The Witness Part 31

They dragged their weary feet over the hot, dark pavements, laughing and talking boisterously with their comrades, or crowded into places of amus.e.m.e.nt to forget for a little while, then to creep back to toss the night out on a hard cot in breathless air or to creep to fire-escape or flat roof for a few brief hours of relief, till it was time to return to the vine-clad factory and its hot, noisy slavery for another day.

Three girls fainted on the fifth floor and two on the sixth next morning. They were not carried to the cool and shaded rest-rooms to revive, but lay on the floor with their heads huddled on a pile of waste, and had a little warmish water from the rusty "cooler" in the back stairway poured upon them as they lay. No white-clad nurse with palm leaf and cooling drinks attended their unconscious state, although there was one in attendance in the rest-room whose duty it was to look after the comfort of any chance visitors. When any stooped to succor here, she fanned her neighbor with her ap.r.o.n, casting an anxious eye on her own silent machine and knowing she was losing "time."

Susie fainted three times that morning, and Katie lost an hour in all, bringing water and making a fan out of a newspaper. Also she had an angry altercation with the foreman. He said if Susie "played up" this way she'd have to quit; there were plenty of girls waiting to take her place, and he hadn't time to fool with kids that wanted to lie around and be fanned. It was his last few words as she was reviving that stung Susie to life again and put her back at her machine for the last time in nervous panic, with the thought of what would happen at home if she lost her job. Up above her the great heavy machines thrashed on and the floor trembled with their movement. Black and thick and hot was the air around Susie and she scarcely could see, for dizziness, the machinery which she worked from habit, as she stood swaying in her place, and wondering if she could hold out till the noon whistle blew.

Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, near one of the elevator shafts, a pile of waste lay smoldering, out of sight. One of the boys from the lumber-yard down the next block had stopped to light his cigarette as he pa.s.sed out into the street after bringing a bill to the head manager. He tossed his match away, not seeing where it fell. The big factory thundered on in full swing of a busy, driving morning, and the little match lay nursing its flame and smoldering.

How long it crept and smoldered no one knew. It seemed to come from every floor at once, that smell of smoke and cry of fire! More smoke in volumes pouring up suddenly through cracks and bursting from the elevator shaft; a lick of flame darting out like a serpent ready to strike, menacing against the heat of the big rooms.

Panic and smoke and fire! Cries and clashing of machinery thundering on like a storm above an angry sea!

The girls rushed together in fear, or, screaming, ran desperately to windows which they knew they could not raise! They pounded at the locked doors and crowded in the narrow pa.s.sages, frantically surging this way and that. There was no one to quiet them or tell them what to do. If some one would only stop that awful machinery! Was the engineer dead?

Mockingly the little cool vines crept in about the window-sills and over the imprisoning panes, as if to taunt the victims who were caught in the death-trap.

"At any rate, if we die you'll die too!" cried Katie Craigin, shaking her fist at the long green tendrils that swept across the window nearest her machine. "Oh, you! You'll burn to a crisp at the roots! You'll wither up an' die. You'll be dead an' brown an' ugly! An' I'm glad!

_Glad!_ For I hate you. _I hate you!_ Do you hear?" And she grasped a handful of leaves that edged the window-sill, spat upon them, and stamped them under her foot, then turned to look for Susie.

But Susie had fallen once more by her machine, leaving it unguarded while it thrashed on uselessly. Her little pinched face looked up from the dirty floor in pitiful unconsciousness amid the wild rush and whirl of the fear-maddened company. If terror drove them they would pa.s.s over her without knowing it. They were blind with desperation.

The room seemed about to burst with the heat. Timbers were cracking. All the stories they had heard of the frailty of the building came now to goad them as they hurtled from one end of their pen to the other, while intermittent clouds of smoke and darting flames conspired to bewilder their senses.

Katie sprang to seize her friend and draw her out of the path of the stampede. As she lifted her a cry arose, like the wail of a lost world facing the judgment. The floor swayed, the machines about seemed to totter, and the floor above seemed bending down with some great weight.

There was a cracking, wrenching, twisting, as of the whole great building in mortal pain, and just as Katie drew her unconscious friend away to the window the floor above gave way and down crashed three awful machines, like great devouring juggernauts, to crush and bear away whatever came in their way.

After that, h.e.l.l itself could scarcely have presented a more terrible spectacle of writhing, tortured souls, pinned anguishing amid the flames; of white faces below looking up to ghastly ones above that gazed down with horror into the awful cavern, closed their eyes, clung to walls and windows, and knew not what to do!

The fearful noise of machinery had suddenly ceased and been succeeded by a calm in which the soft sound of rushing flames, the babble of the crowd outside, the gong of fire-engines, and the cry of firemen seemed balm of music in the ears. Water hissed on hot machinery and burning walls. It splashed inside the window and on the white face of Susie. It touched the hot hands of Katie as she lifted her friend nearer to the blessed spray. A shadow of a ladder somewhere crossed the window.

Splintered gla.s.s fell all about her, and a hand reached in and crushed the window frame.

It was Pat who lifted out the limp Susie and handed her down to Courtland, who was just below, while Katie turned and looked back at the fearful pit of fire beneath her, knowing that in but a few more seconds, if help came not, she, too, would be a part of that writhing, awful heap! She saw the white face and staring eyes of the gray-haired woman who ran the machine next to hers lying beneath a pile of dead. She reeled and felt her senses going. Her hot hands clung to the hotter window-ledge. The flames were leaping nearer! She could not hold out--

Then a strong hand grasped her and drew her out into the blessed air, and she felt herself being carried down, down, safely, wondering, as she went, if the vine was roasted yet, or if it still smirked greenly outside this holocaust; wished she had strength to shake a mocking finger at it; and then she knew no more.

For three long hours Courtland and Pat worked side by side, bringing out the living, searching for the dead and dying, carrying them to an improvised hospital in an old warehouse in the next block. Grim and soiled and gray, with singed hair, blistered hands and faces, and sickened hearts, they toiled on.

To Courtland the experience was like walking with G.o.d and being shown the way he might have gone, and how he had been saved. If he had accepted Ramsey Thomas's proposition he would have been a sharer in the sin that caused this catastrophe. He would have been a murderer, almost as much responsible for that charred body lying at his feet, for all those dead and dying, as if he had owned the place.

The whited sepulcher lay a heap of blackened ruins. Only one small corner rose, of blackened marble, to which clung a fragment of brave green to show what had been but a few short hours before. The morning's sun would see it, too, withered and black like the rest. The model factory was gone! But the money that had built it, the money that it had made, was still in existence to build it over again, a perpetual blind to the lawmakers who might have otherwise put a stop to its abuses! It would undoubtedly be built again, more whited, more sepulchral than before.

As he looked upon the ruin a great resolve came to him. He would give his life to fight the power that was setting its heel upon humanity and putting a price upon its blood. He would devote all his powers to the uplifting of people who had been downtrodden and oppressed in the simple act of earning their daily bread!

Ramsey Thomas, happening to be in a near-by city, and answering a summons by telegraph, arrived at the scene in an automobile as Courtland stood there, grimed and tattered from his fight with death.

Ramsey Thomas, baffled, angry, distressed, wriggled out of his car to the sidewalk and faced Courtland, curiously conspicuous and recognizable with all his disarray. Courtland towered above the great man with righteous wrath in his eyes. Ramsey Thomas cringed and looked embarra.s.sed. He had come to look over the ground to see how much trouble they were going to have getting the insurance, and he hadn't expected to be met by a giant Nemesis with blackened face and singed eyebrows.

"Oh, why--I," he began, nervously. "It's Mr. Courtland, isn't it? They tell me you've been very helpful during the fire! I'm sure we're much obliged. We'll not forget this, I a.s.sure you--"

"Mr. Thomas," broke in Courtland, in a clear, decisive voice, "you wanted to know a year ago why I wouldn't accept your proposition, and you couldn't understand my reason for refusing. There it is!"

He pointed eloquently to the heap of ruins.

"Go over to that warehouse and see the rows of charred bodies! Look at the agonized faces of the dead, and hear the groans of the dying. See the living who are scarred or crippled for life. You are responsible for all that! If I had accepted your proposal I would have been responsible, too. And now I mean to spend the rest of my life fighting the conditions that make such a catastrophe as this possible!"

Courtland turned, and in spite of his tatters and soil walked majestically away from him down the street.

Ramsey Thomas stood rooted to the ground, watching him, a strange mingling of emotions chasing one another over his rugged old countenance: astonishment, admiration, and fury in quick succession.

"Drat him!" he said, under his breath. "Drat him! Now he'll be a worse pest than that little rat of a preacher, for he's got twice as much brains and education!"

CHAPTER x.x.x

The summer pa.s.sed in hard, earnest work.

Courtland had been back at his studies four weeks when there came another letter from Tennelly. Gila had gone to her aunt's, down at Beechwood, for a two weeks' stay. She was worn out with the various functions of the summer and needed a complete rest. They were to be married soon, perhaps in December, and there would be a lot to do to prepare for that. She was going to rest absolutely, and had forbidden him to follow her, so he had some leisure on his hands. Would Courtland like to spend a week-end somewhere along the coast half-way between?

They could each take their cars and meet wherever Courtland said.

It was Sat.u.r.day morning when Courtland received the letter. Pat had gone down to the city for over Sunday. An inexpressible longing filled him to see Tennelly again, before his marriage completed the wall that was between them. He wanted to have a real old-fashioned talk; to look into the soul of his friend and see the old loyalty shining there. He wanted more than all to come close to him once more, and, it might be, tell him about the Christ.

He took down his road-book, turned to the map, and let his finger fall on the coast-line about midway between the city and the seminary.

Looking it up in the book, he found Shadow Beach described as a quiet and exclusive resort with a good inn, excellent service, fine sea-bathing, etc. Well, that would do as well as anywhere. He telegraphed Tennelly:

Meet me at Shadow Beach, Howland's Inlet, Elm Tree Inn, this evening.

COURT.

It was dark when he reached Elm Tree Inn. The ocean rolled, a long black line flecked with faint foam, along the sh.o.r.e, and luminous with a coming moon. Two dim figures, like moving shadows, went down the sand picked out against the path of the moon. Save for those all was lonely, up and down. Courtland shivered slightly and almost wished he had selected some more cheerful spot for the meeting. He had not realized how desolate a sea can be when it is growing cold. Nevertheless, it was majestic. It seemed like eternity in its limitless stretch. The lights in far harbors glinted out in the distance down the coast. Somehow the vast emptiness filled him with sadness. He felt as if he were entering upon anything but a pleasant reunion, and half wished he had not come.

Courtland ran his car up to the entrance and sprang out. He was glad to get inside, where a log fire was crackling. The warmth and the light dispelled his sadness. Things began to take on a cheerful aspect again.

"I suppose you haven't many guests left," he said, pleasantly, as he registered.

"Only him, sir!" said the clerk, pointing to the entry just above Courtland's.

"James T. Aquilar and wife, Seattle, Washington," Courtland read, idly, and turned away.

"They been here two days. Come in a nerroplane!" went on the clerk, communicatively.

"Fly all the way from Seattle?" asked Courtland, idly. He was looking at his watch and wondering if he should order supper or wait until Tennelly arrived.

"Well, I can't say for sure. He's mighty uncommunicative, but he's given out he flies 'most anywhere the notion takes him. He's got his machine out in the lot back o' the inn. You oughtta see it. It's a bird!"

"H'm!" said Courtland. "I must have a look at it in daylight. I'm looking for a friend up from the city pretty soon. Guess it would be more convenient for you if we dined together. I'll wait a bit. Meantime, let me see what rooms you have."

When Courtland came back to the office and sat down before the fire to wait, the spell of sadness seemed to have vanished.