ny come forward and stand in a row, and assume the most
striking and imposing attitudes, and hear the fiddlers play and the
brass trumpets bray as never before, then you may be very sure the
tragedy is about over. So it goes in life.

The crowd had melted away a bit because it was very warm, and then the
men were getting noisy enough, for this was the day on which every true
American was expected to get drunk. It was a sort of Fourth of July.

The old question was being again raised. The bride was standing there in
the midst of the men, a true good woman, a woman who had sinned, yet a
woman who had suffered. One who had fallen was she, yet one who had
resisted more than many a woman who would have cast a stone at her. She
was very glad, and not a man but was glad to see it.

"That baby! It is an angel, and its mother's name is Madonna. That
little bit of a brat! Why, I seed it first, first of any body, and it
wasn't bigger than a pound of soap after a whole day's washing. Make a
fuss about that little thing! A man who would make a fuss about a baby
no bigger than that, no matter when it was born, is a fool!"

"Bully for Bunk--for--for Missis Tim! Bully for Missis Tim!" and the men
shouted, and Mrs. Tim blushed from sheer joy.

The Gopher cheered perhaps more lustily than any one, for he admired the
Widow, and knew her love and worth. The Gopher, it is true, was in
disgrace, for the story went that the young man, his partner, who was
the first to be buried in the Forks, had fallen by his hand. The blow
had been struck in a crowd, it was said, and no one saw it, or at least
no one cared to tell of it if he did, and so the Gopher had been left
alone, and he had left men alone, and lived all the time by himself in a
sort of cave, and that is why he was called the Gopher. Strange stories
were told of this Gopher, too, and men who pretended to know said his
cave was lined with gold.

"That baby!" began the Gopher, lifting up his doubled fist, and bringing
it down now and then by way of emphasis. "That baby! Look here! Here's
one baby among a thousand men. Here's a thousand men asking if it's got
a father. Now does that little baby want a father? I've got a cave full
of gold and I'll be its father! I'll be its brother and uncle and aunt
and mother!" The Gopher thundered his fist down on the bar as he
concluded, and the glasses there jumped up and clinked together, and
bowed to each other, as if they had been dancers about