The document which Captain Murray handed to McCormack to read comprised the charges and specifications that had been filed against the first lieutenant. It had apparently been drawn with much skill and care, and it read as follows:

Lieutenant McCormack looked up from the reading of the charges with eyes that were dazed and incredulous.

“Well,” said Captain Murray, “what do you think of it?”

“Why,” replied Hal, “it’s not true; not any of it.”

“Probably not,” replied the captain, “but you’ll have to meet it all the same. I’ve got to forward the complaint to headquarters. I’ve no discretion in the matter.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Hal was still staring almost stupidly at his commander. The sweeping nature of the charges, their bluntness and brutality, had given him a shock from which he did not at once recover. For years he had been inviting just such a calamity as this, but now that it had come, in this direct and drastic form, the suddenness of it had quite taken away his breath.

Captain Murray handed Hal’s resignation back to him.

“You won’t want to file this now,” he said.

“No,” replied Hal, taking it, “I guess not. I think—I think I’ll deny those charges.”

“Of course you will. And let me tell you, you’ve got a very pretty fight on your hands. It’ll be no boy’s play. The Barriscales are determined. You know you’ve got yourself into this predicament by flirting with economic vagaries, and associating with radical charlatans. I’m willing to do what I can to help you out provided you’ll put up a vigorous defense on your own account. I want to keep you in the Guard.”

“Thank you, Captain! What would you suggest?”

“I think you’d better go and get Brownell to take up your case, and defend you. He’s a good lawyer and a good friend of yours. If anybody can save you he can.”

“Very well, I’ll speak to him. In the meantime I suppose I may be considered as being under arrest?”

“No; I’ve thought about that. These charges are still in the nature of a complaint from private citizens. They will not become official until I have acted on them. But I feel that I cannot afford to ignore them. The Army Regulations provide that the commanding officer with whom any charges are filed shall state, in forwarding them, whether the charges can be sustained. I cannot say that these charges will not be sustained, but I can and will say that I do not think the filing of them warrants your immediate arrest. You will therefore continue to perform your usual duties until the court itself shall order otherwise.”

“Thank you, Captain Murray! You are very generous.”

“And, McCormack, if you get out of this thing safely—and let me tell you frankly that the chances are against you, for you’ve been skating on mighty thin ice,—but if you should pull through all right, for heaven’s sake let go of all these visionary schemes! Come back to solid earth, and be a plain American citizen along with the rest of us!”

Hal did go to see Brownell. And although Brownell gave him a severe dressing-down for what he termed his crass foolishness, he agreed, nevertheless, to take up his case, and he did so with vigor and avidity, for he was fond of the first lieutenant and would have gone through fire and water for him. But when it came to the actual preparation for the defense Hal could give his counsel little assistance. The accused man knew of no specific circumstances on which the charges could have been based, nor of any witnesses whom he could call to disprove them. And while he was obliged to admit that he had undoubtedly said things that might give color to the complaint, he was nevertheless certain that the specifications as they were drawn were untrue.

So Brownell, with a listless client and a weak case before him, had a man’s task on hand to make up a defense. But he plunged into the work bravely. He cross-examined and badgered McCormack by the hour. He interviewed Donatello, General Chick, Miss Halpert, any one and every one who might by any possibility be able to throw light on the situation. He studied the law of the matter and exhausted the logic of his fertile mind in the preparation of arguments and briefs. And after he had done everything that legal knowledge and human ingenuity could help him to do to make ready his defense, he admitted confidentially to Captain Murray that the case was hopeless, and, incidentally, he brought down severe maledictions on the head of the first lieutenant, who, by his ridiculous vagaries and indiscretions, had wrought his own destruction.

One day General Chick came to Brownell’s office with flushed face and staring eyes.

“They’ve put me through the third degree,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Brownell; “talk!”

“Why, they suspoenaed me into Jim Hooper’s place an’ made me tell everything Lieutenant ’Cormack said that night he met them strike leaders in Donatello’s shop.”

“For the love of Pete! I didn’t know he met them.”

“Sure he met ’em. I was there.”

“What did you say he told them?”

“Why, now, I said he told ’em he believed them men o’ Barriscale’s had a right to their jobs, and if Barriscale didn’t give ’em back to ’em they had a right to take ’em anyway.”

“Yes; go on!”

Brownell was gripping the arms of his chair in grim despair.

“An’ he said—he said ’at he wouldn’t never give no orders to no soldiers to shoot workin’ men tryin’ to git their places back.”

“Oh, gosh!” The second lieutenant released his grips on the arms of the chair and clasped his head with both his hands. “The jig’s up!” he continued. “You’ve done it, Chick!”

“Done what, Mr. Brownell?”

“Given the enemy enough ammunition to blow Lieutenant McCormack into the middle of next week.”

“Will—will what I told ’em hurt ’im?”

“Hurt him! Thunder and Mars! It’ll send him to a military prison for life.”

Stunned, dazed, almost unseeing, Chick stumbled out of Brownell’s office into the street. Had the lieutenant for one minute realized what a staggering blow he had given to the boy, he would have dropped everything and hurried after him and disabused his simple mind of its belief in the enormity of his offense. As it was, the wretched hunchback, with an awful, self-accusing finger, piercing into his very vitals, hot and ice-cold by turns, slunk back to hide himself in his dingy corner in the printing-shop of Donatello. For if there was one thing on earth that he would have lost his right hand rather than to have done, it was a thing that might in any way have been injurious to Halpert McCormack. And if there was one person on earth for whom he would willingly have laid down his life and thought it a joy to do so, that person was his beloved first lieutenant.

The strike at the Barriscale plant, and at other smaller plants throughout the city, dragged on through the spring, unsettled and unbroken. But in May, just before starvation on the one side and insolvency on the other became an acute possibility, the union men, through an intermediate committee of interested citizens, came to terms with the companies.

The employers on the one hand made certain concessions, the employees on the other hand waived certain demands, and a settlement was reached.

But the leaders of the radicals would have none of it. Their men would not go back, they declared, until every original demand had been fully met, nor would they permit the union employees to resume work without them. Moreover, when they did return it would not be as wage-slaves, under a humiliating agreement, but as proprietors, having at least an equal voice with their former employers in the management of the business and the distribution of its profits. For was it not one of the chief tenets of their organization that:

So the companies were ground between the upper millstone of unionism and the nether millstone of syndicalism. But, when the shops were opened, the union men, under the protection of the police, disregarding the threats of their former companions in idleness, went back to work. The effort to prevent them by force from doing so was unsuccessful. There were some broken heads and bruised bodies, and the Industrialists retired from the conflict defeated, but sullen and revengeful. Then they picketed the plants, they waylaid workmen, they threatened destruction of property. Under the leadership of Gabriel and Kranich, they kept the laboring element of the community in a turmoil, the proprietors of the mills in a state of constant apprehension, the peaceful citizens of the community fearful lest at any moment the volcano rumbling and grumbling under the feet of industry should break out in violent eruption.

Such was the situation on the day that the court martial convened at Fairweather to try the charges against First Lieutenant Halpert McCormack.

The session was held in the large company room which was crowded to the doors with both Guardsmen and civilians.

The court consisted of five commissioned officers and a judge advocate, none of them under the grade of captain. The commissioned officers were in full dress, wearing their swords; the judge advocate was in undress uniform without his sword. It was his business to protect both the organized militia and the rights of the accused. The ranking officer present was Colonel Wagstaff, who presided.

The accused man, with his counsel, Lieutenant Brownell, sat at a side table, and the Barriscales, father and son, representing the complainants, sat with their counsel, Captain Flower of Company A, at another table. The scene was impressive, the atmosphere of the place was tense with suppressed excitement.

After the order convening the court had been read, and the members of the court had been duly sworn, the defendant was arraigned and the charges and specifications were read to him. He was, necessarily, the center of interest. Standing there in full dress uniform without his sword, pale, and somewhat haggard from loss of sleep, he nevertheless looked the soldier that he was. He knew that his case was hopeless. Brownell had told him so at the last. All that he expected now to do was to try to justify himself, so far as possible, in the eyes of the community. Beyond that he was ready to submit to the judgment of the court. So, when the time came for him to plead, he answered in a voice firm with the consciousness of innocence of the charges as drawn and brought against him:

“Not guilty.”

Then began the calling of witnesses. There were plenty of them indeed who had heard the defendant say that in his opinion the wage system was all wrong, that wealth obtained from the product of labor should be fairly divided between the capitalist and the workman, and that his sympathies in the present industrial conflict were entirely with the men, all of whom should be permitted to resume their old places on their own terms. There was more evidence to the effect that McCormack had declared that the President and the Congress were but pawns in the hands of wealth, and that the present political system was but an instrument for the exploitation of labor. It was all very crude, sophomoric and harmless, but it had about it an air of disloyalty that was distinctly damaging to the chances of the young defendant.

Then First Sergeant Ben Barriscale was called to the stand as a witness for the prosecution. He could do little more than to repeat, in substance, the evidence already given, but he made it stronger, more direct, more convincing. He laid especial stress on the attitude of the defendant toward the parties in the existing strike, his criticism of the owners of the mills, his sympathy with the idle workmen who were threatening revenge and disorder. While the animus of the witness was plain, his testimony was not to be lightly considered.

Brownell took him in hand for cross-examination.

“You and the defendant were rival candidates last year for the office of first lieutenant, were you not?”

“I was a candidate,” replied the witness sharply. “I believe the defendant was one also.”

“And the defendant won out?”

“By one vote, yes.”

“And you felt pretty sore about it?”

“I felt humiliated and outraged because his rank was inferior to mine, and, holding the opinions he did and does, he had no right to the office.”

“And you declared, at the time of the election, in the presence of the entire company, that either McCormack would be dismissed from the Guard or you would get out of it; that you would refuse to serve in the same company with him; you said that, did you not?”

“I did, and I repeat it now. He’s not a fit man for any loyal Guardsman to serve with or under.”

Barriscale’s voice, resonant with wrath, reached to every corner of the room. The members of the court glanced at one another in apparent surprise and apprehension.

Brownell waved his hand to the witness and said smilingly:

“That is all.”

When Ben left the stand the elder Barriscale was called to it to tell of existing industrial conditions in the city, and of the danger of violent interference with peaceful workmen and the rights of property; such interference as might, and probably would, in the absence of the state police, call for protection at the hands of the National Guard. He gave it as his judgment, although the admission of his declaration was strenuously objected to by Brownell as being but opinion evidence, that it would be utterly unsafe to entrust the protection of property and the lives of workmen to a body of troops in command of an officer with the record of Lieutenant McCormack.

“Mr. Barriscale,” asked Brownell, on cross-examination, “are you aware that when Lieutenant McCormack received his commission, he swore to defend the constitution of the United States and of this State, against all enemies, foreign and domestic?”

“I presume he did,” was the curt reply.

“And you believe that he now stands ready to violate that oath?”

“I believe that the oath means nothing to him as against the red-flag and red-hand policy that he advocates, and the traitorous class whose cause he has taken up.”

“You share with your son a certain resentment and bitterness against the defendant on account of his success in the election to the first lieutenancy?”

“I thought and still think, sir, that that election was an outrage against decency. No self-respecting man should be content to serve under an officer so elected, and so identified with the worst elements in the community.”

The witness’s face was red with rage, and he pounded the table in front of him with his clenched fist as he spoke.

“That is all, Mr. Barriscale.”

Suave and smiling, Brownell waved the manufacturer from the stand.

To draw from a witness an admission of hatred for the person against whom he is testifying is to give a body blow to the value of his testimony, and in this respect Brownell was well satisfied with his cross-examination of the Barriscales, both father and son.

Then came the star witness for the prosecution in the person of Chick Dalloway. Poor Chick! For two hours he had been waiting outside the court-room in abject misery. Since the day when Brownell revealed to him the probable result of having given certain information to McCormack’s enemies, he had scarcely eaten or slept. Once he had gone to McCormack himself, to bewail his unfortunate revelations. It was pitiful to see him. Hal tried to cheer and comfort him, but he would not be comforted. Now, at the trial, under the badgering of Barriscale’s lawyer he was about to clinch the fate of the best friend he had on earth. He knew it. He knew that after he had said what he would be compelled to say, Halpert McCormack would be discredited as a citizen and disgraced as a soldier; and he, Chick Dalloway, would be absolutely powerless to prevent it.

He walked up between the rows of chairs, moving from side to side as he went. His knees were strangely weak. His face was pale and drawn, and his eyes seemed to be looking into some far distance.

He took the oath and dropped into the witness-chair by the table, and waited for the torture that he knew would be his, and for the tragedy that was bound to swallow up his beloved lieutenant.