ached up to lift Ruth from the saddle, but she waved
them away and pointed to Jeffrey's broken arm. They helped him down
and half carried him into Doctor Napoleon Goodenough's little office.

Ruth saw that her business was finished. She wheeled Brom Bones toward
home, and gave him his head.

For three glorious miles they fairly flew through the pearly morning
air along the hard mountain road, and the girl never pulled a line.
Breakfastless and weary in body, her heart sang the song that it had
learned in the Glow of Dawn.

IV

THE ANSWER

The Committee on Franchises was in session in one of the committee
rooms outside the chamber of the New York State Senate. It was not a
routine session. A bill was before it, the purpose of which was
virtually to dispossess some four or five hundred families of their
homes in the counties of Hamilton, Tupper and Racquette. The bill did
not say this. It cited the need of adequate transportation in that
part of the State and proposed that the U. & M. Railroad should be
granted the right of eminent domain over three thousand square miles
of the region, in order to help the development of the country.

The committee was composed of five members, three of the majority
party in the Senate and two of the minority. A political agent of the
railroad who drew a salary from Racquette County as a judge had just
finished presenting to the committee the reasons why the people of
that part of the State were unanimous in the wish that the bill should
become a law. He had drawn a pathetic picture of the condition of the
farmers, so long deprived of the benefits of a railroad. He had
almost wept as he told of the rich loads of produce left to rot up
there in the hills because the men who toiled to produce it had no
means of bringing it down to the starving thousands of the cities. The
scraggy rocks and thinly soiled farms of that region became in his
picture vast reservoirs of cheap food, only waiting to be tapped by
the beneficent railroad for the benefit of the world's poor.

When the judge had finished, one minority member of the committee
looked at his colleague, the other minority member, and winked. It was
a grave and respectful wink. It meant that the committee was not often
privileged to listen to quite such bare-faced effrontery. If the
hearing had been a secret one they would not have listened to it. But
the bill had already aroused a storm. So the leader of the majority
had g