nd much money creating public opinion
in favour of itself.

Jeffrey Whiting stood in the evening in the cover of the woods above
Milton's Crossing and watched a train load of soldiers on flat cars
come creeping up the grade from the south. This was the last of the
hills. He had refused to let his men go farther. Behind him lay fifty
miles of new railroad in ruins. Before him lay the open, settled
country. His men, once the fever of destruction had begun to run in
their blood, had wished to sweep on down into the villages and carry
their work through them. But he had stood firm. This was their own
country where they belonged and where the railroad was the interloper.
Here they were at home. Here there was a certain measure of safety for
them even in the destructive and lawless work that they had begun.
They had done enough. They had pushed the railroad back to the edge of
the hills. They had roused the men of the hills behind them. Where he
had started with his seventy-two friends, there were now three hundred
well-armed men in the woods around him. Here in their cover they could
hold the line of the railroad indefinitely against almost any force
that might be sent against them.

But the inevitable sobering sense of leadership and responsibility was
already at work upon him. The burning, rankling anger that had driven
him onward so that he had carried everything and everybody near him
into this business of destruction was now dulled down to a slow, dull
hate that while it had lost nothing of its bitterness yet gave him
time to think. Those men coming up there on the cars were not
professional soldiers, paid to fight wherever there was fighting to be
done. Neither did they care anything for the railroad that they should
come up here to fight for it. Why did they come?

They had joined their organisation for various reasons that usually
had very little to do with fighting. They were clerks and office men,
for the most part, from the villages and factories of the central part
of the State. The militia companies had attracted them because the
armouries in the towns had social advantages to offer, because
uniforms and parade appeal to all boys, because they were sons of
veterans and the military tradition was strong in them. Jeffrey
Whiting's strong natural sense told him the substance of these things.
He could not regard these boys as deadly enemies to be shot down
without mercy or warning. They had taken their arms at a