ow he climbed through a
hemlock hedge (for the stone gateway was guarded) and walked through the
snow toward the great house.

"An' all the time I seemed to be seein' my daughter Margy right there
before my eyes coughing as though she was dyin'."

It was just nightfall and all the windows were alight. He crept up to a
clump of bushes under a window and waited there a moment while he drew
out and cocked his revolver. Then he slowly reached upward until his
head cleared the sill and he could look into the room. "A big, warm
room," he described it.

"Comrade," said he, "I had murder in my heart that night."

So he stood there looking in with the revolver ready cocked in his hand.

"And what do you think I seen there?" he asked.

"I cannot guess," I said.

"Well," said Bill Hahn, "I seen the great Robert Winter that we had been
fighting for five long months--and he was down on his hands and knees on
the carpet--he had his little daughter on his back--and he was creepin'
about with her--an' she was laughin'."

Bill Hahn paused.

"I had a bead on him," he said, "but I couldn't do it--I just couldn't
do it."

He came away all weak and trembling and cold, and, "Comrade," he said,
"I was cryin' like a baby, and didn't know why."

The next day the strike collapsed and there was the familiar stampede
for work--but Bill Hahn did not go back. He knew it would be useless. A
week later his frail daughter died and was buried in the paupers field.

"She was as truly killed," he said, "as though some one had fired a
bullet at her through a window."

"And what did you do after that?" I asked, when he had paused for a long
time with his chin on his breast.

"Well," said he, "I did a lot of thinking them days, and I says to
myself: 'This thing is wrong, and I will go out and stop it--I will go
out and stop it.'"

As he uttered these words, I looked at him curiously--his absurd flat
fur hat with the moth-eaten ears, the old bulging overcoat, the
round spectacles, the scarred, insignificant face--he seemed somehow
transformed, a person elevated above himself, the tool of some vast
incalculable force.

I shall never forget the phrase he used to describe his own feelings
when he had reached this astonishing decision to go out and stop the
wrongs of the World. He said he "began to feel all clean inside."

"I see it didn't matter what become o' me, and I began to feel all clean
inside."

It seemed, he explained, as though