er chapter in which the wheels of
events spin rapidly in their courses toward that moral equilibrium
that deeds must find before they stop when they are started for the
Larger Good.

CHAPTER XXVII

The spring of 1904 in Sycamore Ridge opened in turmoil. The turmoil
came from the contest over the purchase of the town's water system.
Robert Hendricks as president of the Citizens' League was leading the
forces that advocated the purchase of the system by the town, as being
the only sure way to change the water supply from the polluted
mill-pond to a clean source. Six months before he had leased every
bill-board in town, and for the two months preceding the city election
that was to decide the question of municipal purchase he had hired
every available hall in town, for every vacant night during those
months, and had bought half of the first page of both the _Banner_ and
the _Index_ for those months--and all of this long before the town
knew the fight was coming. He covered the bill-boards and the first
pages of the newspapers with analyses of the water in the
mill-pond--badly infected from the outlet of the town sewers and its
surface drainage. The Citizens' League filled the halls with speakers
demanding the purchase of the plant and the removal of the pumping
station to a place several miles above the town, and four beyond the
mill-pond. Judge Bemis, with the aid and abetment of John Barclay, who
was in the game to help his old friend, put up banners denouncing
Hendricks as a socialist, accusing him of being the town boss, and
charged through the columns of the _Index_ that Hendricks' real motive
in desiring to have the city take over the waterworks system was to
make money on the sale of the city's bonds. So Hendricks was the
centre of the fight.

In the first engagement, a malicious contest, Hendricks lost. The town
refused to vote the bonds to buy the plant. But at the same election
the same people elected a city council overwhelmingly in favour of
municipal ownership and in favour of compelling the operating company
to move its plant from the mill-pond. The morning after the election
Hendricks began a lawsuit as a taxpayer and citizen to make the
waterworks company move its plant. The town could understand that
issue, and sentiment rallied to Hendricks again. Judge Bemis, at the
head of the company, although irritated, was not alarmed. For in the
courts he could promote delays, plead technicalities, and w