thought you two boys went on the noon train," he lied,
carelessly. "Well, long as you're here you might as well take these--in
case you get short." He pressed a bill into the hand of each. "Good-bye
and good luck! I had to come down about that shipment should have been
here last Monday--it beats time what these railroads do with stuff
nowadays. Five days between here and Buffalo!"

He continued to grumble as the train moved on, even as the two waved to
him from a platform.

"A hundred berries!" breathed Spike, examining his bill. "Say, he sheds
it easy, don't he?"

They watched him where he stood facing the train. He seemed to have quit
grumbling; his face was still.

"Well, kid, here we go! Now it's up to the guy what examines us. You'll
breeze through--not a nick in you. Me--well, they're fussy about teeth,
I'm told, and, of course, I had to have a swift poke in the mush that
dented my beak. They may try to put the smother on me."

"Cheer up! You'll make the grade," said Wilbur.

Through the night he sat cramped and wakeful in the seat of a crowded
day coach, while Spike beside him slept noisily, perhaps owing to the
dented beak. His head back, he looked out and up to a bow moon that
raced madly with the train, and to far, pale stars that were still. He
wondered if any one out there noted the big new adventure down here.

CHAPTER XVII

Wilbur Cowan's fear that his brother might untimely stop the war proved
baseless. The war went on despite the _New Dawn's_ monthly exposure of
its motive and sinister aims; despite its masterly paraphrase of a
celebrated document declaring that this Government had been "conceived
in chicanery and dedicated to the industrial slavery of the masses." Not
even the new social democracy of Russia sufficed to inspire any
noticeable resistance. The common people of the United States had
refused to follow the example of their brothers of Russia and destroy a
tyranny equally hateful, though the _New Dawn_ again and again set forth
the advantages to accrue from such action. War prevailed. As the
Reverend Mallet said: "It gathered the vine of the earth and cast it
into the great wine press of the wrath of God."

But the little cluster of intellectuals on the staff of the _New Dawn_
persevered. Monthly it isolated the causative bacteria of unrest, to set
the results before those who could profit would they but read. Merle,
the modernist, at the forefront of what was known as all t