could never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible-even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well: there were fangs beneath her tongue.

Heaven knows-it's the one thing I don't know about it, to this day-if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher's part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes-no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn't wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing -the unused ticket, for example-resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher's. All other clues were abandoned, at the time, for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn't ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh. into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering unholy lamplight of the halfbare, half-tawdry room-the whole not unlike one of Goya's foregrounds-justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo-at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn't matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emo

tion. Filippo was happier, tout bonnement, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together-to hound her into suicide, for example-would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life, as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think: how much less must our opinion matter to them! No: Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn't want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight: anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen's duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I even put to her then, after a fashion. "It was long," she answered; "but I should do it all again. He was horrible." What can you do with hatred like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. "Poison . . . and I am poisoned." Filippo's words to me would have served his wife's turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her specific complaints, no "cause." She hated him, not for what he did, but for what he was. She would have done it all again. The mere irony of her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher had no ironic sense-only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those ribands, those laces, with the delicate hovering fingers of a ghoul.

It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however. Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her husband's plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole trial, from ac

cusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime unmitigated luck-a beautiful blunder of Heaven's in her behalf. That she thought of herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as at last!—extremely fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard, less and less, any accent of hesitation. She knew oh, perfectly-how little any one else would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough. Can you imagine my going, hot-foot, to wake Letitia with the story? No more than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by my solemn promise (though, if you'll believe it, her own recital had already greatly calmed her), left me, to seek repose. I watched her fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to break fast, and I did not see her again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a hesitating comment. "Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a nice woman?" I too, had broken Mrs. Wace's bread,

but I did not hesitate. "I think you are undoubtedly right, Letitia."

It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do, to avenge Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I have always had an arrangement by which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd's death, I could still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I say, could not have borne it.

I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don't know how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher-for not at least trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher's guilt, and it is only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that fact has not made it any easier to call him "Filippo," which I have faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing that, for years, I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful bounder.

VOL. L.-7

S it not true," once asked a public man of wide experience, "that our country has surmounted successfully its various crises?" Thinking of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, of the disputed presidency and the Electoral Commission, and of the railroad riots of 1877, the student of American history, to whom the question was put, gave the expected affirmative answer. The riots, which are our present concern, were not, it is true, met in the Napoleonic way. The country simply muddled through; but an account of them may well raise the question whether the chaotic manner in which they were suppressed was not, in the long run, better for the safety of the State than if they had been crushed by the imperial method.

The depression following the panic of 1873 was wide-spread and severe, and the railroad interest, which was the largest single business interest in the country, suffered more than any other. In the years of settlement consequent upon the panic and depression, one-fifth in value of the railroad investment of the country was sold under foreclosure of mortgage. For the railroads feel, keenly business stagnation, which results at once in a diminished freight and passenger traffic; and, in any event, there would have been bankruptcies and receiverships, but the situation was aggravated by a war of rates between the trunk lines, as the railways running from Chicago and St. Louis to the seaboard were called. There were four distinct interests: the New York Central, the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio, all having adequate facilities to do more business than was offered them, and the natural competition was increased by the rivalry between the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. It was unquestionably a difficult situation, and the railroad managers showed little ability in meeting it. In 1874 the railroads began bidding against each other for the business that was in sight, with the result that toward the end of 1875

Passen

the through rates on the trunk lines were made without regard to the cost of transportation. In December, 1875, an agreement was entered into between the railroads to maintain rates, but it was broken two months later, and a large part of the year 1876 was marked by a fierce and destructive war of rates. A mention of most of the prevailing freight charges will hardly convey an idea of the fierceness of the war, for the reason that since 1876 a great reduction has been made in the cost of carrying freight, with a corresponding reduction in regular rates; yet a traffic manager of to-day would assert that it would mean absolute ruin to carry cattle from Chicago to New York for a dollar a car-load, which rate was made during the conflict. ger rates were likewise demoralized, and the only good feature of the war was that the low fares permitted a vast number of persons to visit the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia who otherwise would have been debarred from this improving influence. Low rates to Philadelphia need not necessarily have influenced the whole through traffic, but this was a war in which the encounters were at many places. A concrete case will illustrate the advantage of the passenger who travelled between competitive points. Two persons going from Cleveland to Boston, in August, 1876, compared notes as to the cost of their journey. One had paid $6.80 for his ticket from Cleveland to Boston, the other had the courtesies of the Lake Shore and Boston and Albany railroads, as the common giving of free passes was called. While this person paid nothing from Cleveland to Buffalo, and nothing from Albany to Boston, he had to buy a ticket from Buffalo to Albany, for which he paid the legal rate of two cents per mile, or $5.94. His passes covering considerably more than half of his journey of 682 miles had saved him 86 cents.

While the railroad war may have been of transitory benefit to a few, its general and lasting results were not only ruinous to the bondholders and stockholders of the railroads but were bad for the business com

munity at large. Simple fidelity to a fair agreement would have ended it in a day, but this seemed impossible to bring about. Agreements were made but were soon broken. It was said that a railroad president who had himself solemnly promised to maintain rates, went out from the meeting of railroad presidents and managers, and immediately cut the rates to secure a large amount of desirable business. More frequently would a freight agent be guilty of the infraction; openly condemned by his superior, his offence was winked at. Such "smartness" presumably placed him in the line of promotion; so his example was demoralizing to other competitors. In his despair an honest freight agent was heard to say that he wished Congress would pass a law compelling the railroads to keep their agreements. Thomas A. Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, declared that "during the first six months of 1877, not a farthing was made on through competitive freight by any line."

In April, 1877, the railroad presidents entered into a fresh agreement in regard to rates, and this was made more solid by a subsequent one dividing the west-bound tonnage by percentages under a pooling arrangement. Both these agreements were to take effect on July 1, but, confronted with the immense falling off in earnings due to the hard times and their own unwisdom, the presidents did not wait for results from these agreements; in order to recoup themselves for past losses, they somewhat hastily and jauntily announced a reduction of ten per cent in the wages of their employees. This was done on the New YorkPhiladelphia-office-ultimatum-plan which I may thus describe: the railroad president, in his well-appointed office, with the wagesheet on his desk, calculated that the engineer, fireman, and brakeman, receiving so much by the job or by the day, obtained adequate monthly wages, and that they could afford to help in bearing the burden of the commercial depression. The next step was the posting of a peremptory order announcing the ten-per-cent reduction. Herein lay two errors: the one logical, the other administrative. For, in the first place, due weight was not given to the unsteadiness of the work. With laudable intent, too many men were kept on the rolls on the principle that half a loaf is better

than no bread. Moreover, some of the work was done under conditions which reduced the net return; for example, crews of freight trains were left away from home a day or a night, with their board and lodging to pay. The other error lay in reducing the wages hastily by a peremptory order. Thomas A. Scott denied that there was any agreement among the railroads to reduce wages, and did not know whether such a policy was discussed at a meeting of the presidents held in the endeavor to agree upon a system of pooling earnings. But the uniform action seems to suggest some tacit understanding. This was not necessary to meet combinations among laborers; though the powerful organization of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was already in existence, trade-unionism on the whole was in its infancy. It is almost certain that if the division superintendents, master-mechanics, and other like officials of any one railroad had been called into council with their president, they would have advised against an arbitrary reduction. They were close to the men, having, not infrequently, social relations at least with the locomotive engineers, and they were aware how hard the reduced traffic was bearing on the employees. Their plan would have been to say to the men, "Come, let us reason together." Each would have presented his side, the grievances on the one hand, the necessities of the situation on the other. Employers and employed might then have stood shoulder to shoulder in an honest endeavor to cope with a deplorable condition of affairs. The locomotive engineers were a high class of labor, acquiring little properties, creating homes, having a stake in the country, patriotic; and while it was not primarily their strike, their active sympathy and co-operation was a prime factor in it. They might have been moderators instead of being one of the parties to the conflict. Whatever might have been the outcome of such a plan, it would have been better than the actual event.

The drama opened at Martinsburg, W. Va., on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on which the ten-per-cent reduction was ordered to take effect on July 16. Accepted by other employees, it was resisted by the firemen, who during that afternoon began to abandon their trains. By persuasion and threats they induced