Every seat in the primitive town hall was occupied, and a somber frieze of Dakota plainsmen and their sad-faced wives decorated the rough, unpainted sides of the building. On boxes in the narrow aisles, between long rows of pine boards on which were seated the early arrivals, late-comers squatted discontentedly, among them a dozen women carrying fretful babies, to whom from time to time they addressed a comforting murmur as they swung them, cradle-fashion, in their tired arms.

The exercises of the evening had not yet begun, but almost every eye in the big, silent, patient assemblage was fixed on a woman, short and stout, with snow-white hair and a young and vivid face, who had just taken her place on the platform, escorted by a self-conscious official of the little town. Every one in that gathering had heard of Dr. Anna Harland; few had yet heard her speak, but all knew what she represented: "new-fangled notions about women"—women's rights, woman suffrage, feminism, unsettling ideas which threatened to disturb the peace of minds accustomed to run in well-worn grooves. Many of the men and women in her audience had driven twenty, thirty, or forty miles across the plains to hear her, but there was no unanimity in the expressions with which they studied her now as she sat before them. In the men's regard were curiosity, prejudice, good-humored tolerance, or a blend of all three. The women's faces held a different meaning: pride, affectionate interest, admiration tinged with hope; and here and there a hint of something deeper, a wireless message that passed from soul to soul.

At a melodeon on the left of the platform a pale local belle, who had volunteered her services, awaited the signal to play the opening chords of the song that was to precede the speaker's address. In brackets high on the rough walls a few kerosene lamps vaguely illumined the scene, while from the open night outside came the voices of cowboys noisily greeting late arrivals and urging them to "go on in an' git a change of heart!"

The musician received her signal—a nod from the chairman of the evening—and the next moment the voices of a relieved and relaxed audience were heartily swelling the familiar strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." As the men and women before her sang on, Dr. Harland watched them, the gaze of the brilliant dark eyes under her straight black brows keen and intent. Even yet she had not decided what she meant to say to these people. Something in the music, something in the atmosphere, would surely give her a cue, she felt, before she began to speak.

Sitting near her on the platform, I studied both her and her audience. The Far West and its people were new to me; so was this great leader of the woman's cause. But it behooved me to know her and to know her well, for I had accompanied her on this Western campaign for the sole purpose of writing a series of articles on her life and work, to be published in the magazine of which I had recently been appointed assistant editor. During our long railroad journeys and drives over hills and plains she had talked to me of the past. Now, I knew, I was to see her again perform the miracle at which I had not yet ceased to marvel—the transformation of hundreds of indifferent or merely casually interested persons into a mass of shouting enthusiasts, ready to enlist under her yellow banner and follow wherever she led.

To-night, as she rose and for a moment stood silent before her audience, I could see her, as usual, gathering them up, drawing them to her by sheer force of magnetism, before she spoke a word.

"My friends," she began, in the beautiful voice whose vibrating contralto notes reached every person in the great hall, "last Monday, at Medora, I was asked by a missionary who is going to India to send a message to the women of that land. I said to him, 'Tell them the world was made for women, too.' To-night I am here to give you the same message. The world is women's, too. The West is women's, too. You have helped to make it, you splendid, pioneer women, who have borne with your husbands the heat and burden of the long working-days. You have held down your claims through the endless months of Western winters, while your men were away; you have toiled with them in the fields; you have endured with them the tragedies of cyclones, of droughts, of sickness, of starvation. If woman's work is in the home alone, as our opponents say it is, you have been most unwomanly. For you have remained in the home only long enough to bear your children, to care for them, to feed them and your husbands. The rest of the time you have done a man's work in the West. The toil has been yours as well as man's; the reward of such toil should be shared by you. The West is yours, too. Now it holds work for you even greater than that you have done in the past, and I am here to beg you to begin that work."

The address went on. In the dim light of the ill-smelling lamps I could see the audience leaning forward, intent, fascinated. Even among the men easy tolerance was giving place to eager response; on row after row of the rough benches the spectators were already clay in the hands of the speaker, to be molded, for the moment at least, into the form she chose to give them. My eyes momentarily touched, then fastened intently on a face in the third row on the left. It was the face of a woman—a little, middle-aged woman of the primitive Western type—her graying hair combed straight back from a high, narrow forehead, her thin lips slightly parted, the flat chest under her gingham dress rising and falling with emotion. But my interest was held by her eyes—brown eyes, blazing eyes, almost the eyes of a fanatic. Unswervingly they rested on the speaker's face, while the strained attention, the parted lips, the attitude of the woman's quivering little body betrayed almost uncontrollable excitement. At that instant I should not have been surprised to see her spring to her feet and shout, "Alleluia!"

A moment later I realized that Dr. Harland had seen her, too; that she was, indeed, intensely conscious of her, and was directing many of her best points to this absorbed listener. Here was the perfect type she was describing to her audience—the true woman pioneer, who not only worked and prayed, but who read and thought and aspired. The men and women under the flickering lights were by this time as responsive to the speaker's words as a child to its mother's voice. They laughed, they wept, they nodded, they sighed. When the usual collection was taken up they showed true Western generosity, and when the lecture was over they crowded forward to shake hands with the woman leader, and to exhaust their limited vocabulary in shy tributes to her eloquence. Far on the outskirts of the wide circle that had formed around her I saw the little woman with the blazing eyes, vainly endeavoring to force her way toward us through the crowd. Dr. Harland observed her at the same time and motioned to me.

"Will you ask her to wait, Miss Iverson?" she asked. "I would like to talk to her before she slips away." And she added, with her characteristic twinkle, "That woman would make a perfect 'Exhibit A' for my lecture."

I skirted the throng and touched the arm of the little woman just as she had given up hope of reaching the speaker, and was moving toward the door. She started and stared at me, almost as if the touch of my fingers had awakened her from a dream.

"Dr. Harland asks if you will wait a few moments till the others leave," I told her. "She is anxious to meet you."

The brown-eyed woman drew in a deep breath.

"Tha's whut I want," she exclaimed, ecstatically, "but it looked like I couldn't git near her."

We sat down on an empty bench half-way down the hall, and watched the human stream flow toward and engulf the lecturer. "Ain't she jest wonderful?" breathed my companion. "She knows us women better 'n we know ourselves. She knows all we done an' how we feel about it. I felt like she was tellin' them people all my secrets, but I didn't mind." She hesitated, then added dreamily, "It's high time men was told whut their women are thinkin' an' can't say fer themselves."

In the excited group around the speaker a baby, held high in its mother's arms to avoid being injured in the crush, shrieked out a sudden protest. My new acquaintance regarded it with sympathetic eyes.

"I've raised six of 'em," she told me. "My oldest is a girl nineteen. My youngest is a boy of twelve. My big girl she's lookin' after the house an' the fam'ly while I'm gone. I druv sixty miles 'cross the plains to hear Dr. Harland. It took me two days, an' it's jest about wore out my horse—but this is worth it. I ain't had sech a night sence I was a girl."

She looked at me, her brown eyes lighting up again with their queer, excited fires.

"My Jim he 'most fell dead when I told him I was comin'," she went on. "But I says to him, 'I ain't been away from this place one minute in twenty years,' I says. 'Now I guess you folks can git 'long without me fer a few days. For, Jim,' I says, 'ef I don't git away, ef I don't go somewhere an' have some change, somethin's goin' to snap, an' I guess it'll be me!'"

"You mean," I exclaimed, in surprise, "that you've never left your ranch in twenty years?"

She nodded.

"Not once," she corroborated. "Not fer a minute. You know whut the summers are—work, work from daylight to dark; an' in the winters I had t' hol' down the claim while Jim he went to the city an' worked. Sometimes he'd only git home once or twice the hull winter. Then when we begin to git on, seemed like 'twas harder than ever. Jim he kept addin' more land an' more stock to whut we had, an' there was more hands to be waited on, an' the babies come pretty fast. Lately Jim he's gone to Chicago every year to sell his cattle, but I ain't bin able to git away till now."

During her eager talk—a talk that gushed forth like a long-repressed stream finding a sudden outlet—she had been leaning toward me with her arm on the back of the bench and her shining eyes on mine. Now, as if remembering her "company manners," she sat back stiffly, folded her work-roughened hands primly in her lap, and sighed with supreme content.

"My!" she whispered, happily, "I feel like I was in a diff'rent world. It don't seem possible that only sixty miles out on the plains that ranch is right there, an' everything is goin' on without me. An' here I be, hearin' the music, an' all the folks singin' together, an' that wonderful woman talkin' like she did! I feel"—she hesitated for a comparison, and then went on, with the laugh of a happy girl—"I feel like I was up in a balloon an' on my way to heaven!"

I forgot the heat of the crowded hall, the smell of the smoking lamps, the shuffle of hobnailed shoes on the pine floors, the wails of fretful babies. I almost felt that I, too, was floating off with this ecstatic stranger in the balloon of her imagination.

"I see," I murmured. "You're tired of drudgery. You haven't played enough in all these years."

She swung round again until she faced me, her sallow cheeks flushed, her eager, brilliant eyes on mine.

"I ain't played none at all," she said. "I dunno what play is. An' work ain't the only thing I'm tired of. I'm tired of everything. I'm tired of everything—except this."

Her voice lingered on the last two words. Her eyes left my face for an instant and followed the lecturer, of whose white head we obtained a glimpse from time to time as the crowd opened around her. Still gazing toward her, but now as if unseeingly, the plainswoman went on, her voice dropping to a lower, more confidential note.

"I'm sick of everything," she repeated. "Most of all, I'm sick of the plains and the sky—stretching on and on and on and on, like they do, as if they was no end to 'em. Sometimes when I'm alone I stand at my door an' look at 'em an' shake my fists an' shriek. I begun to think they wasn't anything but them nowhere. It seemed 's if the little town back East where I come from was jest a place I dreamed of—it couldn't really be. Nothin' could be 'cept those plains an' the cattle an' the sky. Then, this spring—"

She turned again to face me.

"I dunno why I'm tellin' you all this," she broke off, suddenly. "Guess it's because I ain't had no one to talk to confidential fer so long, an' you look like you understand."

"I do understand," I told her.

She nodded.

"Well, this spring," she went on, "I begun to hate everything, same as I hated the plains. I couldn't exactly hate my children; but it seemed to me they never did nothin' right, an' I jest had to keep tellin' myself they was mine, an' they was young an' didn't understand how they worried me by things they done. Then the hands drove me 'most crazy. They was one man—why, jes' to have that man pass the door made me feel sick, an' yet I hadn't nothin' again' him, really. An' finally, last of all, Jim—even Jim—"

Her voice broke. Sudden tears filled her eyes, quenching for the moment the sparks that burned there.

"Jim's a good man," she continued, steadily, after a moment's pause. "He's a good, hard-workin' man. He's good to me in his way, an' he's good to the children. But of course he ain't got much time for us. He never was a talker. He's a worker, Jim is, an' when night comes he's so tired he falls asleep over the fire. But everything he done always seemed pretty near right to me—till this spring."

Her voice flattened and died on the last three words. For a moment she sat silent, brooding, a strange puzzled look in her brown eyes. The crowd around Dr. Harland was thinning out, and people were leaving the hall. We could easily have reached her now, but I sat still, afraid to dam the verbal freshet that was following so many frozen winters.

"This spring," she went on, at last, "it jest seems like I can't bear to have even Jim around." She checked herself and touched my arm timidly, almost apologetically. "It's a terrible thing to say, ain't it?" she almost whispered, and added slowly, "It's a terrible thing to feel. I can't bear to see him come into the room. I can't bear the way he eats, or the way he smokes, or the way he sets down, or the way he gits up, or the way he breathes. He does 'em all jest like he always has. They ain't nothin' wrong with 'em. But I can't bear 'em no more." She beat her hands together softly, with a queer, frantic gesture. Her voice took on a note of rising excitement. "I can't," she gasped. "I can't, I can't!"

I rose.

"Come," I said, cheerfully. "Dr. Harland is free now. I want you to talk to her. She can help you. She's a very wise woman."

A momentary flicker of something I did not recognize shone in my companion's eyes. Was it doubt or pity, or both?

"She ain't a married woman, is she?" she asked, quietly, as she rose and walked down the aisle by my side.

I laughed.

"No," I conceded, "she isn't, and neither am I. But you know even the Bible admits that of ten virgins five were wise!"

Her face, somber now, showed no reflection of my amusement. She seemed to be considering our claims to wisdom, turning over in her mind the possibility of help from either of us, and experiencing a depressing doubt.

"Well, you're women, anyway," she murmured, at last, a pathetic note of uncertainty lingering in her voice.

"Will you tell me your name?" I asked, "so that I may introduce you properly to Dr. Harland?"

"Tildy Mears," she answered, promptly; then added, with stiff formality, "Mrs. James Mears of the X.X.M. Ranch."

We were already facing Dr. Harland, and I presented Mrs. Mears without further delay. The leader met her with the brilliant smile, the close hand-clasp, the warm, human sympathy which rarely failed to thrill the man or woman she was greeting. Under their influence Mrs. Mears expanded like a thirsty plant in a gentle shower. Within five minutes the two women were friends.

"You're at the hotel, of course," Dr. Harland asked, when she heard of the sixty-mile drive across the country. "Then you must have supper with Miss Iverson and me. We always want something after these long evenings, and I will have it sent up to our sitting-room, so that we can have a comfortable talk."

Half an hour later we were grouped around the table in the little room, and over the cold meat, canned peaches, lemonade, and biscuits which formed our collation Tildy Mears retold her story, adding innumerable details and intimate touches under the stimulus of the doctor's interest. At the end of it Dr. Harland sat for a long moment in silent thought. Then, from the briskness with which she began to speak, I knew that she had found some solution of the human problem before us.

"Mrs. Mears," she said, abruptly, and without any comment on the other's recital, "I wish you would travel around with us for a fortnight. We're going to remain in this part of the state, and you would find our meetings extremely interesting. On the other hand, you could give me a great deal of help and information, and, though I cannot offer you a salary, I will gladly pay your expenses."

This was a plan very characteristic of Dr. Harland, to whom half-way measures of any kind made no appeal. I looked at Tildy Mears. For an instant, under the surprise of the leader's unexpected words, she had sat still, stunned; in the next, her eyes had flashed to us one of their ecstatic messages, as if she had grasped all the other woman's proposition held of change, of interest, of growth. Then abruptly the light faded, went out.

"I'd love to," she said, dully, "I'd jest love to! But of course it ain't possible. Why, I got to start home to-morrer. Jim," she gulped, bringing out the name with an obvious effort, "Jim expecks me back Sat'day night."

"Listen to me, Mrs. Mears"—Dr. Harland leaned forward, her compelling eyes deep in those of the Western woman—"I'm going to speak to you very frankly—as if we were old friends; as if we were sisters, as, indeed, we are."

Tildy Mears nodded. Her eyes, dull and tired now, looked trustfully back at the other woman.

"I feel like we are," she agreed. And she added, "You kin say anything you've a mind to."

"Then I want to say this."

I had never seen Dr. Harland more interested, more impressive. Into what she was saying to the forlorn little creature before her she threw all she had of persuasiveness, of magnetism, and of power.

"If you don't have a change," she continued, "and a very radical change, you will surely have a bad nervous breakdown. That is what I want to save you from. I cannot imagine anything that would do it more effectively than to campaign with us for a time, and have the whole current of your thoughts turned in a new direction. Why, don't you understand"—her deep voice was full of feeling; for the moment at least she was more interested in one human soul than in hundreds of human votes—"it isn't that you have ceased to care for your home and your family. It's only that your tortured nerves are crying out against the horrible monotony of your life. Give them the change they are demanding and everything else will come right. Go back and put them through the old strain, and—well, I'm afraid everything will go wrong."

As if something in the other's words had galvanized her into sudden action Mrs. Mears sprang to her feet. Like a wild thing she circled the room, beating her hands together.

"I can't go back!" she cried. "I can't go back! Whut'll I do? Oh, whut'll I do?"

"Do what I am advising you to do."

Dr. Harland's quiet voice steadied the hysterical woman. Under its calming influence I could see her pull herself together.

"Write Mr. Mears that you are coming with us, and give him our advance route, so that he will know exactly where you are all the time. If your daughter can manage your home for five days she can manage it for two weeks. And your little jaunt need not cost your husband one penny."

"I brought twenty dollars with me," quavered Tildy Mears.

"Keep it," advised the temporarily reckless leader of the woman's cause. "When we reach Bismarck you can buy yourself a new dress and get some little presents to take home to the children."

Tildy Mears stopped her reckless pacing of the room and stood for a moment very still, her eyes fixed on a worn spot in the rug at her feet.

"I reckon I will," she then said, slowly. "Sence you ask me, I jest reckon I'll stay."

The next evening, during her remarks to the gathering she was then addressing, Dr. Harland abruptly checked herself.

"But there is some one here who knows more about that than I do," she said, casually, referring to a point she was covering. "Mrs. Mears, who is on the platform with me to-night, is one of you. She knows from twenty years of actual experience what I am learning from study and observation. She can tell you better than I can how many buckets of water a plainsman's wife carries into an unpiped ranch during the day. Will you tell us, Mrs. Mears?"

She asked a few questions, and hesitatingly, stammeringly at first, the panic-stricken plainswoman answered her. Then a woman in the audience spoke up timidly to compare notes, and in five minutes more Dr. Harland was sitting quietly in the background while Tildy Mears, her brown eyes blazing with interest and excitement, talked to her fellow plainswomen about the problems she and they were meeting together.

Seeing the success of Dr. Harland's experiment, I felt an increased respect for that remarkable woman. She had known that this would happen; she had realized, as I had not, that Tildy Mears could talk to others as simply and as pregnantly as to us, and that her human appeal to her sister workers would be far greater than any even Anna Harland herself could make. One night she described a stampede in words that made a slow chill run the length of my spine. Half an hour later she was discussing "hired hands," with a shrewd philosophy and a quaint humor that drew good-natured guffaws from "hired hands" themselves as well as from their employers in the audience.

Within the next few days Tildy Mears became a strong feature of our campaign. Evening after evening, in primitive Dakota towns, her self-consciousness now wholly gone, she supplemented Dr. Harland's lectures by a talk to her sister women, so simple, so homely, so crudely eloquent that its message reached every heart. During the days she studied the suffrage question, reading and rereading the books we had brought with us, and asking as many questions as an eager and precocious child. Openly and unabashedly Dr. Harland gloried in her.

"Why, she's a born orator," she told me one day, almost breathlessly. "She's a feminine Lincoln. There's no limit to her possibilities. I'd like to take her East. I'd like to educate her—train her. Then she could come back here and go through the West like a whirlwind."

The iridescent bubble was floating so beautifully that it seemed a pity to prick it; but I did, with a callous reminder.

"How about her home?" I suggested—"and her children? and her husband?"

Dr. Harland frowned and bit her lip.

"Humph!" she muttered, her voice taking on the flat notes of disappointment and chagrin. "Humph! I'd forgotten them."

For a moment she stood reflecting, readjusting her plans to a scale which embraced the husband, the home, and the children of her protÉgÉe. Then her brow cleared, her irresistible twinkle broke over her face; she smiled like a mischievous child.

"I had forgotten them," she repeated. "Maybe"—this with irrepressible hopefulness—"maybe Tildy will, too!"

That Tildy did nothing of the kind was proved to us all too soon. Six days had passed, and the growing fame of Mrs. Mears as a suffrage speaker was attracting the attention of editors in the towns we visited. It reached its climax at a mass-meeting in Sedalia, where for an hour the little woman talked to an audience of several hundred, making all Dr. Harland's favorite points in her own simpler, homelier words, while the famous leader of the cause beamed on her proudly from the side of the stage. After the doctor's speech the two women held an informal reception, which the Mayor graced, and to which the Board of Aldermen also lent the light of their presence. These high dignitaries gave most of their attention to our leader; she could answer any question they wished to ask, as well as many others they were extremely careful not to bring up. But the women in the audience, the babies, the growing boys and girls—all these turned to Tildy Mears. From the closing words of her speech until she disappeared within the hotel she was followed by an admiring throng. As I caught the final flash of her brown eyes before her bedroom engulfed her it seemed to me that she looked pale and tired. She had explained that she wanted no supper, but before I went to bed, hearing her still moving around her room, I rapped at her door.

"Wouldn't you like a sandwich?" I asked, when she had opened it. "And a glass of lemonade?"

She hesitated. Then, seeing that I had brought these modest refreshments on a tray, she stepped back and allowed me to pass in. There was an unusual self-consciousness in her manner, an unusual bareness in the effect of the room. The nails on the wall had been stripped of her garments. On the floor lay an open suit-case closely packed.

"Why!" I gasped. "Why are you packing? We're going to stay here over to-morrow, you know."

For an instant she stood silent before me, looking like a child caught in some act of disobedience by a relentless parent. Then her head went up.

"Yes," she said, quietly. "I'm packed. I'm goin' home!"

"Going home!" I repeated, stupidly. It seemed to me that all I could do was to echo her words. "When?" I finally brought out.

"To-morrer mornin'." She spoke almost defiantly. "I wanted to go to-night," she added, "but there wasn't no train. I got to go back an' start from Dickinson, where I left my horse."

"But why?" I persisted. "Why? I thought you were going to be with us another week at least?"

"Well"—she drew out the word consideringly. Then, on a sudden resolve, she gave her explanation. "They was a man in the fourth row to-night that looked like Jim."

"Yes?" I said, and waited. "Was he Mr. Mears?" I asked, at last.

"No."

She knelt, and closed and locked the suit-case.

"He looked like Jim," she repeated, as if that ended the discussion.

For an instant the situation was too complicated for me. Then, in a flash of understanding, I remembered that only the week before I had been made suddenly homesick for New York by one fleeting glimpse of a man whose profile was like that of Godfrey Morris. Without another word I sought Dr. Harland and broke the news to her in two pregnant sentences.

"Mrs. Mears is going home to-morrow morning. She saw a man at the meeting to-night who looked like her husband."

Dr. Harland, who was preparing for bed, laid down the hair-brush she was using, slipped a wrapper over her nightgown, and started for Mrs. Mears's room. I followed. Characteristically, our leader disdained preliminaries.

"But, my dear woman," she exclaimed, "you can't leave us in the lurch like this. You're announced to speak in Sweetbriar and Mendan and Bismarck within the coming week."

"He looked jest like Jim," murmured Tildy Mears, in simple but full rebuttal. She was standing with her back to the door, and she did not turn as we entered. Her eyes were set toward the north, where her home was, and her children and Jim. Her manner dismissed Sweetbriar, Mendan, and Bismarck as if they were the flowers of last year. Suddenly she wheeled, crossed the room, and caught Dr. Harland by the shoulders.

"Woman," she cried, "I'm homesick. Can't ye understand that, even ef you ain't got a home an' a husband ye been neglectin' fer days, like I have? I'm homesick." Patiently she brought out her refrain again. "The man looked jest like Jim," she ended.

She turned away, and with feverish haste put her case on a chair, and her jacket and hat on the case, topping the collection with an old pair of driving-gloves. The completeness of this preparation seemed to give her some satisfaction. She continued with more animation.

"I'm startin' early," she explained. "I told the hotel man soon's I come in to have me called at five o'clock. So I'll say good-by now. An' thank ye both fer all yer kindness," she ended, primly.

Dr. Harland laughed. Then, impulsively, she took both the woman's toil-hardened hands in hers.

"Good-by, then, and God bless you," she said. "My cure has worked. I'll comfort myself with that knowledge."

For a moment the eyes of Tildy Mears fell.

"You ben mighty good," she said. "You both ben good. Don't think I ain't grateful." She hesitated, then went on in halting explanation. "'S long's you ain't married," she said, "an' ain't got nothin' else to do, it's fine to travel round an' talk to folks. But someway sence I see that man to-night, settin' there lookin' like Jim, I realize things is different with us married women."

She drew her small figure erect, her voice taking on an odd suggestion of its ringing platform note.

"Talkin' is one thing," she said, tersely, "livin' is another thing. P'rhaps you ain't never thought of that. But I see the truth now, an' I see it clear."

Her peroration filled the little room, and like a swelling organ tone rolled through the open door and down the stairs, where it reached the far recesses of the hall below. Her lean right arm shot upward in her one characteristic gesture, as if she called on high Heaven itself to bear witness to the wisdom of her words in this, her last official utterance.

"Woman's place," ended Tildy Mears, "is in the home!"