Page:The War on the Webfoot Saloon.djvu/15

 After which parting blast she climbed aboard her suffragette hobby-horse and galloped noisily off in search of new dragons, preferably male. The Great Crusade was over.

But there remains a casualty to report. As the months passed, Walter Moffett grew wan and weak. His eye lost its lustre, his step its spring. After a time he sold out his estabments and returned to the shipping game. It did no good. His health continued to decline. At length he sailed off to the South Seas in search of peace and healing breezes, but he died along the way. The cause of his passing was unknown, though there were those among his friends who muttered darkly that he had been struck down before his time by an excess of Temperance.

The body was returned to Portland for burial. In the obituaries, the newspapers made no mention of the late un pleasantness, perhaps because it was already almost for gotten. For the League appeared as dead as Walter Moffett (it was, in fact, resurrected as the WCTU), and saloons were safe from invasions of unseemly sanctity. When gentlemen gathered together to bend an elbow and wet a lip they agreed, with quiet grins, that the Cup That Cheers had come to stay, and Prohibition was a pipe-dream.

There was not one among them clear-eyed enough to discern, some forty years away, far off on the veriest margin of Time's horizon, a cloud no bigger than the Little Woman's hand.