It was dark when Howard Cardew and Willy Cameron left the hospital.
Elinor's information had been detailed and exact. Under cover of the
general strike the radical element intended to take over the city.
On the evening of the first day of the strike, armed groups from the
revolutionary party would proceed first to the municipal light plant,
and, having driven out any employees who remained at their posts,
or such volunteers as had replaced them, would plunge the city into
darkness.
Elinor was convinced that following this would come various bomb
outrages, perhaps a great number of them, but of this she had no
detailed information. What she did know, however, was the dependence
that Doyle and the other leaders were placing in the foreign element
in the nearby mill towns and from one or two mining districts in the
county.
Around the city, in the mill towns, there were more than forty thousand
foreign laborers. Subtract from that the loyal aliens, but add a certain
percentage of the native-born element, members of seditious societies
and followers of the red flag, and the Reds had a potential army of
dangerous size.
As an actual fighting force they were much less impressive. Only a small
percentage, she knew and told them, were adequately armed. There were
a few machine guns, and some long-range rifles, but by far the greater
number had only revolvers. The remainder had extemporized weapons, bars
of iron, pieces of pipe, farm implements, lances of wood tipped with
iron and beaten out on home forges.
They were a rabble, not an army, without organization and with few
leaders. Their fighting was certain to be as individualistic as their
doctrines. They had two elements in their favor only, numbers and
surprise.
To oppose them, if the worst came, there were perhaps five thousand
armed men, including the city and county police, the state constabulary,
and the citizens who had signed the cards of the Vigilance Committee.
The local post of the American Legion stood ready for instant service,
and a few national guard troops still remained in the vicinity. “What
they expect,” she said, looking up from her pillows with tragic eyes,
“is that the police and the troops will join them. You don't think they
will, do you?”
They reassured her, and after a time she slept again. When she wakened,
at midnight, the room was empty save for a nurse reading under a night
lamp behind a screen. Elinor was not in pain. She lay there, listening
to the night sounds of the hospital, the watchman shuffling along the
corridor in slippers, the closing of a window, the wail of a newborn
infant far away.
There was a shuffling of feet in the street below, the sound of many
men, not marching but grimly walking, bent on some unknown errand. The
nurse opened the window and looked out.
“That's queer!” she said. “About thirty men, and not saying a word. They
walk like soldiers, but they're not in uniform.”
Elinor pondered that, but it was not for some days that she knew that
Pink Denslow and a picked number of volunteers from the American Legion
had that night, quite silently and unemotionally, broken into the
printing office where Doyle and Akers had met Cusick, and had, not so
silently but still unemotionally, destroyed the presses and about a ton
of inflammatory pamphlets.