The two or three pacifists in the Woman's Club seized on the Reverend Pepper's idea with avidity. It was so simple, so sure--stop making munitions everywhere, and war would have to stop. But the Woman's Club, although in the main sympathetic, handled the matter gingerly. In the first place, the Rev. Mr. Pepper had always been "visionary," so the men said. Then, too, they had the relief work of the town to consider. Stop munition making, close the wire mill, and what were the workmen to do? It wasn't right. Somebody would make munitions, why not Sabinsport? Of course, if the League did succeed and other towns went in, they would be for it; but they thought they better wait. In this policy of caution, it is useless to deny that there was an element of self-interest. The husbands of not a few of the ladies had stock in the wire mill and in the works "around the Point." The hottest opposition that Ralph met in his anti-munition campaign was from the War Board, as he and Dick had come to call it. This War Board had evolved from a group which for years had met regularly after supper in the men's lounging room of the Paradise Hotel. Both Ralph and Dick considered it far and away the most entertaining center of public opinion in the town, for it offered a mixture of shrewdness and misinformation, of sense and cynicism, which were as illuminating as they were diverting--a mixture which spread, diluted and disintegrated, of course, into every nook and cranny of the town. The War Board was made up of socially inclined guests and a group of citizens whose number varied with the character, the importance and the heat of public questions. Dick, who, since he first arrived in the town, had taken his dinners at the Paradise, found that the war was having the same drawing power as the choice of a mayor, a governor, or a president. Almost every night more or less men dropped in to discuss the progress of the campaigns and wrangle over the problems raised for this country. A member of the War Board that never missed an evening was Captain William Blackman, as he appeared on the roster of Civil War veterans; "Cap" or "Captain Billy" as he was known at the Paradise--"Captain If" as he came to be known a long time before we went into the war. Captain Billy was seventy-two years old. He walked with a limp, the result of a wound received two days before the evacuation of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. His comfortable income was derived not from a pension which he had always spurned--he had _given_ his services--but from a wholesale grocery business established in Sabinsport after a long and plucky struggle and on which he still kept a vigilant eye. Neither limp nor grocery had ever taken from Captain Billy's military air or dimmed his interest in the battles of the Potomac, in many of which he had taken part.