“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.