Carmen Ariza Part 183

"Sure! Doesn't the militia exist for men like Ames? To-day's work at Avon proves it, I think!"

"Apparently so, Ned," returned Hitt sadly. "And the only possibility of a change in enlightened people is through a better understanding of what is really good and worth while. That means real, practical Christianity. And of that Ames knows nothing."

"Seems to me, Hitt, that it ought to stagger our preachers to realize that nineteen centuries of their brand of Christianity have scarcely even begun to cleanse society. What do you suppose Borwell thinks, anyway?"

"Ned, they still cling to human law as necessarily a compelling influence in the shaping of mankind's moral nature."

"And go right on accepting the blood-stained money of criminal business men who have had the misfortune to ama.s.s a million dollars!

And, more, they actually hold such men up as patterns for the youth to emulate! As if the chief end of endeavor were to achieve the glorious manhood of an Ames! And he a man who is deader than the corpses he made at Avon to-day!"

"The world's ideal, my friend, has long been the man who succeeds in everything except that which is worth while," replied Hitt. "But we have been bidden to come out from the world, and be separate. Is it not so?"

"Y--e--s, of course. But I can't take my thought from Avon--"

"And thereby you emphasize your belief in the reality of evil."

"Well--look at us! The Express stands for righteousness. And now we are a dead duck!"

"Then, if that is so, why not resign your position, Ned? Go seek work elsewhere."

"No, sir! Not while the Express has a leg to stand on! Your words are an offense to me, sir!"

Hitt rose and clapped his friend heartily on the back. "Ned, old man!

You're a jewel! Things do look very dark for us, if we look only with the human sense of vision. But we are trying to look at the invisible things within. And there is only perfection there. Come, we must get to work. The Express still lives."

"But--Carmen?"

Hitt turned and faced him. "Ned, Carmen is not in our hands. She is now completely with her G.o.d. We must henceforth wait on Him."

On the following afternoon at three a little group of Avon mill hands crept past the guards and met in Father Danny's Mission, down in the segregated vice district. They met there because they dared not go through the town to the Hall. Father Danny was with them. He had slipped into town the preceding night, and remained in hiding through the day. And Carmen was with them, too. She had gone first to the Hall, and then to the Mission, when she arrived again in the little town. And after she had deposited Hitt's check in the bank she had asked Father Danny to call together some of the older and more intelligent of the mill hands, to discuss methods of disbursing the money.

Almost coincident with her arrival had come an order from Ames to apprehend the girl as a disturber of the peace. The hush of death lay over Avon, and even the soldiers now stood aghast at their own b.l.o.o.d.y work of the day before. Carmen had avoided the main thoroughfares, and had made her way unrecognized. At a distance she saw the town jail, heavily guarded. Its capacity had been sorely taxed, and many of the prisoners had been crowded into cold, cheerless store rooms, and placed under guards who stood ready to mow them down at the slightest threatening gesture.

"It's come, Miss Carmen!" whispered Father Danny, after he had quietly greeted the girl. "It's come! It may be the beginning of the great revolution we've all known wasn't far off! I just _had_ to get back here! They can only arrest me, anyway. And, oh, G.o.d! my poor, poor people!"

He sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands. But soon he sprang to his feet. "No time for mollycoddling!" he exclaimed. "Come, men, we'll give you checks, and do you get food for the babies. Only, don't buy of the company stores!"

"We'll have to, Father," said one of them. "It's dangerous not to."

"But they've never taken cash from you there, ye know. Only your pay scrip."

"Aye, Father, and they've discounted that ten per cent each time. But if we bought at other stores we were discharged. And now we'd be blacklisted."

"Ah, G.o.d, that's true!" exclaimed the priest. "But now then, Miss Carmen, we'll begin."

For an hour the girl wrote small checks, and the priest handed them out to the eager laborers. They worked feverishly, for they knew that at any moment they might be apprehended.

"Ah, you men!" cried Father Danny, at last unable to restrain himself.

"Did ye but know that this grand nation is wholly dependent on such as you, its common people! Not on the rich, I say, the handful that own its mills and mines, but on you who work them for your rich masters!

But then, ye're so ignorant!"

"Don't, Father!" pleaded Carmen, "don't! They have suffered so much!"

"Ah, la.s.s, it's but love that I'm dealin' out to 'em, G.o.d knows! And yet, it's they that are masters of the situation, only they don't know it! There's the pity! They've no leaders, except such as waste their money and leave 'em in the ditch! The world's social schemes, Miss Carmen, don't reach such as these. They're only sops. And they've got the contempt of the wage-earners."

"The Church, Father, could do much for these people, if--"

"Don't hesitate, Miss Carmen. You mean, if we didn't give all our thought to the rich, eh? But still, it's wholly up to the people themselves, after all. And, mark me, when they do rise, why, such men as Ames won't know what's. .h.i.t 'em!"

The door was thrown violently open at that moment, and a squad of soldiers under the command of a lieutenant entered.

Carmen and Father Danny rose and faced them. The mill hands stood like stone images, their faces black with suppressed rage. The lieutenant halted his men, and then advanced to the girl.

"Is a woman named Carmen Ariza here?" he demanded rudely.

"I am she," replied the fearless girl.

"Come with us," he said in a rough voice.

"That she will not!" cried Father Danny, suddenly pulling the girl back and thrusting himself before her.

The lieutenant raised his hand. The soldiers advanced. The mill hands quickly formed about the girl. And then, with a yell of rage, they threw themselves upon the soldiers.

For a few minutes the little room was a bedlam. The crazed strikers fought without weapons, except such as they could wrest from the soldiers. But they fought to the death. One of them seized Carmen and threw her beneath the table at which she had been working. Above her raged the desperate conflict. The shouting and cursing might have been heard for blocks around. Father Danny stood in front of the table, beneath which lay the girl. He strove desperately to maintain his position, that he might protect her, meantime frantically calling to the mill hands to drag her out to the rear, and escape by the back door.

In the midst of the _melee_ a soldier mounted a chair near the door and raised his rifle. The shot roared out, and Father Danny pitched forward to the floor. Another shot, and still another followed in quick succession. The strikers fell back. Confusion seized them. Then they turned and fled precipitately through the rear exit.

The lieutenant dragged Carmen from beneath the table and out through the door. Then, a.s.sembling his men, he gave an order, and they marched away with her up the icy street to the town jail.

CHAPTER 16

With the wreckage which he had wrought strewn about him, J. Wilton Ames sat at his rich desk far above the scampering human ants in the streets below and contemplated the fell work of his own hands. And often and anon as he looked, great beads of perspiration welled out upon his forehead, and his breath came hot and dry. In the waste basket at his feet lay crumpled the newspapers with their shrieking, red-lettered versions of the slaughter at Avon. He was not a coward, this man! But he had pushed that basket around the desk out of his sight, for when he looked at it something rose before him that sent a chill to his very soul. At times his vision blurred; and then he pa.s.sed his hands heavily across his eyes. He had chanced to read in the grewsome accounts of the Avon ma.s.sacre that little children had been found among those fallen shacks, writhing in their last agonies.

And the reports had said that great, red-dripping holes had been ripped in their thin little bodies by those awful "dum-dum" bullets.

G.o.d! Why had he used them? And why had the demoniac soldiers down there blown the brains from harmless women and helpless babes? He really had not intended to go so far!

And yet, he had! Curse them! The brats would have grown up to oppose the vested privileges of the rich! They, too, would have become anarchists and rioters, bent on leveling the huge industrial fabric which such as he had so laboriously erected under the legal protection afforded their sacred rights! He had done well to remove them now! And the great captains of industry would thank him for the example he had thus fearlessly set!

To think of Avon was for him now to think in terms of blood. And yet his carnal soul hourly wrestled sore with thoughts of a wholly different stamp; with those strange emotions which he had felt when in Carmen's presence; with those unfamiliar sentiments which, had he not fought them back so bitterly, might have made him anew, and--

But the remembrance maddened him. His face grew black, and his mouth poured forth a torrent of foul imprecations and threats upon her and upon those who stood with her. His rage towered again. He smote the desk with his great fist. He fumed, he frothed, he hurled reason from its throne, and bade the Furies again become his counselors.

Upon the desk before him lay the mortgage papers which Hitt had signed. He had bought the mortgage from the bank which had loaned the Express the money. He would crush that sheet now, crush it until the ink dripped black from its emasculated pages! And when it fell into his hands, he would turn it into the yellowest of sensational journals, and hoot the memory of its present staff from ocean to ocean!