopped more than once in his favorite South Side Alley to discuss with the “gang” what the runaway was probably doing at the moment. In reporting his conversations, he sometimes would shake his head, saying, “You know these youngsters are getting a new idea about running away—that it may be a glorious deed.”
The point at which the effect was most significant, in Dick’s judgment, was the wire mill. Practically all of the boys in the South Side Club belonged there. They were friends and companions of Mikey. His going away had sobered them and made them far and away more interested in the war. The most significant effect was the way in which they cooled toward a movement which had begun to make strong headway in the factories and mills, a movement in which Ralph was taking keen interest as he saw in it a possibility of reviving the opposition to munition making which had been destroyed by Cowder’s and Mulligan’s appeal to the mill. This movement was already beginning to crystallize into a new party, made up of workmen and farmers. It was called Labor’s National Peace Council. Nobody could tell just who started it in the mill, but Ralph had seized the idea and was working seriously for it.
“Where in hell did it come from?” Cowder asked Dick. “Not out of this town, I tell you, Ingraham. I know this town like a book. There’s no Labor Peace Council in it when there’s plenty of work. This scheme’s been sneaked in from outside, and it’s being fed on the sly. What I can’t make out is, Who’s doing it? It’s the same crowd that kept up the battle against munitions. I don’t believe it’s Otto. I’m watching him. It’s somebody in the plants.”
Dick had his notions. They were connected with an investigation he had been making on the quiet. His curiosity about where the boys in his club got the arguments they presented against munition making and selling had led him to look into the journals they read, particularly the foreign journals—Slovak, Bohemian, Italian, Polish. He discovered that they were all carrying a surprisingly similar series of articles, protesting on the highest moral grounds against the dragging of the workmen into such a business—making munition, forcing them to earn their bread by preparing destruction for their fellows, or going without it. He didn’t like it and spoke to Ralph, translating to him the selections that he had put his hands on.
“It’s the same hand that does this, Ralph; what do you think?”
“Why,” said Ralph, “I’ve had that stuff offered me. I know all about it. There’s a bunch of peacemakers in the East who are syndicating it, in the domestic as well as the foreign press, paying all the expenses. They say it’s their contribution to the cause. The agent offered it to me here. They would not give me the names of the philanthropists. I told the agent that I didn’t advertise justice, I advocated it. But, Dick, it’s all right. They’re just silly, mistaken in their way of getting at it. You cannot carry on advertising of this kind in this country but people get onto the source of it very soon, just as you have; and that puts an end to it. I told the man that offered me that stuff that would be the way of it.”