He had grown up decent as could be expected, and so merry that everybody loved him. He was in the way of becoming a crack in the wire mill when the _Lusitania_ outrage came, and he ran to join the avengers as quickly as from childhood he had always jumped into any fight in alley or street, in school or shipyard, when his queer sense of justice was aroused. He was always a "grand fighter," Katie often said, when townspeople congratulated her on the part he had taken with the Canadians. There was no doubt but that Sabinsport followed more carefully the famous fights of the English because Mikey Flaherty was with them. The Boys' Club, the War Board, the _Argus_, Katie's friends, Patsy at the High School and in the Women's Clubs--all watched for the reports of what the Canadians were doing--talked them over, and wondered first if Mikey, and later if the Lieutenant, was there. It was the idea that somebody they had always known was living in the trenches that gave an interest and a reality to mud and rats and cooties, which grew with what they heard. Mikey's letters were read and re-read and printed in the _Argus_ "by request."
Ralph grumbled at the abnormal curiosity, as he called it, for horrors, and again quarreled with Patsy for cultivating the love of war among her pupils, to which Patsy hotly replied that she'd never, as long as she lived, cease to cultivate hatred of Germany and her kind of war. And then for days there would be coldness between them. Patsy would cry herself to sleep, and Ralph would go about glum and self-accusing, save now and then when he would burst into cursing at war and all its horrible effects. "If it wasn't for the war, I'd have friends in Sabinsport," he told Dick.
If there was no one else in Sabinsport by the summer of 1916 to whom the war had brought the same anguish as to Katie Flaherty, there was a constantly larger number to whom it was bringing dread and pain. The war--this war which did not concern them, continued to reach its long and cruel tentacles across the sea and every now and then literally lift a member from some apparently somnolent family. There was Young Tom, as all Sabinsport called the eighteen-year-old son of Tom and Mary Sabins. Young Tom had come home from school in the fall of 1915 and announced that he had volunteered for ambulance service in France, and that if they didn't do the square thing and let him go, he'd run away. And they knew he would do it. Tom took it squarely and with inward pride, but Mary Sabins' world toppled on its foundations when she heard his ultimatum and realized that for some reason unknown to herself her husband actually sympathized with the boy.