“Fighting, in the long run, will do no good, Mrs. Bowman,” said Grant. “It will hurt the cause.
“But it will do us good,” she answered.
“Force against force and we lose–they have the guns,” he persisted.
531“Well, I’d rather feed my babies to good merciful guns than to wheels,” she replied, and then softened as she took his hand.
“I guess I’m mad to-day, Grant. Go on up. Maybe they’ll let you look at him. He smiled at me–just as he did when Doctor Nesbit showed him to me the day he was born.”
She kept back her tears with an effort, and added, “Only the Doc tried to tell me that babies don’t smile. But I know better, Ben smiled–just like the one to-day.”
“Well, Mrs. Bowman,” rejoined Grant, “there’s one comfort. Dr. Nesbit’s law makes it possible for you to get your damages without going to law and dividing with some lawyer. However the Doctor and I may differ–we down here in the mines and mills must thank him for that.”
“Oh, Doc Jim’s all right, Grant,” answered Mrs. Bowman, relapsing into her lifetime silence.
It was nearly three months later and spring was at its full, before they discharged little Ben from the hospital. But the last fortnight of his stay they had let him visit outside the hospital for a few hours daily. And to the joy of a great crowd in the Hot Dog saloon, he sat on the bar and sang his little heart out. They took him down to Belgian hall at noon, and he sang the “Marseillaise” to the crowd that gathered there. In the hospital, wherever they would let him, after he had visited the Hot Dog, he sang–sang in the big ward where he sat by a window, sang in the corridors, whenever the patients could hear him, and sang Gospel hymns in his cot at bedtime.
He was an odd little bundle, that Henry Fenn carried into the offices of the Wahoo Valley Fuel Company one afternoon in early June, with Dick Bowman following proudly, as they made the proof of the claim for compensation for the accident. The people in the offices were kind and tenderly polite to the little fellow. Henry saw that all the papers were properly made out, and the clerk in the office told Dick and Henry to call for the check next day but one–which was pay day.