The news that the wire mill would open at once on full time ran up and down the street on quick feet, and such rejoicing as it brought! Women who had ceased to go to the butcher's went confidently in. "Jim goes to work to-morrow, can you trust me for a boiling piece?" and the butcher, as pleased as his customer, said, "Sure," cut it with a whistle and threw in a few ounces. Over on the South Side where there had been grumblings and quarreling for nights, there was singing and laughing. The women cleaned houses that, in their despair, they'd let grow sloven, and the men brought in the water and played games with the children. Oh, the promise of wire to make stirred all Sabinsport with hope. Dick, going over to the live South Side Club, found a larger group than usual and a livelier curiosity about the war. They could think of it, now that they were not forced to think so much and so sullenly of where the next meal was coming from. A few weeks later a new reason for hope came to Sabinsport. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was going to convert the linoleum factory "around the point." It was to be a big concern, give work to a thousand girls besides the men. The wages were to be "grand," the girls in the ten-cent store heard, and more than one of them on six dollars a week said, "Me for the munitions if it's more money." The rumor was not idle, for early in December the building began. Sabinsport would not go hungry in the winter of 1914-15. The war that had raised the specter had taken it away. "And because the war has made us easy in our pockets again, we are all for the war," sneered Ralph. "Are we?" said Dick. "I doubt it. So far as I can see, we are puppets of the war as is all the rest of the world." "We could refuse to make its infernal food. We could hold ourselves above its blood money. Reuben Cowder doesn't care how he makes money if he makes it." "And by that argument the men and women in the mills and to be in the new mill don't care as long as they make it," retorted Ralph. "We're hardening our hearts,"--and to save Sabinsport's soul, as he claimed, Ralph began a lively campaign against the making and exporting of munitions to other nations. It was a new idea to Sabinsport. To make what the world would buy, of the quality it would take, was simply common sense to her mind. She had nothing in her code of industrial ethics which put a limitation on any kind of manufacturing except beer and whiskey. Sabinsport had never had a brewery or a distillery. It would have hurt her conscience to have had one. Indeed the only time she had ever out and out fought and beaten the combination of Mulligan and Cowder was when they attempted to establish a brewery. The opposition had been so general and it had been of such a kind that the men had withdrawn. "It isn't worth fighting to a finish," Cowder had told Jake. "We'll have bigger game one of these days, and we don't want the town to be against us."