.

* * * * *

The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men
who had followed the course of things through the past months, men
who knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper
had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up
there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed
quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that
could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would
amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give
the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be
driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess.
There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed
themselves.

The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State
who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a
moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise
vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked
the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad.
Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could
tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State,
went back again to their business.

The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a
blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was
listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow
to anger; but, once past a certain point of aggravation, absolutely
heedless and reckless of consequences.

He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in
the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was
happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the
people and only for the people.

He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down
through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the
gathering of the forces of the State to punish.

Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph
Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no
moment now.

One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give
the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W.
Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set
all these things going, whose ruthless h