“I hope you’ll be here when I get back—­and I hope I’ll be here, too,” said his master, and went on, sauntering up to the station a bit later as nonchalantly as ever Dave Cowan himself had gone there to begin a long journey on the six-fifty-eight.  Spike Brennon lounged against a baggage truck.  Spike’s only token of departure was a small bundle covered with that day’s Advance.  They waited in silence until the dingy way train rattled in.  Then Sharon Whipple appeared from the freight room of the station.  He affected to be impatient with the railway company because of a delayed shipment which he took no trouble to specify definitely, and he affected to be surprised at the sight of Wilbur and Spike.

“Hello!  I thought you two boys went on the noon train,” he lied, carelessly.  “Well, long as you’re here you might as well take these—­in case you get short.”  He pressed a bill into the hand of each.  “Good-bye and good luck!  I had to come down about that shipment should have been here last Monday—­it beats time what these railroads do with stuff nowadays.  Five days between here and Buffalo!”

He continued to grumble as the train moved on, even as the two waved to him from a platform.

“A hundred berries!” breathed Spike, examining his bill.  “Say, he sheds it easy, don’t he?”

They watched him where he stood facing the train.  He seemed to have quit grumbling; his face was still.

“Well, kid, here we go!  Now it’s up to the guy what examines us.  You’ll breeze through—­not a nick in you.  Me—­well, they’re fussy about teeth, I’m told, and, of course, I had to have a swift poke in the mush that dented my beak.  They may try to put the smother on me.”

“Cheer up!  You’ll make the grade,” said Wilbur.

Through the night he sat cramped and wakeful in the seat of a crowded day coach, while Spike beside him slept noisily, perhaps owing to the dented beak.  His head back, he looked out and up to a bow moon that raced madly with the train, and to far, pale stars that were still.  He wondered if any one out there noted the big new adventure down here.

CHAPTER XVII

Wilbur Cowan’s fear that his brother might untimely stop the war proved baseless.  The war went on despite the New Dawn’s monthly exposure of its motive and sinister aims; despite its masterly paraphrase of a celebrated document declaring that this Government had been “conceived in chicanery and dedicated to the industrial slavery of the masses.”  Not even the new social democracy of Russia sufficed to inspire any noticeable resistance.  The common people of the United States had refused to follow the example of their brothers of Russia and destroy a tyranny equally hateful, though the New Dawn again and again set forth the advantages to accrue from such action.  War prevailed.  As the Reverend Mallet said:  “It gathered the vine of the earth and cast it into the great wine press of the wrath of God.”