Miss Abigail gave the grampus snort which had been her great-grandfather's war-cry. "Hoo! You're like all other book folks! You give things such long names you scare yourselves! I haven't got anything to do with economics, nor it with me. It's a plain question as to whether the church my ancestors built and worshipped in is to be sold. There's nothing so inevitable in _that_, let me tell you. Laws of nature--fiddlesticks! How about the law of gravity? Don't I break that every time I get up gumption enough to raise my hand to my head!"
Mr. Horton looked at the belligerent old woman with the kindest smile of comprehension. "Ah, I know how hard it is for you. In another way I have been through the same bitter experience. My home, my real home, where my own people are, is out in a wind-swept little town on the Nebraska prairies. But I cannot live there because it is too far from my world of artists and art patrons. I tried it once, but the laws of supply and demand work for all alike. I gave it up. Here I am, you see. You can't help such things. You'd better follow on to Johnsonville now and not embitter the last of your life with a hopeless struggle."
Miss Abigail fairly shouted at him her repudiation of his ideas. "Not while there is a breath in me! My folks were all soldiers."
"But even soldiers surrender to overpowering forces."
"Hoo! Hoo! How do they know they're overpowering till they're overpowered! How do they dare surrender till they're dead! How do they know that if they hold out just a little longer they won't get reënforcements!"
Mr. Horton was a little impatient of his old friend's unreason. "My dear Miss Abigail, you have brains. _Use_ them! What possible reinforcements can you expect?"
The old woman opposed to his arguments nothing but a passionately bare denial. "No! No! No! We're different! It's in your blood to give up because you can reason it all out that you're beaten," She stood up, shaking with her vehemence. "It's in my blood to fight and fight and fight--"
"And then what?" asked the sculptor, as she hesitated.
She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for the next four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against odds that rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had been imperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with it own action. In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because they could get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because the others had gone. Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford because there was so little cobbling to do. After that the butcher went away, then the carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted by the man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same building for sixty years. It was the old story. He had a large family of children who needed education and "a chance."