at the end of
that time."

"You say nothing about street sermons," said a plaintive old gentleman
with a long white beard and the liquid eyes of an exhorter.

"No, not one. I don't want them. I can work better indoors."

The president said, "Well, Mr. Hartigan, perhaps it would be well for
you to retire, in order that we may freely discuss your plan. As you
seem to have it on paper, would you mind leaving the document?" Jim
hesitated, glanced at it, then handed it to Mr. Hopkins. It was all in a
woman's hand.

In fifteen minutes, Jim was summoned to learn the decision. They
accepted, not unanimously, but they accepted his entire proposition,
with the exception of one item; they would not pay salary to or
officially recognize his wife. It was a bitter pill, and Jim's eyes were
brimming with tears and his face flushed at the injustice when he went
home to tell her. Poor little woman! Her lips tightened a trifle, but
she said: "Never mind, I'll work for it just the same. I'm afraid they
are still in the Dark Ages; but the light will come."

CHAPTER LII

The Boss

It had been a private dwelling, far out on the prairie once, but the
hot, steady lava flow of the great city had reached and split and swept
around the little elevated patch of grimy green with its eleven
despairing trees. A wooden house it was, and in the very nature of it a
temporary shift; but the committee--Hopkins, Hartigan, and Belle--felt
it worth looking into.

With the agent, these three went over it and discussed its possibilities
and the cost. Ten times in that brief talk did Hopkins find himself
consulting Belle when, in the ordinary process, he should have consulted
Hartigan. Why? No man raises himself to the power and pitch that Hopkins
had attained, without a keen, discriminating knowledge of human nature.
And he felt the fact long before he admitted it even to himself: "Yes,
he's a pair of giant wings, but she's the tail, all right." And he was
not displeased to find this original estimate justified by events.

The three years' lease was signed; and a bulletin board appeared on the
bravest of all the battered old trees at the front--the very battle
front. A gnarled and twisted cedar it was, and when a richer name than
"Club" was sought for the venture, it was this old tree that linked up
memory with itself and the house was named, not "The People's Club," as
at first intended, but "Cedar Mountain House"--the word "mountain" being