IRA:  (rising and turning on him) You get my corn?  I raise this corn for you? (not to them—­his mind now going where it is shut off from any other mind) If I could make the wind stand still!  I want to turn the wind around.

MADELINE:  (going to him) Why—­father.  I don’t understand at all.

IRA:  Don’t understand.  Nobody understands. (a curse with a sob in it) God damn the wind!

(Sits down, his back to them.)

EMIL:  (after a silence) Well, I’ll go. (but he continues to look at IRA, who is holding the sack of com shut, as if someone may take it) Too bad—­(stopped by a sign from MADELINE, not to speak of it) Well, I was saying, I have go on to Beard’s Crossing.  I’ll stop for you on my way back. (confidentially) Couldn’t you telephone your uncle?  He could do something.  You don’t know what you’re going up against.  You heard what the Hindus got, I suppose.

MADELINE:  No.  I haven’t seen anyone to-day.

EMIL:  They’re held for the grand jury.  They’re locked up now.  No bail for them.  I’ve got the inside dope about them.  They’re going to get what this country can hand ’em; then after we’ve given them a nice little taste of prison life in America, they’re going to be sent back home—­to see what India can treat them to.

MADELINE:  Why are you so pleased about this, Emil?

EMIL:  Pleased?  It’s nothin’ to me—­I’m just telling you.  Guess you don’t know much about the Espionage Act or you’d go and make a little friendly call on your uncle.  When your case comes to trial—­and Judge Lenon may be on the bench—­(whistles) He’s one fiend for Americanism.  But if your uncle was to tell the right parties that you’re just a girl, and didn’t realize what you were saying—­

MADELINE:  I did realize what I was saying, and every word you’ve just said makes me know I meant what I said.  I said if this was what our country has come to, then I’m not for our country.  I said that—­and a-plenty more—­and I’ll say it again!

EMIL:  Well—­gee, you don’t know what it means.

MADELINE:  I do know what it means, but it means not being a coward.

EMIL:  Oh, well—­Lord, you can’t say everything you think.  If everybody did that, things’d be worse off than they are now.

MADELINE:  Once in a while you have to say what you think—­or hate yourself.

EMIL:  (with a grin) Then hate yourself.

MADELINE:  (smiling too) No thank you; it spoils my fun.

EMIL:  Well, look-a-here, Madeline, aren’t you spoiling your fun now?  You’re a girl who liked to be out.  Ain’t I seen you from our place, with this one and that one, sometimes all by yourself, strikin’ out over the country as if you was crazy about it?  How’d you like to be where you couldn’t even see out?

MADELINE:  (a step nearer the cell) There oughtn’t to be such places.