Chapter 22

He had traversed the stone-flagged approach and climbed the steps of the broad veranda to reach for the bell-push when he heard his name called softly in the voice that he had come to know in all of its many modulations. The call came from the depths of one of the great wicker lounging-chairs half-hidden in the veranda shadows. In a moment he had placed another of the chairs for himself, dropping into it wearily.

"How did you know it was I?" he asked, when he could trust himself to speak.

"I saw you at the gate," she returned. "Are you just up from the Iron Works?"

"I have been to dinner since we came up-town--Raymer and I."

A pause, and then: "The men are still holding out?"

"We are holding out. The plant is closed, and it will stay closed until we can get another force of workmen."

"There will be lots of suffering," she ventured.

"Inevitably. But they have brought it upon themselves."

"Not the ones who will suffer the most--the women and children," she corrected.

"It's no use," he said, answering her thought. "There is nothing in me to appeal to."

"There was yesterday, or the day before," she suggested.

"Perhaps. But yesterday was yesterday, and to-day is to-day. As I told Raymer a little while ago, I've changed my mind."

"About the rights of the down-trodden?"

"About all things under the sun."

"No," she denied, "you only think you have. But you didn't come here to tell me that?"

"No; I came to ask a single question. How is Mr. Galbraith?"

"He is a very sick man."

Another pause, for which the questioner was responsible.

"You mean that there is a chance that he may not recover?"

"More than a chance, I'm afraid. The first thing Doctor Bertie did yesterday evening was to wire St. Paul for two trained nurses; and to-day he telegraphed Chicago for Doctor Holworthy, who charges twenty-five dollars a minute for mere office consultations."

"Humph!" said Griswold, "money needn't cut any figure." And then, after a moment of silence: "I did my best; you know I did my best?"

Her answer puzzled him a little.

"I could almost find it in my heart to hate you if you hadn't."

"But you know I did."

"Yes; I know you did."

Silence again, broken only by the whispering of the summer night breeze rustling the leaves of the lawn oaks and the lapping of tiny waves on the lake beach. At the end of it, Griswold got up and groped for his hat.

"I'm going home," he said. "It has been a pretty strenuous day, and there is another one coming. But before I go I want you to promise me one thing. Will you let me know immediately, by 'phone or messenger, if Mr. Galbraith takes a turn for the better?"

"Certainly," she said; and she let him say good-night and get as far as the steps before she called him back.

"There was another thing," she began, with the sober gravity that he could never be sure was not one of her many poses, and not the least alluring one. "Do you believe in God, Kenneth?"

The query took him altogether by surprise, but he made shift to answer it with becoming seriousness.

"I suppose I do. Why?"

"It is a time to pray to Him," she said softly; "to pray very earnestly that Mr. Galbraith's life may be spared."

He could not let that stand.

"Why should I concern myself, specially?" he asked; adding: "Of course, I'm sorry, and all that, but----"

"Never mind," she interposed, and she left her chair to walk beside him to the steps. "I've had a hard day, too, Kenneth, boy, and I--I guess it has got on my nerves. But, all the same, you ought to do it, you know."

He stopped and looked down into the eyes whose depths he could never wholly fathom.

"Why don't you do it?" he demanded.

"I? oh, God doesn't know me; and, besides, I thought--oh, well, it doesn't matter what I thought. Good-night."

And before he could return the leave-taking word, she was gone.

XXXIV

THE ABYSS

Raymer's prediction that the real trouble would begin when the attempt should be made to start the plant with imported workmen was amply fulfilled during the militant week which followed the opening of hostilities.

The appearance of the first detachment of strike-breakers, a trampish crew gathered up hastily by the employment agencies in the cities in response to Griswold's telegrams, was the signal for active resistance. Promptly the Iron Works plant and the approaches to it were picketed, and of the twenty-five or thirty men who came in on the first day's train only a badly frightened and cowed half-dozen won through the persuading, jeering, threatening picket line to the offices of the plant.

Other days followed in which the scenes of the first were repeated--with the difference that each succeeding day saw the inevitable increase of lawlessness. From taunts and abuse the insurrectionaries passed easily to violence. Street fights, when the trampish place-takers came in any considerable numbers, were of daily occurrence, and the tale of the wounded grew like the returns from a battle. By the middle of the week Raymer and Griswold were asking for a sheriff's posse to maintain peace in the neighborhood of the plant; and were getting their first definite hint that some one higher up was playing the game of politics against them.

"No, gentlemen; I've done all that the law requires and a little more," was the sheriff's response to the plea for better protection. Then came the hint. "You can take it as a word from a friend that this private scrap of yours with your men is making everybody pretty tired. First and last, it's only a question of whether you'll pay out a little more money, or a little less money, not to a lot of imported hoboes, but to certain citizens of Red Earth County,"--to which was added significantly--"citizens with votes."

"In other words, Mr. Bradford, you've got your orders from the men higher up, have you?" rasped Griswold, who was by this time lost to all sense of expediency.

"I don't have to reply to any such charge as that," said the chief peace officer, turning back to his desk; and so the brittle little conference ended.

"All of which means that we shall lose the plant guard of deputies that Bradford has been maintaining," commented Raymer, as they were descending the Court House stairs; and again his prediction came true. Later in the day the guard was withdrawn; and Griswold, savagely reluctant, was forced to make a concession repeatedly urged and argued for by the older men among the strikers, namely, that the guarding of the company's property be entrusted to a picked squad of the ex-employees themselves.

During these days of turmoil and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars and planes of projection became more and more distorted. Fairness was gone, and in its place stood angry resentment, ready to rend and tear. Pity and ruth were going: the daily report from Margery told of the lessening chance of life for Andrew Galbraith, and the stirrings evoked were neither regretful nor compassionate. On the contrary, he knew very well that the news of Galbraith's death would be a relief for which, in his heart of hearts, he was secretly thirsting.

It was at the close of the week of tumult that the dreadful beckoning came. One of the two trained nurses installed at Mereside had been called away to the bedside of a sick father. Another had been wired for immediately, but between the going and the coming a night would intervene. So much Griswold got from Margery over the Iron Works telephone late in the afternoon of a day thickly besprinkled with the sidewalk waylayings and riotings. When he reached his Shawnee Street lodgings at nine o'clock that night he found Miss Grierson's phaeton standing at the curb.

"Get in," she said, briefly, making room for him in the basket seat. And when the mare had been given the word to go: "I hope you are not too tired to chaperon me. I've got to drive over to the college infirmary. We simply _must_ have another nurse for to-night."

He denied the weariness--most untruthfully--and after that, she made him talk all the way across town to the college campus; compelled him, and found him absently irresponsive. Oh, yes; the fight was still going on: No, they would never give in to the demands of the strikers: Yes, he had seen Miss Farnham twice since the trouble began; she was frankly agreed with Raymer's mother and sister; they all wanted peace, and they were all against him. She led him on, and meanwhile they encountered one failure after another in the nurse-hunting. The town clock was striking the quarter-past ten when Miss Grierson confessed that she had exhausted the list of possibilities.

"I must go back at once," she declared. "Miss Davidson--the day nurse--has been on duty constantly since six this morning, and I'm not going to let her kill herself."

"But you haven't been able to find anybody. Who will relieve her?"

Then came the thunderbolt--and beyond it the beckoning. "You and I will," she said calmly. And then, as if to forestall the possible refusal: "It is merely to sit in the next room and to go in and give him his medicine at half-hour intervals. Either of us can do that much for a poor old man who is making his last stand in the fight for his life."

Three days earlier, nay, one day earlier, Griswold might have recoiled in horror from the suggestion that thrust itself into heart and brain. But now he merely pushed the unspeakable prompting into the background. Of course, he would go; and, equally of course, he would share the night watch with her. One question he permitted himself, and it was not asked until after they had reached the darkened mansion on the lake's edge and were mounting the stair to the sick-room. Was Mr. Galbraith conscious? Could he recognize any one?

"No," was the low-voiced response; and presently they had reached the outer room of shaded lights, and the sleepy day nurse had been released, and Margery was explaining the medicines to her watch sharer.

It was a simple matter, as she had said; the medicine from the larger bottle was to be given in tea-spoonful doses on the even hour, and that in the smaller, ten drops in a little water, on the alternating half-hours.

"It's his heart chiefly, now," she explained, "and this drop-medicine is for that. If you should forget to give it--but I know you won't forget. There are books in the hall case, and you can sit in here and read. When you are tired, come and tap at the door of my room and I'll take what you leave."

While she was speaking the softly chiming clock in the lower hall struck the half-hour. "I'll help you give him the first dose," she went on; and he stood by and watched her as she dropped the heart-stimulant into a spoon and diluted it with a little water. "Come," she said; and they went together into the adjoining room.

Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal: it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would have been the loser.

The small service was quickly rendered. Griswold lifted the sick man, and his companion, deft and steady-handed, administered the stimulant.

"Ten drops; no more and no less; exactly on the half-hour: those are Doctor Bertie's orders," she said, when they had withdrawn to the outer room. And then: "Good-night, for a little while. Don't hesitate to call me when you've had enough."

For so long as he could distinguish her light step in the corridor, Griswold stood motionless as she had left him. Then he flung himself into the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands.

* * * * *

The quarter-hour passed, and after the three mellow strokes had died away the silence grew slowly maddening. When inaction was no longer bearable, Griswold sprang up and went to stand at the open window. The summer night was hot and breathless. In the north-west a storm cloud was creeping up into the sky, and he watched its black shadow climbing like a terrifying threat of doom out of the illimitable and blotting out the stars one by one.... "For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain...." Out of a childhood which seemed very far away and unreal the words of the Psalmist came to ring in his ears like the muffled tolling of a passing-bell. So it must be soon for all the living; and whether a little sooner or a little later, what could it matter? A breath more or less to be drawn; a longer or shorter fluttering of the feeble heart; that was all.

The clock struck eleven, and mechanically he poured out the dose from the larger bottle and gave it to the sick man. When it was done he left the bedside and the inner room quickly and went back to the open window. The air was thick and stifling, and when he sat down in the deep window-seat he was gasping for breath. It was going to be harder than he had thought it would, though now that the time had come he realized that he had been subconsciously planning for it, preparing for it. And the means which had been thrust into his hands could scarcely have been simpler. He had only to sit still and do nothing--and no one would ever know. He took up the small phial and held it to the light: ten drops, or forty drops; they would neither be missed, nor counted if they should remain.

The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly, and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt, rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes, striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples, and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after that, nothing.

* * * * *

A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her shoulders to make her look up at him.

"Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?--Oh, my God! I am a murderer--a murderer at last!"

She turned her face away quickly.

"Oh, no, no, boy!--not meaning to be!" she murmured.

"What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows--He knows whether I meant it or not."

She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her, he saw the dark eyes swimming.

"It was too hard; I shouldn't have asked it of you, Kenneth. I knew what a cruel strain you've been under all these bad days. And there was no harm done. I--I have been here a long time--ever since half-past eleven; and I've been giving Mr. Galbraith his medicine. Now go down-stairs and stretch out on the hall lounge. I'll run down and send you home as soon as it stops raining."

XXXV

MARGERY'S ANSWER

"Well, it has come at last," said Raymer, passing a newly opened letter of the morning delivery over to Griswold. "The railroad people are taking their work away from us. I've been looking for that in every mail."

Griswold glanced at the letter and handed it back. The burden of the night of horrors was still lying heavily upon him, and his only comment was a questioning, "Well?"

"I've been thinking," was the reply. "I know Atherton, the new president of the Pineboro, pretty well; suppose I should run over to St. Paul and see him--make it a personal plea. We have enough of the hoboes now to run half-gangs; and perhaps, if I could make Atherton believe that we are going to win----"

"You couldn't," Griswold interrupted, shortly. "And, besides, you have told me yourself that Atherton is only a figurehead. Grierson's the man."

At this, Raymer let go again.

"What's the use?" he said dejectedly. "We're down, and everything we do merely prolongs the agony. Do you know that they tried to burn the plant last night?"

"No; I hadn't heard."

"They did. It was just before the thunder storm. They had everything fixed; a pile of kindlings laid in the corner back of the machine-shop annex and the whole thing saturated with kerosene."

"Well, why didn't they do it?" queried Griswold, half-heartedly. After the heavens have fallen, no mere terrestrial cataclysm can evoke a thrill.

"That's a mystery. Something happened; just what, the watchman who had the machine-shop beat couldn't tell. He says there was a flash of light bright enough to blind him, and then a scrap of some kind. When he got out of the shop and around to the place, there was no one there; nothing but the pile of kindlings."

Griswold took up the letter from the railway people and read it again. When he faced it down on Raymer's desk, he had closed with the conclusion which had been thrusting itself upon him since the early morning hour when he had picked his way among the sidewalk pools from Mereside to upper Shawnee Street.

"You can still save yourself, Edward," he said, still with the colorless note in his voice. And he added: "You know the way."

Raymer jerked his head out of his desk and swung around in the pivot-chair.

"See here, Griswold; the less said about that at this stage of the game, the better it will be for both of us!" he exploded. "I'm going to do as I said I should, but not until this fight is settled, one way or the other!"

Griswold did not retort in kind.

"The condition has already expired by limitation; the fight is as good as settled now," he said, placably. "We are only making a hopeless bluff. We can hold our forty or fifty tramp workmen just as long as we pay their board over in town, and don't ask them to report for work. But the day the shop whistle is blown, four out of every five will vanish. We both know that."

"Then there is nothing for it but a receivership," was Raymer's gloomy decision.

"Not without a miracle," Griswold admitted. "And the day of miracles is past."

Thus the idealist, out of a depth of wretchedness and self-exprobration hitherto unplumbed. But if he could have had even a momentary gift of telepathic vision he might have seen a miracle at that moment in the preliminary stage of its outworking.

The time was half-past nine; the place a grotto-like summer-house on the Mereside lawn. The miracle workers were two: Margery Grierson, radiant in the daintiest of morning house-gowns, and the man who had taken her retainer. Miss Grierson was curiously examining a photographic print: the pictured scene was a well-littered foundry yard with buildings forming an angle in the near background. Against the buildings a pile of shavings with kindlings showed quite clearly; and, stooping to ignite the pile, was a man who had evidently looked up at, or just before, the instant of camera-snapping. There was no mistaking the identity of the man. He had a round, pig-jowl face; his bristling mustaches stood out stiffly as if in sudden horror; and his hat was on the back of his head.

"It ain't very good," Broffin apologized. "The sun ain't high enough yet to make a clear print. But you said 'hurry,' and I reckon it will do."

Miss Grierson nodded. "You caught him in the very act, didn't you?" she said coolly. "What did he do?"

"Dropped things and jumped for the camera. But the flash had blinded him, and, besides, the camera had been moved. I let him have a foot to fall over, and he took it; after which I made a bluff at tryin' to hold him. Lordy gracious! new ropes wouldn't 'a' held him, then. I'll bet he's runnin' yet--what?"

"What did he hope to accomplish by setting fire to the works?"

"It was a frame-up to capture public sympathy. There's been a report circulating 'round that Raymer and Griswold was goin' to put some o' the ringleaders in jail, if they had to _make_ a case against 'em. Clancy had it figured out that the fire'd be charged up to the owners, themselves."

Miss Grierson was still examining the picture. "You made two of these prints?" she asked.

"Yes; here's the other one--and the film."

"And you have the papers to make them effective?"

Broffin handed her a large envelope, unsealed. "You'll find 'em in there. That part of it was a cinch. Your governor ought to fire that man Murray. He was payin' Clancy in checks!"

Again Miss Grierson nodded.

"About the other matter?" she inquired. "Have you heard from your messenger?"

Broffin produced another envelope. It had been through the mails and bore the Duluth postmark.

"Affidavits was the best we could do there," he said. "My man worked it to go with MacFarland as the driver of the rig. They saw some mighty fine timber, but it happened to be on the wrong side of the St. Louis County line. He's a tolerably careful man, and he verified the landmarks."

"Affidavits will do," was the even-toned rejoinder. Then: "These papers are all in duplicate?"

"Everything in pairs--just as you ordered."

Miss Grierson took an embroidered chamois-skin money-book from her bosom and began to open it. Broffin raised his hand.

"Not any more," he objected. "You overpaid me that first evening in front of the Winnebago."

"You needn't hesitate," she urged. "It's my own money."

"I've had a-plenty."

"Enough so that we can call it square?"

"Yes, and more than enough."

"Then I can only thank you," she said, rising.

He knew that he was being dismissed, but the one chance in a thousand had yet to be tested.

"Just a minute, Miss Grierson," he begged. "I've done you right in this business, haven't I?"

"You have."

"I said I didn't want any more money, and I don't. But there's one other thing. Do you know what I'm here in this little jay town of yours for?"

"Yes; I have known it for a long time."

"I thought so. You knew it that day out at the De Soto, when you was tellin' Mr. Raymer a little story that was partly true and partly made up--what?"

"And when you were sitting behind the window curtains listening," she laughed. "Yes; I knew it then. What about it?"

"I've been wonderin' as I set here, if there was anything on the top side of God's green earth that'd persuade you to tell me how much o' that story was made up."

She was smiling deliciously when she said: "You are from the South, Mr. Broffin, and I didn't suppose a Southerner could be so unchivalrous as to suspect a lady of fibbing."

He shook his head. "I wish you'd tell me, Miss Grierson. I'm in pretty bad on this thing, and if----"

"I can tell you what to do, if that will help you."

"It might," he allowed.

"Go away and take some other commission. It's a cold trail, Mr. Broffin."

"But you won't say that Griswold isn't the man?"

"It is not for me to say. But Miss Farnham says he isn't, and Mr. Galbraith--you tried him, didn't you? What more do you want?"

"I want _you_ to say he isn't; then I'll go away."