born among her poor neighbors in the valley that she
did not thrill with a keen delight at its coming, and welcome it with
some small material token of her joy. In the baby she lived over again
her own first days of maternity. But it was no play motherhood that
restored her soul and refilled her receptacle of faith day by day. The
bodily, huggable presence of her daughter continually unfolding some new
beauty kept her eager for the day's work to close in the Valley that she
might go home to drop the vicarious happiness that she brought in her
kindergarten for the real happiness of a home.

Often Grant Adams, hurrying by on his lonely way, paused to tell Laura
of a needy family, or to bring a dirty, motherless child to her haven,
or to ask her to go to some wayward girl, newly caught in the darker
corners of the spider's web.

Doggedly day by day, little by little, he was bringing the workmen of
the Valley to see his view of the truth. The owners were paying spies to
spy upon him and he knew it, and the high places of his satisfaction
came when, knowing a spy and marking him for a victim, Grant converted
him to the union cause. With the booming of the big guns of prosperity
in Harvey, he was a sort of undertone, a monotonous drum, throbbing
through the valley a menace beneath it all. Once--indeed, twice, as he
worked, he organized a demand for higher wages in two or three of the
mines, and keeping himself in the background, yet cautiously managing
the tactics of the demand, he won. He held Sunday meetings in such halls
as the men could afford to hire and there he talked--talked the religion
of democracy. As labor moved about in the world, and as the labor press
of the country began to know of Grant, he acquired a certain fame as a
speaker among labor leaders. And the curious situation he was creating
gave him some reputation in other circles. He was good for an occasional
story in a Kansas City or Chicago Sunday paper; and the _Star_
reporter, sent to do the feature story, told of a lonely, indomitable
figure who was the idol of the laboring people of the Wahoo Valley; of
his Sunday meetings; of his elaborate system of organization; of his
peaceful demands for higher wages and better shop conditions; of his
conversion of spies sent to hinder him, of his never-ceasing effort,
unsupported by outside labor leaders, unvisited by the aristocracy of
the labor world, yet always respecting it, to preach unionism as a faith
rath