The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

The exit of Mr. Max Dalberg from Sabinsport was very quiet. An automobile drove up to his door on the upper level, as it often did in the evening, and three gentlemen came out of the house. If there had been anybody to watch, they would have noticed that the one in the middle was being supported. They might have thought him ill. He was helped into the car, and thus departed from Sabinsport the “wonder of the laboratory” of the munition plant. And thus ended his magnificent dream of frightfulness, for at the same hour that he was being quietly conveyed in a comfortable car out of Sabinsport, various other gentlemen in various other towns belonging to this grandiloquent scheme were undergoing the same experience.

Katie slipped back to her kitchen, and her face was wonderful to see. It was the face of the righteous warrior with his enemy’s head in his hands. It was the look that all the Celtic Flahertys and O’Flahertys from the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, through the days of the Cæsars, through all of the centuries of England’s injustice to Ireland, had worn. It was the greatest moment of Katie Flaherty’s life.

There was only one fly in her ointment—she could not talk about it. She could not tell Mary O’Sullivan or Mr. Dick. The hardest thing that could ever come to her was the seal upon her lips. It was not that Katie wanted to talk about her part in this thing, that had nothing to do with it. But it was to tell of the battle, to tell of the defeated enemy; it was to tell of the revenge! It was a wonderful story, and all her Irish imagination cried out to depict it to her neighbors. But she had given her promise to young Mr. Barker, and, clever man that he was, he had put a flea in her bonnet which he knew would ensure absolutely closed lips. “You will not, Mrs. Flaherty, give one hint of what has happened. Your roomer upstairs is not the only German connected with this business. The capture of others depends upon absolute secrecy about what has happened to Mr. Dalberg.”

So Katie, in this cruel trial of silence, was sustained by the hope that she might get another German scalp.

This was the reason that, when Dick came home, no hint of what had happened was given him, though there were mornings when Katie Flaherty would gladly have given her good right arm to have been able to have opened her lips and pictured the whole magnificent scene.

Now, it is not to be supposed that interested and heartened as the Rev. Richard Ingraham really was in all these changes that had come over Sabinsport, that they either satisfied his heart or filled his mind. Night and day, one thought absorbed him, stronger than all others, one feeling mounted higher and higher. He thought he had put behind in the weeks of rest in the South—his love for Nancy Cowder. He thought he had had it out with himself. He believed he had made his renunciation, that he could come back, work with her in camp and town, go out as usual to the farm on Monday afternoons, meet her easily and naturally everywhere, even see outwardly unmoved the day come which he believed thoroughly would come, when she would marry Otto Littman. And, though it is improbable that he could have gone through the ordeal with anything like the control and certainty that he had persuaded himself was possible, yet such is my confidence in the man that I believe he would have put it through if, when he returned, he had not divined, rather than learned, that there had been a great change in the relations of Otto and Nancy.

It was not a change, so far as he could judge, from which he had a right to draw hope. He told himself again and again that, on the contrary, the change probably only meant that later, when the war was over perhaps, when suspicion of Otto had passed and Nancy was released from her labors in the camp, that again they would seek each other; yet the fact that at this moment they were not seeking each other, that so far as he could make out, they were not seeing each other, gave Dick an unreasoning encouragement. In spite of himself, his dreams came back. In spite of himself he saw more and more of Nancy Cowder.

What had happened with Otto, he could not make out. Otto still remained in town. It was certain that Reuben Cowder, as well as other leading men who once had shunned him, were taking pains to support him. It was evident that a great burden had been raised from Rupert Littman’s heart. Never had he been so affectionate, so proud of Otto as now. That is, at the very head of Sabinsport business, where suspicion of Otto had first begun, there had been a great change. These men, if you asked them, would tell you that they knew it to be a fact, from the very highest authority, that Otto Littman had rendered the Secret Service of the United States a tremendous service; they knew it to be a fact that he had run the danger of losing his own life in order to save the lives of others. That was as far as they would go—as a matter of fact, that was as far as they could go. But the authority on which these facts were stated was so unimpeachable that there was not a man of them that doubted, and there was not a man of them that was not doing his best for Otto.

But this had not won him Nancy Cowder, Dick found. A change had come over the girl. She was much quieter. But that might be because of her continuous work at the camp; work which she never left, which, whatever the effort and the strain called for, she always gave. Reuben Cowder was anxious about his daughter, with good reason, and one of his first requests of Dick on his return was to try to bring her to her senses.

And yet Dick in his foolish heart argued that it was not the work at all, that her pallor came from pain over a break with Otto; and though many a night he had wild fancies that this was not so, he always told himself in the morning that he was wrong, that it was only a matter of time when the breech between them would be healed, that it was his business to keep away from her.