“You've got to disband, boys,” said I, when I had called the Tin Whistles together. “Throw away your whistles. Big Kennedy told me that the first toot on one of 'em would get the musician thirty days on the Island. It's an order; so don't bark your shins against it.” After Big Kennedy was installed as Chief, affairs in their currents for either Big Kennedy or myself went flowing never more prosperously. The town settled to its lines; and the Chief of Police, with a wardman whom Big Kennedy selected, and who was bitten by no defect of integrity like the dangerous McCue, was making monthly returns of funds collected for “campaign purposes” with which the most exacting could have found no fault. We were rich, Big Kennedy and I; and acting on that suggestion of concealment, neither was blowing a bugle over his good luck. I could have been happy, being now successful beyond any dream that my memory could lay hands on, had it not been for Apple Cheek and her waning health. She, poor girl, had never been the same after my trial for the death of Jimmy the Blacksmith; the shock of that trouble bore her down beyond recall. The doctors called it a nervous prostration, but I think, what with the fright and the grief of it, that the poor child broke her heart. She was like something broken; and although years went by she never once held up her head. Apple Cheek faded slowly away, and at last died in my arms. When she passed, and it fell upon me like a pall that Apple Cheek had gone from me forever, my very heart withered and perished within me. There was but one thing to live for: Blossom, my baby girl. Anne came to dwell with us to be a mother to her, and it was good for me what Anne did, and better still for little Blossom. I was no one to have Blossom's upbringing, being ignorant and rude, and unable to look upon her without my eyes filling up for thoughts of my lost Apple Cheek. That was a sharpest of griefs--the going of Apple Cheek! My one hope lay in forgetfulness, and I courted it by working at politics, daylight and dark. It would seem, too, that the blow that sped death to Apple Cheek had left its nervous marks on little Blossom. She was timid, hysterical, terror-whipped of fears that had no form. She would shriek out in the night as though a fiend frighted her, and yet could tell no story of it. She lived the victim of a vast formless fear that was to her as a demon without outlines or members or face. One blessing: I could give the trembling Blossom rest by holding her close in my arms, and thus she has slept the whole night through. The “frights,” she said, fled when I was by. In that hour, Anne was my sunshine and support; I think I should have followed Apple Cheek had it not been for Blossom, and Anne's gentle courage to hold me up. For all that, my home was a home of clouds and gloom; waking or sleeping, sorrow pressed upon me like a great stone. I took no joy, growing grim and silent, and far older than my years.