“Vision of what the world might be—­world with the army left out, with all that the army represented to me vanished from the earth.  With men not ruling and cursing other men; but working together—­the world for all and all for the world.  And the thing that saved me was that I saw there was something to work for—­something to believe in—­look at—­think about—­when old memories of the guard knocking me down with the butt of his gun would tear into my soul and bring me low with the hate they roused.

“And so I began again, Katie dear, that sense of things as they might be—­that vision—­taking some of the sting from what I had suffered from things as they were.  I stopped hating and cursing; I began thinking and dreaming.  There came the desire to know.  I tore into books like a madman.  I couldn’t go on hating my fellow-men because I was too busy trying to find out about them.  And so it happened that there were things more interesting to think about than the things I had suffered in the army; I was carried out of myself—­and saved.

“I wish I could talk to some of those other fellows!  Some of those boys who ran away from the army, not because they were criminals and cowards, but just because they didn’t know what to make of things.  I wish I could talk to some of those men who dug clay with me at Fort Leavenworth—­men who went away cursing the government, loathing the flag, hating all men, and who have nothing to take them out of it.  I wish I could take them up with me to the hill-top and say—­’There!  Don’t look at the little pit down below!  Look out!  Look wide!’

“Katie—­you aren’t going to save men by putting them at back-breaking work under brutalized guards.  You aren’t going to redeem men by belittling them.  You’re going to save them by making them see.  And the crime of our whole system of punishments is that it does all in its power, not to make them see, but to shut them out from seeing....”

In the letters which followed he told her other things, things he had done, the work he hoped to do, what he wanted to do with his life.  Told it with the simplicity of sincerity, the fine seriousness untainted with the self-consciousness called modesty.

He believed he could work with men; things he had already done made him believe he could do more, bigger things.  He wanted to help fight the battles of the people who worked; not with any soldier of fortune notion, but because he was one of those people, because he had suffered as one of those people, and believed he saw their way more clearly than the mass of them were seeing it.

And he wanted to write about men; had some reason for believing he could.  He was hoping that his play would open the way to many other things; it looked as though it were going to be put on.