ects every
business interest in this town, and the devil only knows what they will
do with it!" exclaimed Coleman.

"Ask your wife," Sasnett suggested.

"I did ask Mabel," Acres admitted.

"What'd she say?"

"Said they'd collect the rents and interest first thing."

Sasnett laughed, and Briggs seized his hat and left the room with the
air of an injured man.

While these desultory conferences were being held all over the town
Monday morning, where two or three were gathered together on the
streets, Susan Walton was sitting opposite Judge Regis in his office.
Her knees were wide apart, her hands folded above her fat stomach. She
had untied her bonnet strings, which was a bad-weather indication.

The Judge was listening with his eye fixed keenly upon her, the hair
above his temples sticking out like owl's ears.

"I've bluffed it so far, John Regis. I've reorganized the Civic League
and Cemetery Association into the Co-Citizens' League, which was no
small undertaking, I can tell you. Half the women would not have joined
if they'd known what they were doing. I got them by not explaining how
immediate the business of getting suffrage is, and by offering
scandalous committee appropriations. But I'm shaking in my shoes. I
don't know how we are to carry out the conditions of this trust. The
more I think of it, the more I suspect Sarah Mosely of being plain
crazy!"

"She's the first woman in this country to meet the issue of suffrage for
women with the sanity of practical common sense," he answered.

"But she's limited her bequest to use in this county. Suffrage is a
state issue. I should know. I have given years of thought to it."

"Yes, you've spent your energies like the rest of them, Susan, in mere
agitation, in parades with transparencies bearing the legend, 'Votes for
Women!' The last one of you might as well be blowing your breath against
the order of things. Nothing could be more futile."

"We are beginning to create a sentiment for suffrage," she protested.

"Yes, in women. But can women give it to you? What's the good of
undertaking the impossible? The income from this Foundation will not
exceed twenty thousand dollars a year. That would not be a drop in the
bucket in a state campaign, where you would be compelled to fight the
most powerful political machines, and the graft and vice elements of the
cities, all of which are naturally opposed to suffrage for women."

"Still, I don't see what we can do her