way the boys grew closer together, Patsy cramming himself from
books during the day in order to tell Cully at night all about the Forty
Thieves boiled in oil, or Ali Baba and his donkey, or poor man Friday
to whom Robinson Crusoe was so kind; and Cully relating in return how
Jimmie Finn smashed Pat Gilsey's face because he threw stones at his
sister, ending with a full account of a dog-fight which a "snoozer of a
cop" stopped with his club.

So when Patsy came limping up the garden path this morning, rubbing
his eyes, his voice choking, and the tears streaming, and, burying
his little face in Cully's jacket, poured out his tale of insult and
suffering, that valiant defender of the right pulled his cap tight over
his eyes and began a still-hunt through the tenements. There, as he
afterwards expressed it, he "mopped up the floor" with one after another
of the ringleaders, beginning with young Billy McGaw, Dan's eldest son
and Cully's senior.

Tom was dumfounded at the attack on Patsy. This was a blow upon which
she had not counted. To strike her Patsy, her cripple, her baby! The
cowardice of it incensed her, She knew instantly that her affairs must
have been common talk about the tenements to have produced so great an
effect upon the children. She felt sure that their fathers and mothers
had encouraged them in it.

In emergencies like this it was never to the old father that she turned.
He was too feeble, too much a thing of the past. While to a certain
extent he influenced her life, standing always for the right and always
for the kindest thing she could do, yet when it came to times of action
and danger she felt the need of a younger and more vigorous mind. It
was on Jennie, really more her companion than her daughter, that she
depended for counsel and sympathy at these times.

Tom did not underestimate the gravity of the situation. Up to that point
in her career she had fought only the cold, the heat, the many weary
hours of labor far into the night, and now and then some man like McGaw.
But this stab from out the dark was a danger to which she was unused.
She saw in this last move of McGaw's, aided as he was by the Union,
not only a determination to ruin her, but a plan to divide her business
among a set of men who hated her as much on account of her success as
for anything else. A few more horses and carts and another barn or two,
and she herself would become a hated capitalist. That she had stood out
in the wet