I

'IN half an hour we shall have to go down,' said the president, turning from the window, from which he had been studying the crowd, and addressing the others in the room. 'You understand what you are to do. You will go to the platform, divide, and stand at each side, while Joseph and I come forward. There will be singing. Igor will recite the proclamation of government, Stephen will announce our immediate plans, and then Joseph will speak.'

His eyes ran from one man to another, and each one nodded his head, except Joseph, who remained at the window, looking out over the square. The president glanced at him with a slight frown, and went on in the husky voice that never rose above a whisper. 'It is best that the meeting should be a short one.'

His audience was respectfully silent for a moment or two till Zteck had disappeared into a little alcove half hidden by heavy gold-embroidered curtains.

'I wish my old woman could be here to see me,' sighed one of the men, looking up from the sausage at which he was hacking with a gold-inlaid dagger. He passed it on to Matthew, who sliced off a large portion, remarking contentedly:

'Who would have thought that they would have sausage in a palace?'

'It is good sausage,' added Jacob. 'For three years I have not tasted.

meat, until three days ago. Igor, you should take some.' He thrust it into the face of the herder, who on account of his enormous size and great voice had been chosen to make the proclamation of the new government.

Igor shook his head violently and groaned. 'I should as soon be hanged as high as that tower as make a speech. I shan't be able to whisper any louder than Zteck, I shall be so frightened.'

The men glanced apprehensively at the alcove where the president was conversing in low tones with Stephen, the schoolmaster, and one of them remarked hastily, 'Imagine you are shouting to your cows in the mountains. Shut your eyes and think of that.'

'I shall smell them. They don't smell like cows. Ah,' he cried longingly, 'the smell of cattle in the winter when you're cold!'

Several of the men got up and went to the window of the palace and looked out on the crowd seething below, and, seeing Joseph apparently in deep thought, talked and laughed together in subdued voices.

Joseph was hardly conscious that they were in the room. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of anything in particular. His thoughts flew hither and thither like the pigeons fluttering from lentil to lentil. Looking down at the vast multitude, he was reminded of wheat fields before a storm, and instinctively glanced up at the sky, where the clouds were flying in ragged battalions past the sun. The pale,

fleeting sunlight gleamed and faded on massed ranks of peasant faces. Even from here they looked pinched and blue. His wandering attention was caught for a moment by something that moved among the stone figures on the façade of the cathedral on the other side of the square. It was a man, and Joseph wondered what he could be doing so high above the ground. Perhaps he had climbed up there so that he could see them. He gazed at the great building with its massive towers, its forests of buttresses and pinnacles, and it seemed to him monstrous that men should have labored to pile up so great a mass of stone. 'It is unnatural,' he thought. 'Men ought to work on the earth and build close to it.'

'You should eat, Joseph,' a voice interrupted, and the small monkey face of Matthew peered into his. 'You are like one of the saints, and fast in the midst of plenty. Now I have been a saint and fasted for four years, and so has Jacob here, and Igor, and perhaps even Zteck. But when the king throws open his palace,' they all laughed loudly at this witticism, - 'we must at least eat the feast he has prepared.'

'How the old spider lived,' growled Jacob, and spat on the rich silk rug, 'while we poor peasants searched for grasshoppers and worms in the fields to fill us.'

Benda leaned over and whispered, 'If those outside in the square could see this palace and the great storerooms in the cellar, they would perhaps not be so ready to return home to their bare fields as our president thinks they will be.'

'Yes,' remarked Matthew shrewdly, 'now we are all here it's a problem what to do with us. It's like the old woman who raised her nine sons to be kings when there was only one kingdom.'

Zteck appeared noiselessly behind

them, and Matthew in confusion swallowed a piece of bread a great deal too big for him, so that his eyes stood out from his head and tears started in them. But the president paid no attention and spoke in Joseph's ear.

'I know you agree with me that nothing should be said to excite. The thing now is to send the most of them home as quickly as possible. We are promising them all seed and at least one animal for every village. What we must tell them is that our victory here is won, and that they must return to their homes to make it secure all over the country. Tell them that those who are remaining will watch over things for them.'

'Make the victory secure,' repeated Joseph, gazing at his leader out of bright, feverish eyes. The ex-shopkeeper looked at him attentively; his pale eyes had a hint of menace; but he did not say anything, and turned away to the ebony-and-ivory table on which lay the remains of a meal. He spoke sharply to Benda and Jacob, who were trying to pull apart the fittings of a silver toilet case.

At that moment the door opened and a round head peered in. 'You must come immediately,' said an unceremonious voice. "They are all ready to fire the cannon.'

The men instantly became nervous and Igor trembled violently. Only Matthew appeared unconcerned and stuffed an end of sausage into his pocket, saying, 'Who knows? It may not be here when we return. Courage, Igor. Remember the cows and bellow your loudest.'

They stood uncomfortably at attention under the president's critical gaze. Joseph had not moved. He was wondering where the man among the images on the cathedral had disappeared. Stephen nudged him at last, and he

turned.

'Is this a time for dreaming?' Zteck's cold whisper rebuked.

The president moved down the stairs a little ahead of the others, and Joseph and Igor brought up the rear.

'Ah, if I were like you and could speak so well!' said the herder. 'You would have been a wonderful herdsman. All the cattle would have come to you like children.' He gazed humbly into the pale face of the other.

Joseph smiled. 'Don't be afraid. Think how proud you'll be all your life. Everyone will talk about it.'

Igor appeared somewhat comforted by this assurance, but outside, at the foot of the platform steps, he said anxiously, 'Do you think they will give me the three cows they promised me?'

The great bell in the tower of the cathedral boomed three times and a cannon thundered from the palace steps. A hundred thousand faces turned toward a broad granite pedestal which rose a man's height above the crowd. Yesterday it had carried the bronze statue of an emperor. To-day it was empty except for a few chairs. As figures appeared on the platform the people surged forward impulsively. Then the president and Joseph advanced slowly, and the crowd burst into tumultuous shouting. Tears ran down hollow cheeks.

'Zteck, Zteck, Joseph, Zteck and Joseph, Joseph and Zteck!' The two names were shouted over and over.

The throng which had eddied round the edges of the square now pressed in to look. They were quicker, sharperfeatured, and a little less ragged than the mass of the peasants the people of the city come out to look at their new masters.

"That's the leader!' shouted one to make himself heard above the noise.

"They say he's dumb, and that he drinks blood.'

'A hundred women would not content him,' replied a pale, disease-ravaged man whose head was bandaged.

Fierce looks appeared on the faces of some of those about them, and the two were hastily silent and presently slunk away to another part of the square.

Gradually the uproar and cheering changed to song, a strange melancholy wail that chilled the hearts of many listeners.

"Wolves,' said a one-armed man, drawing a moth-eaten fur collar closer round his neck.

But the singers seemed intoxicated and sang it over and over, swaying with shut eyes to its mournful rhythm.

Out of all the multitude only Zteck and Joseph appeared unmoved. Joseph gazed absently at the pieces of paper flying about above the square, and was conscious only of a sense of emptiness.

The moment that should have been a crowning one, when the mist lifted on the plain, revealing to the straggling half-starved army the sunlit towers of the city, had left him unstirred. From all about him there had risen shouts of hoarse exultation, while blue cracked lips parted in smiles, and rude jests flew back and forth. Joseph, gazing at the glittering icy beauty of the cathedral spires, had held his breath and waited for the inspiration that in a moment must flood his tired spirit. He had gazed and gazed, his soul in his eyes, while his body was being jostled and hurried, his arms grasped, and men were shouting excitedly to him, their eyes flashing wildly in their starved, sunken faces. But it had all been a confusion in which he had found no meaning.

That night at the camp where they slept, huddled in an open field, no fires to thaw the heavy, damp cold that crept up out of the ground and wrapped

them about like a garment, everyone had been talkative and quarrelsome. The men kept turning to look at him expectantly, and the baker's vagabond son, who had grown up in his village, leaned over and whispered, 'When the winning post is near, you should put spurs to the horse.' Joseph was ashamed and dropped his head, pretending to sleep, because he had nothing to say.

The same sense of emptiness paralyzed him now. He looked down at the multitude below him, at the packed, swaying bodies from which rose a smell as of sour hay. Soon they would stop singing, and he would have to speak to them.

The wind was cold and he shivered, drawing closer about his shoulders the rusty black shawl. March winds dry, cold winds . . . drying the land for sowing. This year at last they would sow, and there would be corn for all. Sowing turning over the sticky black clods, each clod glazed to silver by the share. Then the seed, pale, so little, so potent for the life of men. He thought it strange that God should trust the life of His creatures to anything so small, so likely to be lost in the earth. It would rot if the soil were too wet, and wither if it were too dry, and grow feeble and stunted if the sun did not shine enough.

He thought of his own fields, the corner where his land sloped to the stream and the wheat grew lush and strong, the little stony patch where the rows thinned. Those acres that he could plough in a day had given him life, and his father, and his grandfather, and no one knew how many generations before that. In his mind the past sloped up, quiet, peaceful, unmenaced, till all things began at the throne of God, where He had smiled and given to each his little plot of land. Then into this untroubled, toil-filled

existence had come the war, tearing them up by the roots and flinging them to the four winds of heaven.

The singing died away. A rough hand was groping for his-Igor's. He grasped it firmly and smiled at the trembling herder. The huge man stumbled to the front of the platform and stood there shaking like a tree. He opened his mouth to speak and no sound came. The faces of his comrades were strained and anxious. Then Joseph could see the blue eyes suddenly close tightly till the wrinkles spread round them like a fan, the massive head thrown back so that the flying hair, the bulging forehead, and childish upturned nose were all outlined against the sky, and a voice as melodious as bells rang out over the square. 'We having been called by God . . .' The words which he had himself written - how long ago? They sounded alien and strange now, and woke no answering chord as they had done when he wrote them.

He remembered the first time he had seen Igor, after a meeting in the little village of Matten, where the mountains seemed to lean down and crush the houses. The hollow-eyed, starving peasants had listened dully and gone away, and Joseph lingered by the old wooden cross, spent with fatigue, hunger, and an emotion that had evoked no response. Then the giant herder had risen up from the stone on which he had been squatting, and touched his sleeve and said, 'Is God really angry with us? You said that while He was angry nothing would go well with us. Is that why my cows all died?'

Joseph nodded his head wearily. 'But who cares now?' he asked. "They are so miserable they think things cannot be worse.'

He walked on, but Igor kept by his side. 'I will tell you something about

God,' he said mysteriously. 'He is not so strong as people think. I hear Him in the mountains sometimes crying for help like my cattle when they are lost. In the old days, when there were only a few people in the world, it was easy for Him to be king, but now there are so many and they are so strong that He cannot look after them all; they do wicked things.'

The herder's half-crazy fancy had found an echo in Joseph's brain, and he imagined sometimes that God was lying bound somewhere, and that he must find and free Him.

The thundering applause broke out again. Igor opened his eyes and smiled broadly on those below him. He stood there so long that they had to pull him back to his seat. In spite of the cold, sweat glistened on his brown forehead and he wiped it away with his hand. 'Now they will give me my three cows,' he said contentedly.

Joseph was chilled with sudden doubt. Was it true that everything would be well now? Could he go back to the low gray farmhouse, and to Lisa his wife—to long days in the fields in summer, and long lamp-lit hours in winter when he carved endless toys, and she worked so swiftly at the lace on the pillow, and the old grandfather painted the little figures and set them on the shelf to dry? Would the lamplight make a golden circle on the ceiling, and the strings of onions cast fantastic shadows on the walls, and the child at Lisa's side chuckle in his wooden cradle?

Stephen rose and began to speak in his meticulous school-teacher's voice, announcing the programme of the new government: .. To every man his own land without rent or taxes. Seed enough to keep you from starving at least. . . machinery more money to be squandered by the people of the city... supervised

no

Joseph had had no hand in drawing up this programme. Some of it he did not even understand. That had been Zteck's work. He glanced at the president, sitting so still beside him, his hands on his thin knees, his pale blue eyes gazing steadily into the crowd below. What was Zteck thinking?

The age-old peasant distrust of the shopkeeper pricked him as he looked at the crooked features and mottled skin, and he thought of the proverb, "Trust a thief before a priest, but trust a shopkeeper not at all.'

None of their little group liked him, except perhaps Stephen, who wrote his few letters for him, and conferred with him often in secret.

Joseph's eyes followed Zteck's probing gaze and he too looked intently into the sea of upturned faces so hungrily eager, seeing scores whom he could call by name. There were Reuben and his foolish young wife, who had insisted on marching with them, and a man whom he had known in the trenches, another with whom he had stayed in the hill country to the easthundreds who had come because of his words as he hurried from village to village preaching the new, warming doctrine of revolution to those to whom peace had brought nothing but misery, starvation, and the daily acquaintance with death.

He thought of his own words when suddenly, while all the village was on its knees in the fields praying for rain, he had jumped to his feet and pushed aside the astonished priest and spoken, trembling with the sense of the revelation which had descended upon him:

'I have been thinking a long time and wondering why we are so miserable, and why we are all starving when we might be living as we used to-comfortably on our land. I know now it is