"Let me tell you something," said the man. "I've not been loafing for the past two years. I've got Harvey--the men in the mines and smelter, I mean, fairly well unionized, but the unions are nothing--nothing ultimate--they are only temporary." "Well," returned the woman, soberly, "that's something." The man made no answer. With his free hand he was ruffling his red hair, and she could see the muscles of his jaw working, and she felt his great mouth harden as he flashed his blue eyes upon her. "Laura," he cried, "they may whip us this year. For a while they may scare the men into voting for prosperity, but as sure as we both live we shall see these times and these issues and these men who are promoting this devilish conspiracy eternally damned--all of them--the issues, the times and the men who are leading. And I don't want to hurt you, Laura, but," he added solemnly, "your husband must take his punishment with the rest." They sat mute, then each heard the plaintive cry of a child running through the house. "She is looking for me," said Laura. In a moment a little wet-eyed girl was in her mother's arms, crying: "I want my daddy--my dear daddy--I want him to come home--where is he?" She sobbed in her mother's arms and held up her little face to look earnestly into the beautiful face above her, as she cried, "Is he gone--Annie Sands' new mamma says my papa's never coming back--Oh, I want my daddy--I want to go home." She continued calling him and sobbing, and the mother rose to take the child away. "Laura!" cried Grant, in a passionate question. He saw the weeping child and the grief-stricken face of the mother. In an instant he held out his bony left hand to her and said gently: "God help you--God help you." CHAPTER XXIV IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN ACCOUNT IN HIS LEDGER Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the _Times_ one November day after he had come home from his political campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills--a campaign in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted glasses of the Harvey _Daily Times_ as one of the men who had saved the country--when the town read that cold paragraph beginning: "A decree of divorce was issued to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem Calvin in the district court," and ending with these words: "Mrs. Van Dorn declined through her attorney to participate in a division of the property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter, aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street"--when the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van Dorn.