Mikey's sudden departure was quickly known in Sabinsport, and Katie did not hesitate to make the most of the fact that he had gone for love of Mr. Dick. It had its romantic value, that runaway. It made Katie a town heroine. Certain well-to-do gentlemen in the banks, Cowder and Mulligan among them, sent her a purse. There was much talking to her in the streets as she did Dick's marketing, and nightly on the porch of the little house on the south bank of the river where she lived a group of friendly neighbors came in to cry or to exult according to Katie's humor. Dick was not long in sensing that Mikey's action was making opinion in Sabinsport, much as Patsy's adventures in Belgium had done. The very children caught it, and Richard Cowder stopped more than once in his favorite South Side Alley to discuss with the "gang" what the runaway was probably doing at the moment. In reporting his conversations, he sometimes would shake his head, saying, "You know these youngsters are getting a new idea about running away--that it may be a glorious deed." The point at which the effect was most significant, in Dick's judgment, was the wire mill. Practically all of the boys in the South Side Club belonged there. They were friends and companions of Mikey. His going away had sobered them and made them far and away more interested in the war. The most significant effect was the way in which they cooled toward a movement which had begun to make strong headway in the factories and mills, a movement in which Ralph was taking keen interest as he saw in it a possibility of reviving the opposition to munition making which had been destroyed by Cowder's and Mulligan's appeal to the mill. This movement was already beginning to crystallize into a new party, made up of workmen and farmers. It was called Labor's National Peace Council. Nobody could tell just who started it in the mill, but Ralph had seized the idea and was working seriously for it. "Where in hell did it come from?" Cowder asked Dick. "Not out of this town, I tell you, Ingraham. I know this town like a book. There's no Labor Peace Council in it when there's plenty of work. This scheme's been sneaked in from outside, and it's being fed on the sly. What I can't make out is, Who's doing it? It's the same crowd that kept up the battle against munitions. I don't believe it's Otto. I'm watching him. It's somebody in the plants."