Dick thought she looked a little hurt, and he knew Reuben Cowder evaded when he answered, with a quick and warning look at him, “He’s in New York probably. I didn’t ask about him, I was so busy. I will telephone if you wish,” but Nancy said, “No, he must be away or he would have been out.”
It was quite as natural as everything else about it, but it raised a cloud. “She did not know, then, that Reuben Cowder had quarreled with Otto. She did not know there was a question in Sabinsport’s mind about his loyalty. And could it be that she cared for him? What more probable?” If the Reverend Richard Ingraham went home, marveling at the sweet and wonderful companionship so fully and naturally opened to him, there was a decided uneasiness running through his exaltation. Did Nancy Cowder care for Otto Littman? Would she understand the feeling about him? Would she know, indeed, anything of the stratagem and plots that the Germans had spun over the country, with what Dick felt was for the most part decidedly amateurish and bungling skill? Would she dismiss the suspicions which connected Otto Littman’s name with the intrigues as unfounded and unworthy? Did she care enough to defend him, womanlike, even if it was finally proved that there was a serious, nationwide, Germany-inspired conspiracy abroad and that he was connected with the mischief-making?
It was many months before he was to have satisfactory answers to these questions. And for the most part they lay at the bottom of his mind, only working their way for brief, if troubling, moments to the top. Life was too full, too insistent, too weighty, to give time for questions that did not require immediate handling.
He saw much of Reuben Cowder and his daughter. The unquestioning, affectionate acceptance of him as part of their life that had so rejoiced and overwhelmed him that first day, continued. It was made the more delightful by the entire naturalness of the Cowders’ relations with Sabinsport. Ralph and Dick discussed it again and again. The town took them in, and they accepted the town as if there had been no long black years when Sabinsport had openly scorned the man and his daughter, while it secretly feared him and envied her; or when Reuben Cowder hated them all with a Scotch hate because they so utterly misjudged his beautiful girl.
All of this seemed forgotten now—something childish, not worth recall, belonging to a day when men and women occupied themselves with lesser things. The town’s suspicions had been washed completely away by the story of Nancy Cowder’s noble sacrifice and brave endurance. They plumed themselves no little on the fact that she belonged to them. The change in Reuben Cowder, who, if he owned as much as ever of everything and ran it with as high hand as ever, did it smilingly and generously, wiped out fear and old enmities. And as for Nancy and her father, after you’ve been where they had been, resentment for neglect and misjudgment have no part in your soul.
And so the town came together in a way quite new to it. High Town and the “Emma,” Cowder’s Point, Jo’s Mills, the South Side and the War Board began to connect up as they never had before. It was one of the strange ways in which the Great War reached Sabinsport—stretching her mind to take in facts never before known to her, softening her heart to understand and sympathize where she had been ignorant and hard.
It was time that Sabinsport grew together, for the day was close at hand when she was to be called upon to become more than a spectator in the great tragedy. She watched with somber face but steady eye as day after day the proofs piled up that she could no longer do business with Germany. Dick, watching her with the eyes and the heart of a lover, said to himself that when the day came, she could be counted on.
He was right. The day that the Argus reported that Germany had again torn up a pledge, that she had announced her return to the practices she had so solemnly sworn to respect, he heard but one thing as he stopped in the groceries, the barber shop, the lobby of the Paradise, and that was, “Of course this means war.”
Sabinsport took the breaking of diplomatic relations, four days later, almost in silence, but with a growing hardness of eyes and a setting of lips which meant to Dick that she could be relied upon for whatever she might be called upon to do.
It was Ralph who at this moment stirred the town. For weeks now he had shut himself away from his friends, even from Dick and Patsy. The Argus had been dull reading. Even those who highly disapproved of Ralph’s belligerent attacks on the established order missed his outspoken talk. They had not before appreciated how much zest he had given to life.