Part 5

Young Bentley had driven up in his buggy; his liveried servant sat beside him, and the horse he drove plunged and shook with nervousness at being surrounded by a crowd of loud-voiced people. Bentley stood up in the little buggy, having given the reins to his man. “See here,” he said, addressing the crowd, “if we have a strike, you’d better remember that I can stand it, and you can’t. I’ve sent police to the plant to protect my property, and you had better stand by them; for the plant is the machine you make your bread with, and it’s the only thing you can work at. I’ve got lots of irons on the fire. Now some one has trifled with this road-bed, in the cut here, By the Bridge. I suppose you want to make me lose my charter. I’m going to examine the damage now, and I hope you’ll come with me.”

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.

Emma remembered that Jarlsen had liked him, and that he had called to ask for him once By the Tracks and twice on the Pastures. No Bentley had visited the Pastures before, and Emma felt the distinction keenly. She opened the door and went out, merely observing to the bystanders that they “hed no spring.”

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!

“You’re going now,” he said, “to run out to the plant--to run your best; when you get there, go to the furnace. If you keep right on By the Tracks, nobody’ll mind you. Quarry’s bought the furnace-minders, and they’re going to leave for the station to report a disturbance in the factory. The Devil’s Crook is in the little house by the furnace; it is by the door. You take it as you pass--no one’ll be there--and when you see a light in the factory you open the centre door and make a flare, for the police can’t see in the dark. You’ll catch ’em; O Emma, hurry! I’ve got a good chance to fix Quarry, and he didn’t warn me of that blast, or I wouldn’t be here now. He put his flag behind his back when he saw me come, and I walked right on. Hurry, Emma girl! Don’t burn yourself!”

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.

XII.

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.

EPILOGUE.

WE were disputing in the train as to whether it was five or six years since Quarry’s death. I said six, and was told that I was always wrong. My adversary evidently considered this second-rate rejoinder a retort. Presently he said, “You may be right, for I think Jarlsen’s boy is five.”

Jerry Black met us at the station; he wore a bailiff’s uniform of corduroy. The Bentleys were very English now, but kinder than ever. We got into an omnibus, and asked Jerry to come too. He had to be urged, for he is still modest.

“How are the Stonepastures?” said I, anxious to start the conversation.

“Lean livin’ yet,” he answered, sighing; “but we’ve got a home for the aged indigent, and a hospital.”

He began to talk in earnest, and, among other things, told us that Emma paid the doctor the week after Quarry died. He said she felt as if she had killed Quarry, but that her marriage had put it out of her head. “The Jarlsens are getting on fine,” he remarked confidentially, “more than happy in their fortunes. August has sold his idea for freight couplers to the plant, and he’s living in the back of the new schoolhouse, and he goes away singing and gets paid for it. He bought a piano with his savings.”

“Emma’s too fine to shave me, I suppose,” said I.

“Don’t name it to her, please,” implored Jerry.

We arrived at the church--it was Bentley’s wedding we were attending--and on either side of the walk through the yard the men and women of the plant waited for the bride. There was not a foot of space left in the church. Bowa stood next me, and with him was Martha Long. “It’s a pleasanter time than the last,” she said as I greeted her. We had been staying at the plant in the strike when Quarry had gone under, and I was pleased that she remembered it. Black was everywhere. At last he pushed us all back to clear the path for the bride. Bentley was in the church at the chancel.

Then there broke on our eager ears the finest tenor I had ever heard. They say he sang a Swedish wedding song. I don’t care what it was--I almost cried when he stopped. His voice rose high and strong, and seemed to spread like perfume; he sang gladly.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Every one within hearing answered proudly, “Jarlsen.”

THE END.

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