The Transgressors Part 37

Acting upon a sudden impulse, she runs up the track a distance of a hundred yards. There are rocks lying on the side of the track nearest the mountain.

One, two, three big rocks she places on the track.

A faint cheer reaches her.

"They have started the car," she laughs hysterically.

"It will not harm the Keystone. No, it will stop here."

Another and another rock is placed on the rails.

She knows that these boulders are a poor impediment to a wildcat car; but they are the only things available.

A whirring sound rings in her ears. It is the car rolling down the grade with the velocity of a thunder-bolt.

In a minute or two at the most, the car will be upon her.

Still she does not falter. The second pyramid must be completed.

Again she turns to look down the track. The headlight of the engine seems to be upon her. It is, in fact, just crossing the culvert.

A glance at the pile of rocks makes them appear insignificant.

"They will never be able to stop the car," she moans.

Then with a final effort she tugs at a boulder larger than any of the others. She has it on the rail when the whistling of the engine startles her.

The engineer has seen the lower pyramid of rocks on the track and has whistled "down brakes."

The train is stopping; it will be saved, for one of the two obstructions will derail the motor-car.

Sister Martha starts to run down the track. She has not taken a dozen steps when the juggernaut dashes into the pyramid of rocks.

Instantly there is a flash and an explosion, that shakes the mountain.

Great ledges of rock slide from the overhanging crags.

In a shower of splintered stone, Martha is literally entombed. Her life is sacrificed on the altar of devotion. She has lived a Christian and dies a martyr.

But the Keystone Express is saved.

Its pa.s.sengers and crew, when they recover from the fright occasioned by the explosion, hasten from the cars. Trainmen are sent up the track to investigate. Brakemen are also sent down the track to carry the news to the station.

One of these men stumbles across Widow Braun. He returns to the train carrying her.

From her, Trueman and the other pa.s.sengers, including the Coal and Iron Police, learn of the plot to wreck the train and of the heroic effort made by Sister Martha and the widow herself, to avert the calamity.

Trueman starts in quest of Sister Martha. Accompanied by one of the trainmen with a lamp, he reaches the scene of the explosion.

The trainman discovers the body of Martha.

Bending over the prostrate body Harvey Trueman weeps. It is the manly expression of deep emotion.

"She died to save my life and the lives of the hundreds on the train.

Was there ever a more n.o.ble sacrifice? It cannot be that she has given her life in vain. I must do the work she has begun. If I can prevent the miners from committing acts of violence it will atone for the loss of Sister Martha."

From the top of the mountain, Trueman catches a glimpse of the torches and miners' lamps. The miners are moving toward the town. Trueman is familiar with every inch of ground about Wilkes-Barre. He has played on the mountain as a boy. He now recollects a by-path which will bring him to the town in advance of the miners who are on the wagon road.

"Have the body of Sister Martha taken to the Mount Hope Seminary," he says to the trainman, and away he speeds for Wilkes-Barre.

The Coal and Iron Police are thrown into utter consternation. They dare not advance upon the town in the darkness for fear that there is another plot to destroy them.

The captain orders them to march across the mountain so as to enter the town from a direction opposite to that by which they are expected. To affect this detour will delay their arrival several hours, but their own safety is more to be considered than that of the townspeople.

And the miners? They have heard the explosion and believe that the Coal and Iron Police have been sent to their doom.

With the police out of their way there is nothing to check the miners in the accomplishment of their design to recover the body of Carl Metz.

It is the radical element that has conceived the idea of wrecking the train. They take full control of the miners and lead the way to join their comrades on the Esplanade. As they pa.s.s through the streets hundreds of men and women who have known nothing of the plot to wreck the train, fall in line and march on in the procession. The number of miners and townspeople soon reaches the thousands. By the time they arrive at the Esplanade there are ten thousand in line.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

AT THE DEAD COAL KING'S MANSION.

Along the Esplanade the hurrying thousands begin to move in the direction of the Terrace; miners who have been in the shafts for eighteen hours; yard-hands from the railroads; iron founders, naked save for their breeches, have quit their furnaces; townspeople whom fear impels to see what the night will bring forth; this heterogeneous horde presses on to the scene of the murder.

It is a night that lends an appropriate setting to so strange and uncanny an event. The sky is leaden except for a streak on the western horizon where the fading, sinister light of the sun gives token of a stormy morrow. Through the walled banks, the river rushes turbulently, swollen by recent rains; its waters tinged by the dyes and other refuse from the city above.

On the further bank, the groups of breakers and foundries loom up as vague shadow creations. From fifty chimney mouths thick black smoke curls unceasingly; now soaring to a considerable height, now driven down to earth by fitful gusts of wind. In their sinuous course these smoke-clouds resemble the genii of fable, who spread over the earth carrying death and devastation.

In sharp contrast to this picture is the Avenue of Opulence on the side of the river which boasts of the Esplanade. Here is a line of fifty palatial residences; the homes of the owners of a hundred mines and factories and the task-masters of fifty thousand men, their wives and their progeny.

Cl.u.s.tered about the breakers and furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the light of civilization dawned.

Nero thrumming his violin from the vantage point of the crowning hill of Rome, had no such portraiture of the degradation of humanity as that which the Magnates nightly view from their balconies. A stranger would be struck with surprise that the thousands should be huddled in dens that wild animals would find uninhabitable, while the sons of greed and avarice flaunt their trappings of mammon from the hilltops.

This is the arena in which is to be enacted a scene of this great drama.

The actors, the audience are gathering.

Mingled sounds of strange nature are on the air. The murmur always present where mult.i.tudes are a.s.sembled runs as an undertone; the sharp notes of frightened women and terrified children rise as the tones of an oratorio; steady, full, vibrant are the sounds of the men's voices.

On the countenances of the men can be read the exultation of their hearts, that at least one of their tyrants has encountered his Nemesis.

Faces here and there are wreathed in smiles, as though their possessors were hastening to a fete. Some are grave, for the thought of the retribution that the Magnates will demand, and which they knew so well how to secure, is enough to bring a pallor to the cheek. There are men in the eddying thousands who have felt the hot lead of Latimer and Hazleton burn into their backs and the recollection makes them shudder.

They are again upon a highway, but is this a protection against the violence of their masters? They are now, as then, unarmed, but is this a safeguard against the rifles of the hirelings?