er
long arms clear acrost the Pacific to lead them sweet girls into the
pit she has dug for her soldiers? Oh!" sez I, "if she'd only been
drownded!" And I wiped my streamin' eyes on my linen handkerchief.

And Robert sithed deep and sez, "Yes, if she had only died, and," he
sez, "I can't tell Dorothy, I cannot."

And I sez, "There is no need on't; better let her think she's dead.
How long," sez I, turning toward him fierce in my aspect, "how long is
the Lord and decent folks goin' to allow such things to go on?"

And he sez, "Heaven knows, I don't." And we couldn't say more, for
Dorothy wuz approachin', and Robert called up a smile to his troubled
face as he went forward to meet her. But he told me afterwards that
the news had almost killed Elder Wessel. He had to tell him to help
him in his search. He wuz goin' to stay on there a spell longer. He
had to tell him that Lucia had been seen with Aronette staggering out
of a saloon with two young men late at night, reeling down a by-street
to that other licensed house which our Christian govermunt keeps nigh
the saloon, it is so obleegin' and fatherly to its men and boys.

When he told him Elder Wessel fell right down in his chair, Robert
said, and buried his face in his hands, and when he took his hands
down it wuz from the face of an old man, a haggard, wretched,
broken-down old man.

The People's Club House didn't wear the kindly beneficent aspect it
had wore. He felt that coffee and good books and music would have been
safer to fill the Poor Man's Club with; safer for the poor man; safer
for the poor man's family. Tea and coffee seemed to look different to
him from whiskey, and true liberty that he had talked about didn't
seem the liberty to kill and destroy. The license law didn't wear the
aspect it had wore to him, the two licensed institutions Christian
America furnished for its citizens at home and abroad seemed now to
him, instead of something to be winked at and excused, to be two
accursed hells yawning for the young and innocent and unsuspicious as
well as for the wicked and evil-minded. Ungrateful country, here wuz
one of thy sons who sung the praises of thy institutions under every
sky! Ungrateful indeed, to pierce thy most devoted vassal with this
sharp thorn, this unbearable agony.

"For how was he goin' to live through it," he cried. How was he? His
beautiful, innocent daughter! his one pet lamb! It was not for her
undoing that he had petted and smile