We must succeed because we
are right!"

She turned suddenly, and went back into the wings.

"What'd she say?" asked a man in a hoarse whisper. "Gol dern if I know!
Foreign language to me!"

"The volypuke of the Woman's Movement! Didn't understand one word she
said!"

"Well, you'll understand what's coming now or I'll eat my boots!" the
other whispered.

He nodded toward the stage, where Susan Walton stood, flat-footed, fat,
belligerent, her mouth primped, holding her head very much as if she
wore horns instead of the black bonnet tied under her chin. And she was
looking over the top of her spectacles at every man, seemingly straight
in the eye.

"Don't look at us that way, Susan! Makes us feel like we'd been in
washing without your permission!" called some one, imitating a little
boy's whine. There was a gale of good-natured laughter.

"Men and women," she began in her high virago voice, "we have listened
to two very fine speeches this afternoon, one upholding the
sentimentality of the past, the other mystically prophesying the
sentimentality of the future. I'm an apostate from the past, and a
disciple of the future. I've got one foot in the grave and the other
foot on the ballot for women. I shall not deal in sentiment or
prophecies, but in cold facts!"

"Told you we'd understand her, boys!" shouted a voice.

"Go it, Susan! we all know you, and we don't have to give you no
quarter!" yelled a bearded farmer standing in the back of the hall.

"Yes," screamed the old lady, shaking her fist at him, "and I know you,
Tim Cates. You've been living on your wife's land ever since you married
her. And you've made her mortgage it to pay your debts!"

"Git a chip somebody and take po' Tim out on it. She's done ruin't him!"

"Come ag'in, Susan! you drawed blood that time!" shouted the voice.

"I'm coming, and I've got the facts with me!" she cried, flirting her
head in the direction from which the voice came. "I know every man in
this hall: how he lives, how he votes, what he owes, what he can't or
don't pay. I know how hard you farmers work your wives, harder than you
do your beasts, in spite of all that fine talk we listened to from
Marshall Adams, and I know how little you give them, how little they are
allowed to spend. There's one of you standing in plain sight of me
right now who took the fancy bedquilts your wife and daughters pieced
last winter and sold them to get money to pay his taxes, though he is
wort