John Marvel, Assistant Part 60

"I did--I think they have broken with the Argand interest. I saw your aunt to-day, and had a talk with her. I think her eyes are opened at last. I told her a few plain truths."

He dropped into reflection and a quizzical expression came into his eyes.

"I had a very remarkable thing happen to me to-day."

"What was it?" demanded his daughter.

"I had an offer of marriage made me."

Eleanor Leigh's face changed--at first it grew a shade whiter, then a shade redder.

"I know who it was," she said quickly.

"Oh!" Mr. Leigh shut his lips firmly. "I did not know."

"She is a cat! She has been sending me flowers and opera tickets all winter, and deluging me with invitations. I knew she was up to something." She spoke with growing feeling, as her father's eyes rested on her placidly with an amused expression in them. "I wouldn't be such easy game. Why, dad, she'd bore you to death--and as to me, I wouldn't live in the house with her--I couldn't." She stood with mantling cheek and flashing eye, a young Amazon girded for battle.

"I will relieve you," said her father. "It is not the feline-natured lady you have in mind; but a person quite different." Miss Eleanor looked relieved.

"Dad--it couldn't be--it was not Aunt Sophia? That would explain a lot of things. You know I think she's been laying some snares lately. She even forgave me when I told her the other evening that that was the last time I would ever accept an invitation from Mr. Canter, even as a favor to her. Dad, she'd make you miserable. You couldn't."

"No," said Mr. Leigh. "In fact, it was not a lady at all. It was a person of the opposite s.e.x, and the proposal was for your hand."

"Dad! Who was it? Now, dad." She moved around the table to him, as Mr.

Leigh, with eyes twinkling over his victory, shut his mouth firmly.

"Dad, you'd just as well tell me at once, for you know I am going to know, so you might as well tell me and save yourself trouble. Who was it?"

Mr. Leigh took her firmly by the arms and seated her on his knee.

"Well, it was a young man who appeared quite in earnest."

"It wasn't--no, I know it wasn't he--he wouldn't have done that--and it wasn't--" (she pondered) "no, it wasn't he--and it wasn't--" She suddenly paused. "Tell me, what did he say? How did you like him? What did you say to him?"

"So you have settled who it is. Perhaps, you sent him to me?"

"Indeed, I did not, and I don't know who it was. What did you tell him?"

"I told him you were of age----"

"I am not. I am twenty."

"No, I told him you were too young--to think of such a thing----"

"I am twenty," repeated the girl.

"That is what I told him," said Mr. Leigh, "and that I thought you were able to take care of yourself."

The girl rested her chin on his head and went off in a reverie.

"Dad, we must hold together," she said. Her father drew her face down and kissed her silently. "The man who takes you away from me will have to answer with his life," he said.

"There is no one on earth who could," said Eleanor.

x.x.xVI

THE RIOT AND ITS VICTIM

It is a terrible thing for a man with a wife and children to see them wasting away with sheer starvation, to hear his babes crying for bread and his wife weeping because she cannot get it for them. Some men in such a situation drown their sorrow in drink; others take a bolder course, and defy the law or the rules of their order.

The Railway Company, still being forced to run their cars, undertook to comply with the requirement, even though the protection of the police was withheld. The police were instructed, indeed, to be present and keep the peace, and a few were detailed, but it was known to both sides that no real protection would be granted. Coll McSheen's order to the force bore this plainly on its face--so plainly that the conservative papers roundly denounced him for his hypocrisy, and for the first time began to side decisively with the company.

The offer of increased wages to new men was openly scouted by the strikers generally. But in a few houses the situation was so terrible that the men yielded. One of these was the empty and fireless home of McNeil. The little Scotchman had had a bitter experience and had come through it victorious; but just as he was getting his head above water, the new strike had come--against his wishes and his vote. He had held on as long as he could--had held on till every article had gone--till his wife's poor under raiment and his children's clothes had gone for the few dollars they brought, and now he was face to face with starvation.

He walked the streets day after day in company with a sad procession of haggard men hunting for work, but they might as well have hunted on the arctic floes or in the vacant desert. For every stroke of work there were a hundred men. The answer was everywhere the same: "We are laying men off; we are shutting down."

He returned home one night hungry and dejected to find his wife fainting with hunger and his children famished. "I will get you bread," he said to the children, and he turned and went out. I always was glad that he came to me that night, though I did not know till afterward what a strait he was in. I did not have much to lend him, but I lent him some.

His face was haggard with want; but it had a resolution in it that impressed me.

"I will pay it back, sir, out of my first wages. I am going to work to-morrow."

"I am glad of that," I said, for I thought he had gotten a place.

The next morning at light McNeil walked through the pickets who shivered outside the car-barn, and entered the sheds just as their shouts of derision and anger reached him. "I have come to work," he said simply.

"My children are hungry."

The first car came out that morning, and on the platform stood McNeil, glum and white and grim, with a stout officer behind him. It ran down by the pickets, meeting with jeers and cries of "Scab! scab!" and a fusillade of stones; but as the hour was early the crowd was a small one, and the car escaped. It was some two hours later when the car reappeared on its return. The news that a scab was running the car had spread rapidly, and the street near the terminus had filled with a crowd wild with rage and furiously bent on mischief. As the car turned into a street it ran into a throng that had been increasing for an hour and now blocked the way. An obstruction placed on the track brought the car to a stop as a roar burst from the crowd and a rush was made for the scab.

The officer on the car used his stick with vigor enough, but the time had pa.s.sed when one officer with only a club could hold back a mob. He was jerked off the platform, thrown down, and trampled underfoot. The car was boarded, and McNeil, fighting like a fury, was dragged out and mauled to death before any other officers arrived. When the police, in force, in answer to a riot-call, reached the spot a quarter of an hour later and dispersed the mob, it looked as if the sea had swept over the scene. The car was overturned and stripped to a mere broken sh.e.l.l; and on the ground a hundred paces away, with only a shred of b.l.o.o.d.y clothing still about it, lay the battered and mutilated trunk of what had been a man trying to make bread for his children, while a wild cry of hate and joy at the deed raged about the street.

The men who were arrested easily proved that they were simply onlookers and had never been within fifty feet of the car.

The riot made a fine story for the newspapers, and the headlines were glaring. The victim's name was spelled according to the fancy of the reporter for each paper, and was correctly published only two days later.

The press, except the _Trumpet_, while divided in its opinion on many points, combined in its denouncement of the murder of the driver, and called on the city authorities to awake to the gravity of the situation and put down violence. It was indeed high time.

Moved by the similarity of the name to my friend McNeil, I walked over that afternoon to that part of the city where he had lived. It was one of the poorest streets of the poor section. The street on which I had lived at the old Drummer's, with its little hearth-rug yards, was as much better than it as the most fashionable avenue was better than that.

The mora.s.s, like a moving bog, had spread over it and was rapidly engulfing it.

The sidewalks were filled with loafers, men and women who wore the gloomiest or surliest looks. As I pa.s.sed slowly along, trying to read the almost obliterated numbers, I caught fragments of their conversation. A group of them, men and women, were talking about the man who had been killed and his family. The universal a.s.sertion was that it served him right, and his family, too. I gleaned from their talk that the family had been boycotted even after he was dead, and that he had had to be buried by the city, and, what was more, that the cruel ostracism still went on against his family.

"Ay-aye, let 'em starve, we'll teach 'em to take the bread out of our mouths," said one woman, while another told gleefully of her little boy throwing stones at the girl as she came home from outside somewhere. She had given him a cake for doing it. The others applauded both of these.

The milk of human kindness appeared to be frozen in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Much good it will do you! Do you get any more money for doing it?" said an old man with round shoulders and a thin face; but even he did not seem to protest on account of the cruelty. It was rather a snarl. Two or three young men growled at him; but he did not appear afraid of them; he only snarled back.

I asked one of the men which house was the one I was seeking. He told me, while half a dozen hooted something about the "scab."