“And after it, I am sure.”

He led the way to the station wagon and helped her in; then brought her luggage on his own shoulder.

“Oh,” she cried in distress.  “Do you have to be your own stevedore?  I don’t like to have you doing that for me.”

“Out here we wait on ourselves,” he replied when he had tumbled the trunk into the wagon.  He seated himself beside her as if he were doing an accustomed thing, and she, too, felt as if she had been there beside him many times before.

As they entered the village, he said:—­

“You must note my rowdy town.  Never was there such a place—­such organized success built on so much individual failure.  From boss to water-boy we were failures all; so we understood each other.  We haven’t sworn brotherhood, but we’re pulling together.  Some of us had known no law, and most of us had a prejudice against it, but now we’re making our own laws and we rather enjoy the process.  We’ve made the town and the mines our own cause, so what is the use of playing the traitor?  Some of us are short-stake men habitually and constitutionally.  Very well, say we, let us look at the facts.  Since there are short-stake men in the world, why not make allowances for them?  Use their limited powers of endurance and concentration, then let ’em off to rest up.  If there are enough short-stake men around, some one will always be working.  We find it works well.”

“Have you many women in your midst?”

“At first we had very few.  Just some bedraggled wives and a few less responsible ladies with magenta feathers in their hats.  At least, two of them had, and the magenta feather came to be a badge.  But they’ve disappeared—­the feathers, not the ladies.  Honora had a hand in it.  I think she pulled off one marriage.  She seemed to think there were arguments in favor of the wedding ceremony.  But, mind you, she didn’t want any of the poor women to go because they were bad.  We are sinners all here.  Stay and take a chance, that’s our motto.  It isn’t often you can get a good woman like Honora to hang up a sign like that.”

“Honora couldn’t have done it once,” said Kate.  “But think of all she’s learned.”

“Learned?  Yes.  And I, too.  I’ve been learning my lessons, too,—­they were long and hard and I sulked at some of them, but I’m more tractable new.”

“I had my own hard conning,” Kate said softly.  “You never could have done what I did, Mr. Wander.  You couldn’t have been cruel to an old father.”

“Honora has made all that clear to me,” said Karl with compassion.  “When we are fighting for liberty we forget the sufferings of the enemy.”

There was a little pause.  Then Karl spoke.

“But I forgot to begin at the beginning in telling you about my made-over mining town.  Yet you seemed to know about it.”

“Oh, I read about it in the papers.  Your experiment is famous.  All of the people I am associated with, the welfare workers and sociologists, are immensely interested in it.  That’s one of the problems now—­how to use the hobo, how to get him back into an understanding of regulated communities.”