THE hyphen editorial spent the following morning on the hook. Its author gave it an affectionate and yearning glance as he passed early to his desk to touch up his substitute leader on the State Council of Defense. Once fully determined upon the casting of his verbal bomb, he was eager for the explosion and the resultant battle which should end the armed truce. But, as Andrew Galpin had said, fair play demanded that he hold off now, lest he hamper the development of the Governor’s new plan. Any time was suitable for his challenge. Meanwhile copies of it from the stolen galleys had been circulated among the elect of Deutschtum, and a synopsis taken to Governor Embree. He had bidden his informants not to worry. There would be no occasion for the publication of that screed. A plan was already completed which would take care of Mr. Robson. It was observed that the Governor looked weary but optimistic.

Short though the notice had been, the invited conferees responded to the official call for a meeting upon the State Council of Defense plan, almost unanimously. It was a curiously assorted gathering that surrounded the long table in the council room, when Jeremy Robson arrived, a trifle late from his work of re-casting the day’s page. That it was broadly representative was beyond denial. Yet as the newcomer reckoned it up, he felt a more than vague uneasiness.

Appropriating the nearest vacant chair he found himself between a down-state lawyer and politician named Lerch on one side, and Cassius Kimball, of The Bellair Journal, on the other. Next to Kimball sat State Senator Bredle from Embree’s county, beyond him a lake-district dairyman of indeterminate political sympathies, and then Gordon Fliess, of the Fliess Brewing Company, the Lieutenant-Governor, an imposing and obsequious puppet of the Governor’s, and Ernst Bauer of the Marlittstown Herold und Zeitung. Bunched at the upper end of the table were an ill-assorted trio of The Guardian’s enemies, Montrose Clark, Judge Dana, and that anomaly of Teutonic type-reversion, Robert Wanser, grandson of the Young Germany of ’48.

In the other direction, the prospect was no less puzzling nor more reassuring. Half a dozen men from the Southern Tier, a section unfamiliar to Jeremy, suggested a predominance of the Swedish type, which, in Centralia, meant anti-war sentiment. Concerning the next figure, tall, plethoric, ceremonially garbed, there was at least no uncertainty. Emil Bausch’s local letter-writing bureau of German propaganda was at that moment represented in The Guardian’s waste-basket by half a dozen grossly pro-German and subtly anti-American communications to the editor. Bausch had for neighbor that fire-eating Seminarian, the Reverend Theo Gunst, next to whom, in turn, sat Arthur Betts, of Kelter & Betts, looking uncomfortable but flattered. Milliken, presumptively representing the Socialist element, flanked him on the far side with Girdner, appearing for Labor, on his left.

But when Jeremy’s anxious glance finally reached the Governor’s high chair he breathed a temporary sigh of relief. In the place of honor, on the right of the gubernatorial smile, sat Magnus Laurens. Surely that indicated an acceptance by Embree of Jeremy’s argument; Laurens was to be appointed chairman of the council, after all. The Governor’s left was occupied by Ensign, the millionaire absentee owner of The Record. In a less crowded moment Jeremy would have given some thought to this curious preferment. Directly across the table from the central group there protruded loftily from between a pursy judge and a northwestern corn-raiser, a figure tall, stiff, and meager, a lean, hard-wood lath of a man lost in the dim, untroubled contemplation of an awful example of political portraiture on the far wall. Why Professor Rappelje should have been included, Jeremy could not surmise, unless it was that Governor Embree could count upon him as an unquestioning follower through thick and thin. In fact the whole composition of the meeting suggested that the summons had been apportioned with a view to safe control by the Governor.

To the watchful Jeremy it seemed that Governor Embree was nervous. The smile at the corners of the conciliatory lips was disturbed by a restless twitching. After an anxiously calculating glance over the assemblage he began to read from a typed sheet a preamble, concluding: “Therefore, I present for the consideration of this honorable body the following names to constitute the Centralia State Council of Defense.”

The first nomination fell upon Jeremy’s ears like a burst of thunder. It was that of Emil Bausch, chairman.

The second nomination fell upon his brain like a bludgeon. It was that of Jeremy Robson, vice-chairman.

From down the table he caught the confirmatory sneer of Montrose Clark. His eyes darted to Magnus Laurens, squarest and most honorable of enemies, and met in his face a wrathful contempt. Cassius Kimball leaned to him and whispered:

“First you knew of it?”

“Yes.”

“He’s put it over on you.”

Jeremy sat in a daze. His mind was confused by the suddenness of the thrust; his will was blurred. Instinctively he felt that he must do something. But what? Protest? Decline to serve? Announce his attitude? And already his time was past! The monotonous, fateful reading had gone beyond him.

Wanser and Fliess, Kimball, Laurens, ex-Governor Scudder, Montrose Clark, the Reverend Theo Gunst, Lieutenant-Governor Maxwell, Ensign, Bredle, Girdner, Ivanson, the Swede, and so on with the German and pacifist element always slightly but safely in the majority. Not a word was spoken, except once when in a brief breathing-pause some one shot out, like an arrow through the tense quiet, the contemptuous monosyllable:

“Packed!”

Jeremy thought that he identified the voice as that of Judge Selden Dana. Then the reader pronounced the name of Professor Harvey Rappelje.

“Wait!” said that gentleman.

“Order! Order!” protested Wanser and Bausch with suspicious readiness.

“I am in order,” retorted the economist, rising in his place to confront the Governor opposite.

The Governor smiled, but thrust out a nervous tongue and licked the corners of the smile. The professor’s face was as set and still as a frozen river, and much the same color. Embree, motioning with a placating hand for silence, resumed: “The Honorable Carter N. Rock—”

“Wait!” The scholar’s keener voice cut off the reading. “I rise to a point of order, sir.”

“State the point.”

“Governor Embree, is that your honest conception of a council to fight this war?”

“Out of order!” cried Bausch again, and was reinforced by Girdner, Fliess, and others. “Who said fight?”

“We are not making war.”

“Keep to the point.”

“Discussion is not in order.”

“Sit down.”

But the hard challenge of the professor’s glare compelled the Governor. “It is my carefully considered selection,” said he with a suggestion of sulkiness.

There leapt from Rappelje’s lips a blasting oath. From any mouth in that environment it would have been startling. From the lean dry, silent, repressed scholar it had something of the shock of nature’s forces in outbreak. Not less appalling was the single word to follow:

“Treason!”

Embree’s smile did not fade; but it shriveled into a masklike grimace, the rictus of a child before the convulsion racks it.

“You—you will retract—” he began chokingly.

Two astounding tears welled from the scholar’s pale eyes, tears of a still man’s uttermost fury.

“I will demonstrate to you,” said he precisely, “what it is to fight.”

He launched himself across the table at the Governor’s throat.

The steel-framed Laurens seized and forced him back; but not before Embree had collapsed into his chair. From his place, up the table, the Lieutenant-Governor, quite beside himself, squealed for a totally imaginary sergeant-at-arms. The corn-belt farmer, in thunderous tones with a wailing inflection besought any and all not to forget that they were gentlemen. Girdner, huge and formidable, had jumped to his feet. The white-haired, alert Milliken caught up a heavy paper-weight. Bausch was solemnly, almost sacrificially taking off his coat. A medley of voices demanded “Order!”

“Throw him out!”

“Arrest him!” There were all the elements of a lively and scandalous mÊlÉe, waiting only the fusing act.

Laurens checked it with one sufficient threat. Brandishing the weighty official gavel of lignum vitÆ, he stood, a modern Thor, in the unconscious pose and with the menace of the Berseker, and, in a full-throated bellow proclaimed:

“I’ll brain the first man that strikes a blow.”

Before that intimidation they dropped into their chairs. There was a ripple of the shamed and foolish laughter of self-realization as the strain eased. The warrior-scholar’s neighbors, who had been holding him in his chair, felt his limbs relax, and mistakenly thinking his effort spent, released him. Instantly he rose.

“I apologize to this honorable body,” he said with quiet courtesy, “and to the State of Centralia as represented by its chief executive. And, as a question of privilege preliminary to my resignation, I ask whether the list as read is to stand.”

“I will not submit to be bulldozed or intimidated,” declared the Governor huskily.

“The list stands?” persisted the other.

“It stands, subject to the approval of this body.”

“Doubtless you can carry it,” conceded the objector, ranging the assemblage with his clear and contemptuous glance.

“Vote,” piped up an uncertain and tentative voice.

“But you would be well advised not to make the attempt.”

Martin Embree conceived that the proper course now was to ignore this unforeseen assailant of his plan. “I will proceed with the reading,” he announced.

“I beg your pardon,” said the relentless and polite voice. “One moment. You will have until this evening to withdraw your list.”

“And vot then? Vot then?” broke in Emil Bausch, thrusting upward a truculent face.

“Do you want civil war in this State?” challenged Fliess.

“If necessary,” retorted Rappelje, and stared him down with a steady and intolerable eye. He turned again to the Governor. “Unless that list is withdrawn before night, Martin Embree,” said he solemnly, “so help me the God of my country, I will raise the University and hang you to the highest tree on the campus.”