In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams’s ship of dreams was left high and dry in the salt marsh. Finally a time came when the tide began to boom in. But in no substantial way did his newspaper feel the impulse of the current. The Tribune was an old hulk; it could not ride the tide. And its skipper, seedy, broken with the years, always too gentle for the world about him, even at his best, ever ready to stop work to read a book, Amos Adams, who had been a crank for a third of a century, remained a crank when much that he preached in earlier years was accepted by the multitude.
Amos Adams might have made the Harvey Tribune a financial success if he could have brought himself to follow John Kollander’s advice. But Amos could not abide the presence much less the counsel of the professional patriot, with his insistent blue uniform and brass buttons. Under an elaborate pretense of independence, John Kollander was a limber-kneed time-server, always keen-eyed for the crumbs of Dives’ table; odd jobs in receiverships, odd jobs in lawsuits for Daniel Sands–as, for instance, furnishing unexpected witnesses to prove improbable contentions–odd jobs in his church, odd jobs in his party organization, always carrying a per diem and expenses; odd jobs for the Commercial Club, where the pay was sure; odd jobs for Tom Van Dorn, spreading slander by innuendo where it would do the most good for Tom in his business; odd jobs for Tom and Dick and for Harry, but always for the immediate use and benefit of John Kollander, his heirs and assigns. But if Amos Adams ever thought of himself, it was by inadvertence. 455 He managed, Heaven only knows how, to keep the Tribune going. Jasper bought back from the man who foreclosed the mortgage, his father’s homestead. He rented it to his father for a dollar a year and ostentatiously gave the dollar to the Lord–so ostentatiously, indeed, that when Henry Fenn gayly referred to Amos, Grant and Jasper as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the town smiled at his impiety, but the holy Jasper boarded at the Hotel Sands, was made a partner at Wright & Perry’s, and became a bank director at thirty. For Jasper was a Sands!
The day after Amos Adams and Tom Van Dorn had met in the Serenity of Books and Wallpaper at Brotherton’s, Grant was in the Tribune office. “Grant,” the father was getting down from his high stool to dump his type on the galley; “Grant, I had a tiff with Tom Van Dorn yesterday. Lord, Lord,” cried the old man, as he bent over, straightening some type that his nervous hand had knocked down. “I wonder, Grant”–the father rose and put his hand on his back, as he stood looking into his son’s face–“I wonder if all that we feel, all that we believe, all that we strive and live for–is a dream? Are we chasing shadows? Isn’t it wiser to conform, to think of ourselves first and others afterward–to go with the current of life and not against it? Of course, my guides–”
“Father,” cried Grant, “I saw Tom Van Dorn yesterday, too, in his big new car–and I don’t need your guides to tell me who is moving with the current and who is buffeting it. Oh, father, that hell-scorched face–don’t talk to me about his faith and mine!” The old man remounted his printer’s stool for another half-hour’s work before dusk deepened, and smiled as he pulled his steel spectacles over his clear old eyes.
One would fancy that a man whose face was as seamed and scarred with time and struggle as Grant Adams’s face, would have said nothing of the hell-scorched face of Tom Van Dorn. Yet for all its lines, youth still shone from Grant Adams’s countenance. His wide, candid blue eyes were still boyish, and a soul so eager with hope that it sometimes blazed into a mad intolerance, gazed into the world from behind them. Even his arm and claw became an animate 456hand when Grant waved them as he talked; and his wide, pugnacious shoulders, his shock of nonconforming red hair, his towering body, and his solid workman’s legs, firm as oak beams,–all,–claw, arms, shoulders, trunk and legs,–translated into human understanding the rebel soul of Grant Adams.
Yet the rebellion of Grant Adams’s soul was no new thing to the world. He was treading the rough road that lies under the feet of all those who try to divert their lives from the hard and wicked morals of their times. For the kingdoms of this earth are organized for those who devote themselves chiefly, though of course not wholly, to the consideration of self. The world is still vastly egoistic in its balance. And the unbroken struggle of progress from Abel to yesterday’s reformer, has been, is, and shall be the battle with the spirit that chains us to the selfish, accepted order of the passing day. So Grant Adams’s face was battle scarred, but his soul, strong and exultant, burst through his flesh and showed itself at many angles of his being. And a grim and militant thing it looked. The flinty features of the man, his coarse mouth, his indomitable blue eyes, his red poll, waving like a banner above his challenging forehead, wrinkled and seamed and gashed with the troubles of harsh circumstance, his great animal jaw at the base of the spiritual tower of his countenance–all showed forth the warrior’s soul, the warrior of the rebellion that is as old as time and as new as to-morrow.
Working with his hands for a bare livelihood, but sitting at his desk four or five days in the week and speaking at night, month after month, year after year, for nearly twenty years, without rest or change, had taken much of the bounce of youth from his body. He knew how the money from the accumulated dues was piling up in the Labor Union’s war chest in the valley. He had proved what a trade solidarity in an industrial district could do for the men without strikes by its potential strength. Black powder, which killed like the pestilence that stalketh in darkness, was gone. Electric lights had superseded torches in the runways of the mines. Bathhouses were found in all the shafts. In the smelters the long, killing hours were abandoned and a score of safety 457devices were introduced. But each gain for labor had come after a bitter struggle with the employers. So the whole history of the Wahoo Valley was written in the lines of his broken face.
The reformer with his iridescent dream of progress often hangs its realization upon a single phase of change. Thus when Grant Adams banished black powder from the district, he expected the whole phantasm of dawn to usher in the perfect day for the miners. When he secured electric lights in the runways and baths in the shaft house, he confidently expected large things to follow. While large things hesitated, he saw another need and hurried to it.
Thus it happened, that in the hurrying after a new need, Grant Adams had always remained in his own district, except for a brief season when he and Dr. Nesbit sallied forth in a State-wide campaign to defend the Doctor’s law to compel employers to pay workmen for industrial accidents, as the employers replace broken machinery–a law which the Doctor had pushed through the Legislature and which was before the people for a referendum vote. When Grant went out of the Wahoo Valley district he attracted curious crowds, crowds that came to see the queer labor leader who won without strikes. And when the crowds came under Grant’s spell, he convinced them. For he felt intensely. He believed that this law would right a whole train of incidental wrongs of labor. So he threw himself into the fight with a crusader’s ardor. Grant and the Doctor journeyed over the State through July and August; and in September the wily Doctor trapped Tom Van Dorn into a series of joint debates with Grant that advertised the cause widely and well. From these debates Grant Adams emerged a somebody in politics. For oratory, however polished, and scholarship, however plausible, cannot stand before the wrath of an indignant man in a righteous cause who can handle himself and suppress his wrath upon the platform.
As the week of the debate dragged on and as the pageant of it trailed clear across the State, with crowds hooting and cheering, Doctor Nesbit’s cup of joy ran over. And when Van Dorn failed to appear for the Saturday meeting at the capital, the Doctor’s happiness mounted to glee.