“Would you make it a secret organization?”

“Yes.  I like doing things in the open myself, but you’ve got to fight a rat in his hole, if he won’t come out.”

“Would you hold office?” Pink asked.

Willy Cameron smiled.

“I’m a good bit like the boy who dug post holes in the daytime and took in washing at night to support the family.  But I’ll work, if that’s what you mean.”

“We’d better have a constitution and all that, don’t you think?” Pink asked.  “We can draw up a tentative one, and then fix it up at the first meeting.  This is going to be a big thing.  It’ll go like a fire.”

But Willy Cameron overruled that.

“We don’t need that sort of stuff,” he said, “and if we begin that we might as well put it in the newspapers.  We want men who can keep their mouths shut, and who will sign some sort of a card agreeing to stand by the government and to preserve law and order.  Then an office and a filing case, and their addresses, so we can get at them in a hurry if we need them.  Get me a piece of paper, somebody.”

Then and there, in twenty words, Willy Cameron wrote the now historic oath of the new Vigilance Committee, on the back of an old envelope.  It was a promise, an agreement rather than an oath.  There was a little hush as the paper passed from hand to hand.  Not a man there but felt a certain solemnity in the occasion.  To preserve the Union and the flag, to fight all sedition, to love their country and support it; the very simplicity of the words was impressive.  And the mere putting of it into visible form crystallized their hitherto vague anxieties, pointed to a real enemy and a real danger.  Yet, as Willy Cameron pointed out, they might never be needed.

“Our job,” he said, “is only as a last resort.  Only for real trouble.  Until the state troops can get here, for instance, and if the constabulary is greatly outnumbered.  It’s their work up to a certain point.  We’ll fight if they need us.  That’s all.”

It was very surprising to him to find the enterprise financed immediately.  Pink offered an office in the bank building.  Some one agreed to pay a clerk who should belong to the committee.  It was practical, businesslike, and—­done.  And, although he had protested, he found himself made the head of the organization.

“—­without title and without pay,” he stipulated.  “If you wish a title on me, I’ll resign.”

He went home that night very exalted and very humble.

CHAPTER XXI

For a time Lily remained hidden in the house on Cardew Way, walking out after nightfall with Louis occasionally, but shrinkingly keeping to quiet back streets.  She had a horror of meeting some one she knew, of explanations and of gossip.  But after a time the desire to see her mother became overwhelming.  She took to making little flying visits home at an hour when her grandfather was certain to be away, going in a taxicab, and reaching the house somewhat breathless and excited.  She was driven by an impulse toward the old familiar things; she was homesick for them all, for her mother, for Mademoiselle, for her own rooms, for her little toilet table, for her bed and her reading lamp.  For the old house itself.