And his mother's grip
had hurt his hand, and a lump had risen in his throat--as Dan, his oldest
brother, had marched away with his company of New Hampshire mountain boys.
"We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." Dan had been
killed at Shiloh.
And it must be like that now in France. No, he did not like the look which
he had seen on Laura's face as she had talked about the war and the fat
profits to be made. Was this all we Yankees had to say to the people over
in Europe?
Frowning and glancing at Deborah's back, he saw that she was tired. It was
nearly midnight, but still she kept working doggedly on, moving her
shoulder muscles at times as though to shake off aches and pains, then
bending again to her labor, her fight against such heavy odds in the winter
just beginning for those children in the tenements. He recalled a fragment
of the appeal she had made to him only the month before:
"Can't you see that we're all of us stunned, and trying to see what war
will mean to all the children in the world? And while we're groping,
groping, can't we give each other a hand?"
And as he looked at his daughter, she made him think of her grandmother,
as she had so often done before. For Deborah, too, was a pioneer. She, too,
had lived in the wilderness. Clearing roads through jungles? Yes. And
freeing slaves of ignorance and building a nation of new men. And now she
was doggedly fighting to save what she had builded--not from the raids of
the Indians but from the ravages of this war which was sweeping
civilization aside.
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