The strike had apparently settled down to the ordinary run of strikes.
The newspaper men from New York were gradually recalled, as the mill
towns became orderly, and no further acts of violence took place. Here
and there mills that had gone down fired their furnaces again and went
back to work, many with depleted shifts, however.
But the strikers had lost, and knew it. Howard Cardew, facing the
situation with his customary honesty, saw in the gradual return of
the men to work only the urgency of providing for their families, and
realized that it was not peace that was coming, but an armed neutrality.
The Cardew Mills were still down, but by winter he was confident they
would be open again. To what purpose? To more wrangling and bickering,
more strikes? Where was the middle ground? He was willing to give the
men a percentage of the profits they made. He did not want great wealth,
only an honest return for his invested capital. But he wanted to manage
his own business. It was his risk.
The coal miners were going out. The Cardews owned coal mines. The miners
wanted to work a minimum day for a maximum wage, but the country must
have coal. Shorter hours meant more men for the mines, and they would
have to be imported. But labor resented the importation of foreign
workers.
Again, what was the answer?
Still, he was grateful for peace. The strike dragged on, with only
occasional acts of violence. From the hill above Baxter a sniper daily
fired with a long range rifle at the toluol tank in the center of one
of the mills, and had so far escaped capture, as the tank had escaped
damage. But he knew well enough that a long strike was playing into the
hands of the Reds. It was impossible to sow the seeds of revolution
so long as a man's dinner-pail was full, his rent paid, and his family
contented. But a long strike, with bank accounts becoming exhausted and
credit curtailed, would pave the way for revolution.
Old Anthony had had a drastic remedy for strikes.
“Let all the storekeepers, the country over, refuse credit to the
strikers, and we'd have an end to this mess,” he said.
“We'd have an end to the storekeepers, too,” Howard had replied, grimly.
One good thing had come out of the bomb outrages. They had had a
salutary effect on the honest labor element. These had no sympathy with
such methods and said so. But a certain element, both native and foreign
born, secretly gloated and waited.
One thing surprised and irritated Howard. Public sentiment was not so
much with the strikers, as against the mill owners. The strike worked
a hardship to the stores and small businesses dependent on the
great mills; they forgot the years when the Cardews had brought them
prosperity, had indeed made them possible, and they felt now only
bitter resentment at the loss of trade. In his anger Howard saw them as
parasites, fattening on the conceptions and strength of those who had
made the city. They were men who built nothing, originated nothing. Men
who hated the ladder by which they had climbed, who cared little how
shaky its foundation, so long as it stood.
In September, lured by a false security, the governor ordered the
demobilization of the state troops, save for two companies. The men at
the Baxter and Friendship plants, owned by the Cardews, had voted to
remain out, but their leaders appeared to have them well in hand, and
no trouble was anticipated. The agents of the Department of Justice,
however, were still suspicious. The foreigners had plenty of money.
Given as they were to hoarding their savings in their homes, the local
banks were unable to say if they were drawing on their reserves or were
being financed from the outside.
Shortly before the mayoralty election trouble broke out in the western
end of the state, and in the north, in the steel towns. There were ugly
riotings, bombs were sent through the mails, the old tactics of night
shootings and destruction of property began. In the threatening chaos
Baxter and Friendship, and the city nearby, stood out by contrast for
their very orderliness. The state constabulary remained in diminished
numbers, a still magnificent body of men but far too few for any real
emergency, and the Federal agents, suspicious but puzzled, were removed
to more turbulent fields.
The men constituting the Vigilance Committee began to feel a sense
of futility, almost of absurdity. They had armed and enrolled
themselves--against what? The growth of the organization slowed down,
but it already numbered thousands of members. Only its leaders retained
their faith in its ultimate necessity, and they owed perhaps more than
they realized to Willy Cameron's own conviction.
It was owing to him that the city was divided into a series of zones, so
that notification of an emergency could be made rapidly by telephone and
messenger. Owing to him, too, was a new central office, with some one
on duty day and night. Rather ironically, the new quarters were the
dismantled rooms of the Myers Housecleaning Company.
On the day after his proposal to Edith, Willy Cameron received an
unexpected holiday. Mrs. Davis, the invalid wife of the owner of the
Eagle Pharmacy, died and the store was closed. He had seen Edith for
only a few moments that morning, but it was understood then that the
marriage would take place either that day or the next.
He had been physically so weary the night before that he had slept, but
the morning found him with a heaviness of spirit that he could not throw
off. The exaltation of the night before was gone, and all that remained
was a dogged sense of a duty to be done. Although he smiled at Edith,
his face remained with her all through the morning.
“I'll make it up to him,” she thought, humbly. “I'll make it up to him
somehow.”
Then, with Ellen out doing her morning marketing, she heard the
feeble thump of a cane overhead which was her mother's signal. She was
determined not to see her mother again until she could say that she was
married, but the thumping continued, and was followed by the crash of a
broken glass.
“She's trying to get up!” Edith thought, panicky. “If she gets up it
will kill her.”
She stood at the foot of the stairs, scarcely breathing, and listened.
There was a dreadful silence above. She stole up, finally, to where she
could see her mother. Mrs. Boyd was still in her bed, but lying with
open eyes, unmoving.
“Mother,” she called, and ran in. “Mother.”
Mrs. Boyd glanced at her.
“I thought that glass would bring you,” she said sharply, but with
difficulty. “I want you to stand over there and let me look at you.”
Edith dropped on her knees beside the bed, and caught her mother's hand.
“Don't! Don't talk like that, mother,” she begged. “I know what you
mean. It's all right, mother. Honestly it is. I--I'm married, mother.”
“You wouldn't lie to me, Edith?”
“No. I'm telling you. I've been married a long time. You--don't you
worry, mother. You just lie there and quit worrying. It's all right.”
There was a sudden light in the sick woman's eyes, an eager light that
flared up and died away again.
“Who to?” she asked. “If it's some corner loafer, Edie--” Edith had
gained new courage and new facility. Anything was right that drove the
tortured look from her mother's eyes.
“You can ask him when he comes home this evening.”
“Edie! Not Willy?”
“You've guessed it,” said Edith, and burying her face in the bed
clothing, said a little prayer, to be forgiven for the lie and for all
that she had done, to be more worthy thereafter, and in the end to earn
the love of the man who was like God to her.
There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one
on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable
suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.
Mrs. Boyd lay back and closed her eyes.
“I haven't been so tickled since the day you were born,” she said.
She put out a thin hand and laid it on the girl's bowed head. When Edith
moved, a little later, her mother was asleep, with a new look of peace
on her face.
It was necessary before Ellen saw her mother to tell her what she had
done. She shrank from doing it. It was one thing for Willy to have done
it, to have told her the plan, but Edith was secretly afraid of Ellen.
And Ellen's reception of the news justified her fears.
“And you'd take him that way!” she said, scornfully. “You'd hide behind
him, besides spoiling his life for him! It sounds like him to offer, and
it's like you to accept.”
“It's to save mother,” said Edith, meekly.
“It's to save yourself. You can't fool me. And if you think I'm going to
sit by and let him do it, you can think again.”
“It's as good as done,” Edith flashed. “I've told mother.”
“That you're going to be, or that you are?”
“That we are married.”
“All right,” Ellen said triumphantly. “She's quiet and peaceful now,
isn't she? You don't have to get married now, do you? You take my
advice, and let it go at that.”
It was then that Edith realized what she had done. He would still marry
her, of course, but behind all his anxiety to save her had been the real
actuating motive of his desire to relieve her mother's mind. That was
done now. Then, could she let him sacrifice himself for her?
She could. She could and she would. She set her small mouth firmly, and
confronted the future; she saw herself, without his strength to support
her, going down and down. She remembered those drabs of the street on
whom she had turned such cynical eyes in her virtuous youth, and she saw
herself one of that lost sisterhood, sodden, hectic, hopeless.
When Willy Cameron left the pharmacy that day it was almost noon. He
went to the house of mourning first, and found Mr. Davis in a chair in
a closed room, a tired little man in a new black necktie around a not
over-clean collar, his occupation of years gone, confronting a new and
terrible leisure that he did not know how to use.
“You know how it is, Willy,” he said, blinking his reddened eyelids.
“You kind of wish sometimes that you had somebody to help you bear your
burden, and then it's taken away, but you're kind of bent over and used
to it. And you'd give your neck and all to have it back.”
Willy Cameron pondered that on his way up the street.
There was one great longing in him, to see Lily again. In a few hours
now he would have taken a wife, and whatever travesty of marriage
resulted, he would have to keep away from Lily. He meant to play square
with Edith.
He wondered if it would hurt Lily to see him, remind her of things she
must be trying to forget. He decided in the end that it would hurt her,
so he did not go. But he walked, on his way to see Pink Denslow at the
temporary bank, through a corner of the park near the house, and took a
sort of formal and heart-breaking farewell of her.
Time had been when life had seemed only a long, long trail, with Lily at
the end of it somewhere, like water to the thirsty traveler, or home to
the wanderer; like a camp fire at night. But now, life seemed to him a
broad highway, infinitely crowded, down which he must move, surrounded
yet alone.
But at least he could walk in the middle of the road, in the sunlight.
It was the weaklings who were crowded to the side. He threw up his head.
It had never occurred to him that he was in any, danger, either from
Louis Akers or from the unseen enemy he was fighting. He had a curious
lack of physical fear. But once or twice that day, as he went about,
he happened to notice a small man, foreign in appearance and shabbily
dressed. He saw him first when he came out of the marriage license
office, and again when he entered the bank.
He had decided to tell Pink of his approaching marriage and to ask him
to be present. He meant to tell him the facts. The intimacy between them
was now very close, and he felt that Pink would understand. He neither
wanted nor expected approval, but he did want honesty between them. He
had based his life on honesty.
Yet the thing was curiously hard to lead up to. It would be hard to set
before any outsider the conditions at the Boyd house, or his own sense
of obligation to help. Put into everyday English the whole scheme
sounded visionary and mock-heroic.
In the end he did not tell Pink at all, for Pink came in with excitement
written large all over him.
“I sent for you,” he said, “because I think we've got something at last.
One of our fellows has just been in, that storekeeper I told you about
from Friendship, Cusick. He says he has found out where they're meeting,
back in the hills. He's made a map of it. Look, here's the town, and
here's the big hill. Well, behind it, about a mile and a half, there's a
German outfit, a family, with a farm. They're using the barn, according
to this chap.”
“The barn wouldn't hold very many of them.”
“That's the point. It's the leaders. The family has an alibi. It goes in
to the movies in the town on meeting nights. The place has been searched
twice, but he says they have a system of patrols that gives them
warning. The hills are heavily wooded there, and he thinks they have
rigged up telephones in the trees.”
There was a short silence. Willy Cameron studied the rug.
“I had to swear to keep it to ourselves,” Pink said at last. “Cusick
won't let the Federal agents in on it. They've raided him for liquor
twice, and he's sick as a poisoned pup.”
“How about the county detectives?”
“You know them. They'll go in and fight like hell when the time comes,
but they're likely to gum the game where there's any finesse required.
We'd better find out for ourselves first.”
Willy Cameron smiled.
“What you mean is, that it's too good a thing to throw to the other
fellow. Well, I'm on, if you want me. But I'm no detective.”
Pink had come armed for such surrender. He produced a road map of the
county and spread it on the desk.
“Here's the main road to Friendship,” he said, “and here's the road they
use. But there's another way, back of the hills. Cusick said it was a
dirt lane, but dry. It's about forty miles by it to a point a mile or so
behind the farm. He says he doesn't think they use that road. It's too
far around.”
“All right,” said Willy Cameron. “We use that road, and get to the farm,
and what then? Surrender?”
“Not on your life. We hide in the barn. That's all.”
“That's enough. They'll search the place, automatically. You're talking
suicide, you know.”
But his mind was working rapidly. He was a country boy, and he knew
barns. There would be other outbuildings, too, probably a number of
them. The Germans always had plenty of them. And the information was too
detailed to be put aside lightly.
“When does he think they will meet again?”
“That's the point,” Pink said eagerly. “The family has been all over the
town this morning. It is going on a picnic, and he says those picnics of
theirs last half the night. What he got from the noise they were making
was that they were raising dust again, and something's on for to-night.”
“They'll leave somebody there. Their stock has to be looked after.”
“This fellow says they drop everything and go. The whole outfit. They're
as busy raising an alibi as the other lot is raising the devil.”
But Willy Cameron was a Scot, and hard-headed.
“It looks too simple, Pink,” he said reflectively. He sat for some time,
filling and lighting his pipe, and considering as he did so. He was
older than Pink; not much, but he felt extremely mature and very
responsible.
“What do we know about Cusick?” he asked, finally.
“One of the best men we've got. They've fired his place once, and he's
keen to get them.”
“You're anxious to go?”
“I'm going,” said Pink, cheerfully.
“Then I'd better go along and look after you. But I tell you how I see
it. After I've done that I'll go as far as you like. Either there is
nothing to it and we're fools for our pains, or there's a lot to it,
and in that case we are a pair of double-distilled lunatics to go there
alone.”
Pink laughed joyously.
Life had been very dull for him since his return from France. He had
done considerable suffering and more thinking than was usual with him,
but he had had no action. But behind his boyish zest there was something
more, something he hid as he did the fact that he sometimes said his
prayers; a deep and holy thing, that always gave him a lump in his
throat at Retreat, when the flag came slowly down and the long lines of
men stood at attention. Something he was half ashamed and half proud of,
love of his country.
* * * * *
At the same time another conversation was going on in the rear room of
a small printing shop in the heart of the city. It went on to the
accompaniment of the rhythmic throb of the presses, and while two
printers, in their shirt sleeves, kept guard both at the front and rear
entrances.
Doyle sat with his back to the light, and seated across from him,
smoking a cheap cigar, was the storekeeper from Friendship, Cusick. In a
corner on the table, scowling, sat Louis Akers.
“I don't know why you're so damned suspicious, Jim,” he was saying.
“Cusick says the stall about the Federal agents went all right.”
“Like a house a-fire,” said Cusick, complacently.
“I think, Akers,” Doyle observed, eyeing his subordinate, “that you
are letting your desire to get this Cameron fellow run away with your
judgment. If we get him and Denslow, there are a hundred ready to take
their places.”
“Cameron is the brains of the outfit,” Akers said sulkily.
“How do you know Cameron will go?”
Akers rose lazily and stretched himself.
“I've got a hunch. That's all.”
A girl came in from the composing room, a bundle of proofs in her hand.
With one hand Akers took the sheets from her; with the other he settled
his tie. He smiled down at her.