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Ebook has 96 lines and 12848 words, and 2 pages

THE STRIKE.

"Having ears to hear, let them hear."

THE sleep of young strength puts a wide distance between yesterday's cares and to-day's. The dawn that awoke Emma was gray, but it did not suggest the blight of ashes as had last night's twilight. She was sure of the return of Jarlsen's faculties, and she also knew that Quarry could have made no disturbance through the night. She was inclined to think that he meant to frighten them, and by daylight his acts seemed more like very bad manners than like an attempt at murder.

In the morning, before setting out, she changed the bandage on Jarlsen's hand. The wide burns were "guttering," seaming up in red lines. She told him this, and though he made no reply she felt sure, with unshakable, feminine sureness, that he had heard. She led him out to his hammock and placed him in it. Quarry was haranguing Old Butte, and the sound of his voice seemed to make the Swede nervous. Emma was certain that he had heard him.

She had always liked the Pastures as a place to walk; the air was less flat than in the town; and it was pleasant to set one's face against poverty and one's feet toward a place where people were rich enough to pay rent. Bentley's Place overtopped the city on an artificial and costly eminence. The little house that was placed like a lodge was the terminal station of the narrow-gauge railway. She knew herself to be two miles and three quarters from that, and a mile or more from the plant.

Usually she met the day squad coming out from the town, the men standing in the ore cars, the smoke from their pipes and the straining, overworked little engine blown behind them toward the town--like a message sent home, Emma thought. But to-day no cars passed, and she, being a child of toil, was quick to know that this meant a strike. She hurried on to her earnings, remembering that when men are out of work they have all day in which to spend their savings. Women see so little in strikes but higher wages until some one is dead.

When she reached the Bridge it was crowded with people. Men who had not worked at the plant for years were exhorting their fellows not to submit to tyranny. Many large words were being misused with great pride by those who never had a chance to talk except when the crowd was too busy to listen. The women were not very carefully dressed, having had no time for fastenings or strings. They, together with the children they brought with them, seemed to regard the occasion as one of festivity.

Nothing was denounced very definitely. One stranger was said to be a reporter, whereupon half a dozen people beset him, anxious to have their views in the paper. Emma could learn nothing from any of them. They used Quarry's and Bowa's names frequently, so that she forebore mentioning under whose roof the Englishman had passed the night.

Her shop was in the fourth house from the Bridge; a steep diagonal path ran from its back door to the Tracks. The men were swarming to it before she was quite ready to have them, and many arrived by the rarely used footway. News came with them, and she found herself believing first one report and then another. Bowa came to be shaved; she was surprised at his thinking of a thing so incidental to a holiday toilet as a shave, but she supposed that he was resolved to die tidy, and said as much.

He could not be at the plant, he explained, and felt that he had no need to be there. His smile was exceedingly subtle, but his hands worked against his will in an embarrassed fashion.

The day wore on until about four o'clock. Her business had been immense, and she had listened to the many accounts and descriptions of the plant until she felt she knew it perfectly. In the centre was the powder house, where explosives were kept; on the city flank was the nutt and bolt factory, and very near, but south of it, the furnace. It was set on a steep "slide" of rock; its door, through which the furnace was fed, was on the summit side; and on the base side, lower on the slide by eight feet or more, was another door through which the "cinder" flew away at night into the darkness like a burning river. This door seems complicated on paper, though in fact its construction is simple. A skewer secures it at its upper edge--a skewer with a large loop at one end. Into this loop the hook of the fire-tenders' strange implement is thrust when the door is to be opened. "The Devil's Crook" is what the men have named the long oak stick finished at one end with an iron hook. It does look like a thing wherewith to herd black sheep.

Emma was weary of constant exclamation and argument. It was time she ate; so she closed her door and "boiled her bottle," allowing the men who were already in the shop to remain there. She saw Bowa get up from his chair and leave by the back door, silent and hurried. As was natural, Emma turned to the window to see what had caught his eye in the street.

He jumped to the ground and began to descend the steps leading to the road-bed in the cut, over which the Bridge is. No one followed him, but with admirable nerve he neither hesitated nor quickened his pace.

Before she got to the stair's head about six men had followed her, looking deeply ashamed of each other, but at present firm in their duty. Emma let them pass her, and slipped into the advancing crowd.

Bowa and three companions were standing on the tracks by two overturned ore cars. They seemed more sheepish than defiant, and Emma noticed with pride how neat Bowa looked as he tried not to flinch under Bentley's contemptuous gaze. The rails were torn up for about twenty yards, and in the silence that preceded Bentley's first words Emma realized that this meant prison.

"Did you do that?" he said at length. Then turning to the men at his back, he said very pleasantly, "I think we can put this right with"--his voice grew suddenly louder--"two more to help us."

Two Soot City police appeared, and very quietly secured Bowa and his friends. They were too surprised to make any resistance, and went silent and sullen at Bentley's curt bidding. Some one cried, "Shame!" at the plant owner. Martha Long answered "Nonsense!" very loud. But her tears fell for Bowa, and she pleaded for him in words.

"Mr. Bentley," she said, "he was put up to that. He's young for the shadder of a prison to fall on him. He's as mild as new milk, and he's had his taste, and he won't want no more."

"Martha," Bentley answered, "I think making an example of a workman is making a martyr of him and an enemy of his labour organization. I don't want any strikes, so I'll probably let him off; but I wouldn't promise any one."

Martha went away well comforted, and Emma, when the darkness had fallen, set out for home. She considered the strike was over, and laughed as she made herself pictures of Quarry's discomfiture; his plans would be henceforth unheeded, and, as he had not succeeded, the men would not fear him, and not fearing meant, under such conditions, shunning. She had had a diverting day; the silver jingled in her pocket, and her wish was that Jarlsen might have ears to hear all about it.

The cottage was dark, but before she came within a hundred yards of it, while it yet stood out black and square against the dark east, she heard Jarlsen calling, "Emma, hurry, girl!--Emma, girl, hurry!"

She ran to him, stumbling and in dread, and groped in the darkness of the room with tender hands that feared--she longed to know just what.

"I'm all right," he said; "but listen. Speak to me; I can hear. I've heard ever since we moved. I've wanted to say so, but I wanted to go on hearing your father talk to Quarry. I've heard it all. I'm done with secrets; I'm pretty near done with theirs. Speak to me, Emma; I can prove it."

"I'm so bursting-out happy, I can't talk much," said she.

Her speech followed her in his voice. "I'm so bursting-out happy, I can't talk much.' But I can hear! Emma, Quarry and your poppa have been setting it up since we came here, and I was afraid to say I heard, for fear two couldn't keep a secret. Emma, we want the plant's pension, and we're going to get it!

Emma could feel that he wanted to go himself. She caught up her shawl. "Is it the powder house?" she asked.

"For God's sake," he said loudly, "get started! Of course it is!"

She ran out into the wide darkness. She was racing death, and she knew it.

THE EYE OF GOD.

"And the eye of God shall pierce the lengthy darkness."

EMMA'S first thought was of the time that it would take her to get to the plant. Young Bentley had once run a mile under five minutes, and his feat had been in the newspapers; but she could not, of course, count on herself for like speed. She felt that the cinder flare would light up her life's crisis. Jarlsen's excited voice echoed in her mind, and the thought that Quarry might have saved him with the warning flag, instead of letting him come unchecked on live powder, urged her on the faster. She saw that to-day's attempt at the Tracks was a forced incident, intended to look like the strike's crisis. She remembered her own part in it with laughter.

She was choked with anxiety. It seemed to her that if the powder house were fired there would be no food anywhere in Soot City. Who would be killed and how much would be damaged was an unanswerable question that weakened her with painful suspense. She barely noticed the hissing rush of her breath or felt the pain in her side. Her feet grew heavy, and the noise of their fall on the road-bed sounded to her as if it was far off in the town. Her neck was craned in the direction of the plant, and she wanted to throw herself along the earth. When the lights at the sidings and at the station grew nearer her dimmed eyes could barely distinguish them. Some warm thing, with a new taste, crept over her lips. She put up her hand to it, and saw in the light at the first siding that it was blood.

Her body rocked with the push of her heart-beats, and "yet," she thought, "I may be late."

At last she passed the station. Through its blindless windows she could see Benz, the furnace-tender, talking fast to the police. For a moment she thought of going in and telling her story, but she feared a loss of time, and started furiously up the grade to the tool-house. She found the door standing open and entered boldly, snatching the crook and striking at a man who raised himself from the floor. He lay down again at once, saying, "All right, only don't tell me where you put it."

"I'm in time," she thought.

There was a little patch of light before the threshold. Looking up, she saw four policemen crossing by the powder house to the factory. Then the scheme came entire into her puzzled brain. They were called out on search and it was their lights in the factory that were to be taken as the signal for Quarry's men to fire the mine. The furnace-tenders had gone as guides, and the unshifted cinder could not expose offenders.

"He's a cute viper!" Emma was talking to herself to keep her nerve; she was spent and breathless.

The heat by the furnace was terrible; it shone on the iron trough in an outlined square of yellow, where the light streamed through the door cracks. She fitted the crook's hook to the loop of the skewer and paused, waiting. Her thoughts were busy with the way in which they might fire the powder stores. Heat and cold hurried through her alternately; her hands and brow were wet. There were, of course, no men on duty at the plant save forty of the factory force, Quarry among them. Emma saw that this was part of the blind.

The electric lights were out; they had not been turned on since early the last evening, but presently one shone from the ground floor of the factory. Emma pulled back her crook exultingly, but the skewer would not give. She jerked, but it was firm. Gathering her strength, she braced her feet and threw herself back. She saw a fiery line pass above her head, and heard the red-hot skewer tinkle against a stone behind her. She rushed to the front of the furnace to get rid of the heat, and stood on the crest of the incline.

As the cinder flew in a glowing mass down the trough to the cinder hill, she saw the spires at the city and the Bridge. Then she looked directly before her.

As the night lifted from the plant yard she saw that some one was running; the figure took on it the red of the brightening furnace waste, and the flame of the torch the runner carried grew white in the rosy glare. The light spread higher, and Emma saw the tops of the elm trees that grew on the other side of the factory. The cinder rattled in the trough with a grating loudness.

"He hes a train of oiled rope laid," said she.

The plant-hand was Quarry, and still he ran toward the powder house in the vivid light. The men, most of them police, were watching him. He knelt with his light in his hand, and fell forward, the torch under him. Then Emma heard a pistol shot that sounded like snapping fingers in the din of the cinder waste.

Bentley's voice was hardly heard in the various noise that followed the shot. "Lock up God's eye!" he called; "it's done big work, but don't waste fuel."

And a woman's voice, peevish from fatigue, called from the height: "I can't--I'm broken, I'm so tired!"

But Quarry did not stir; his torch was out. And in the house on the Pastures Jarlsen's eyes strained themselves to pierce their own darkness, although the cloudy sky was like a red sea, and the plant stood out plainly with orange elm trees and bright roofs.

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