Nonsense! With one blow the unfamiliar sentiment which had been shedding its influence upon him that morning laid the ugly suspicion dead at his feet. A single glance into that sweet face turned so lovingly up to his brought his own deep curse upon himself for his hellish thought.

"You know," she bubbled, with a return of her wonted airy gaiety, "I just had to run the gauntlet through guards and clerks and office boys to get here. Aren't you glad I didn't send in my card? For then you would have refused to see me, wouldn't you?"

"I would not!" he replied harshly. Then he repented his tone. "If I had known you were out there," he said more gently, "I'd have sent out and had you dragged in. I—I have wanted something this morning; and now I am sure it was—"

"Yes," she interrupted, taking the words out of his mouth, "you wanted me. I knew you would. You see, it's just absolutely impossible to oppose anybody who loves you. You know, that's the very method Jesus gave for overcoming our enemies—to love them, just love them to pieces, until we find that we haven't any enemies at all any more. Isn't it simple? My! Well, that's the way I've been doing with you—just loving you."

The man's brows knotted, and his lips tightened. Was this girl ridiculing him? Or was there aught but the deepest sincerity expressed in the face from which he could not take his eyes? Impossible! And yet, did ever human being talk so strangely, so weirdly, as she?

He bent a little closer to her. "Did you say that you loved me?" he asked. "I thought you looked upon me as a human monster." After all, there was a note of pathos in the question. Carmen laid her hand upon his.

"It's the real you that I love," she answered gently. "The monster is only human thought—the thought that has seemed to mesmerize you. But you are going to throw off the mesmerism, aren't you? I'll help you," she added brightly. "You're going to put off the 'old man' completely—and you're going to begin by opening yourself and letting in a little love for those poor people down at Avon, aren't you? Yes, you are!"

At the mention of the people of Avon his face became stern and dark. And yet she spoke of them alone. She had not mentioned the Beaubien, Miss Wall, the Express, nor herself. He noted this, and wondered.

"You see, you don't understand, Mr. Ames. You'll be, oh, so surprised some day when you learn a little about the laws of thought—even the way human thought operates! For you can't possibly do another person an injury without that injury flying back and striking you. It's a regular boomerang! You may not feel the effects of its return right away—but it does return, and the effects accumulate. And then, some day, when you least expect it, comes the crash! But, when you love a person, why, that comes back to you too; and it never comes alone. It just brings loads of good with it. It helps you, and everybody. Oh, Mr. Ames," she cried, suddenly rising and seizing both his hands, "you've just got to love those people down there! You can't help it, even if you think you can, for hate is not real—it's an awful delusion!"

It was not so much an appeal which the girl made as an affirmation of things true and yet to come. The mighty Thou shalt not! which Moses laid upon his people, when transfused by the omnipotent love of the Christ was transformed from a clanking chain into a silken cord. The restriction became a prophecy; for when thou hast yielded self to the benign influence of the Christ-principle, then, indeed, thou shalt not desire to break the law of God.

Carmen returned to her chair, and sat eagerly expectant. Ames groped within his thought for a reply. And then his mental grasp closed upon the words of Hood.

"They are very bitter against me—they hate me!" he retorted lamely.

"Ah, yes," she said quickly. "They reflect in kind your thought of them. Your boomerangs of greed, of exploitation, of utter indifference which you have hurled at them, have returned upon you in hatred. Do you know that hatred is a fearful poison? And do you know that another's hatred resting upon you is deadly, unless you know how to meet and neutralize it with love? For love is the neutralizing alkaloid."

"Love is—weakness," he said in a low tone. "That kind, at least."

"Love weakness! Oh! Why, there is no such mighty power in the whole universe as love! It is omnipotent! It is hatred that is weak!"

Ames made a little gesture of contempt. "We argue from different standpoints," he said. "I am a plain, matter-of-fact, cold-blooded business man. There is no love in business!"

"And that," she replied in a voice tinged with sadness, "is why business is such chaos; why there is so much failure, so much anxiety, fear, loss, and unhappiness in the business world. Mr. Ames, you haven't the slightest conception of real business, have you?"

She sat for a moment in thought. Then, brightly, "I am in business, Mr. Ames—?"

"Humph! I am forced to agree with you there! The business of attempting to annihilate me!"

"I am in the business of reflecting good to you, and to all mankind," she gently corrected.

"Then suppose you manifest your love for me by refraining from meddling further in my affairs. Suppose from now on you let me alone."

"Why—I am not meddling with you, Mr. Ames!"

"No?" He opened a drawer of the desk and took out several copies of the Express. "I am to consider that this is not strictly meddling, eh?" he continued, as he laid the papers before her.

"No, not at all," she promptly replied. "That's uncovering evil, so's it can be destroyed. All that evil, calling itself you and your business, has got to come to the surface—has got to come up to the light, so that it can be—"

"Ah! I see. Then I, the monster, must be exposed, eh? And afterward destroyed. A very pretty little idea! And the mines and mills which I own—"

"You own nothing, Mr. Ames, except by consent of the people whom you oppress. They will wake up some day; and then state and national ownership of public utilities will come, forced by such as you."

"And that desideratum will result in making everybody honest, I suppose?"

"No," she answered gravely. "We must go deeper than that. All our present troubles, whether domestic, business, civic, or social, come from a total misapprehension of the nature of God—a misunderstanding of what is really good. We have all got to prove Him. And we are very foolish to lose any more time setting about it, don't you think so?

"You see," she went on, while he sat studying her, "those poor people down at Avon don't know any more about what is the real good than you do. And that's why their thoughts and yours center upon the false pleasures of this ephemeral existence called life—this existence of the so-called physical senses—and why you both become the tools of vice, disease, and misfortune. They build up such men as you, and then you turn about and crush them. And in the end you are both what the Bible says—poor, deluded fools."

"Well, I'll be—"

"Oh, don't swear!" she pleaded, again seizing his hand and laughing up into his face. But then her smile vanished.

"It's time you started to prove God," she said earnestly. "Won't you begin now—to-day? Haven't you yet learned that evil is the very stupidest, dullest, most uninteresting thing in the world? It is, really. Won't you turn from your material endeavors now, and take time to learn to really live? You've got plenty of time, you know, for you aren't obliged to work for a living."

She was leaning close to him, and her breath touched his cheek. Her soft little hand lay upon his own. And her great, dark eyes looked into his with a light which he knew, despite his perverted thought, came from the unquenchable flame of her selfless love.

Again that unfamiliar sentiment—nay, rather, that sentiment long dormant—stirred within him. Again his worldly concepts, long entrenched, instantly rose to meet and overthrow it. He had not yet learned to analyze the thoughts which crept so silently into his ever-open mentality. To all alike he gave free access. And to those which savored of things earthy he still gave the power to build, with himself as a willing tool.

"You will—help me—to live?" he said. He thought her the most gloriously beautiful object he had ever known, as she sat there before him, so simply gowned, and yet clothed with that which all the gold of Ophir could not have bought.

"Yes, gladly—oh, so gladly!" Her eyes sparkled with a rush of tears.

"Don't you think," he said gently, drawing his chair a little closer to her, "that we have quite misunderstood each other? I am sure we have."

"Perhaps so," she answered thoughtfully. "But," with a happy smile again lighting her features, "we can understand each other now, can't we?"

"Of course we can! And hasn't the time come for us to work together, instead of continuing to oppose each other?"

"Yes! yes, indeed!" she cried eagerly.

"I—I have been thinking so ever since I returned yesterday from Washington. I am—I—"

"We need each other, don't we?" the artless girl exclaimed, as she beamed upon him.

"I am positive of it!" he said with suggestive emphasis. "I can help you—more than you realize—and I want to. I—I've been sorry for you, little girl, mighty sorry, ever since that story got abroad about—"

"Oh, never mind that!" she interrupted happily. "We are living in the present, you know."

"True—and in the future. But things haven't been right for you. And I want to see them straightened out. And you and I can do it, little one. Madam Beaubien hasn't been treated right, either. And—"

"There!" she laughed, holding up a warning finger. "We're going to forget that in the good we're going to do, aren't we?"

"Yes, that's so. And you are going to get a square deal. Now, I've got a plan to make everything right. I want to see you in the place that belongs to you. I want to see you happy, and surrounded by all that is rightfully yours. And if you will join me, we will bring that all about. I told you this once before, you may remember."

He stopped and awaited the effect of his words upon the girl.

"But, Mr. Ames," she replied, her eyes shining with a great hope, "don't think about me! It's the people at Avon that I want to help."

"We'll help them, you and I. We'll make things right all round. And Madam Beaubien shall have no further trouble. Nor shall the Express."

"Oh, Mr. Ames! Do you really mean it? And—Sidney?"

"Sidney shall come home—"

With a rush the impulsive girl, forgetting all but the apparent success of her mission, threw herself upon him and clasped her arms about his neck. "Oh," she cried, "it is love that has done all this! And it has won you!"

The startled man strained the girl tightly in his arms. He could feel the quick throbbing in her throat. Her warm breath played upon his cheek like fitful tropic breezes. For a brief moment the supreme gift of the universe seemed to be laid at his feet. For a fleeting interval the man of dust faded, and a new being, pure and white, seemed to rise within him.

"Yes," he murmured gently, "we'll take him to our home with us."

Slowly, very slowly, the girl released herself from his embrace and stepped back. "With—us?" she murmured, searching his face for the meaning which she had dimly discerned in his words.

"Yes—listen!" He reached forward and with a quick movement seized her hand. "Listen, little girl. I want you—I want you! Not now—no, you needn't come to me until you are ready. But say that you will come! Say that! Why, I didn't know until to-day what it was that was making me over! It's you! Don't go! Don't—"

Carmen had struggled away from him, and, with a look of bewilderment upon her face, was moving toward the door. "Oh, I didn't know," she murmured, "that you were—were—proposing marriage to me!"

"Don't you understand?" he pursued. "We'll just make all things new! We'll begin all over again, you and I! Why, I'll do anything—anything in the world you say, Carmen, if you will come to me—if you will be my little wife!

"I know—I know," he hastily resumed, as she halted and stood seemingly rooted to the floor, "there is a great difference in our ages. But that is nothing—many happy marriages are made between ages just as far apart as ours. Think—think what it means to you! I'll make you a queen! I'll surround you with limitless wealth! I'll make you leader of society! I'll make Madam Beaubien rich! I'll support the Express, and make it what you want it to be! I'll do whatever you say for the people of Avon! Think, little girl, what depends now upon you!"

Carmen turned and came slowly back to him. "And—you will not do these things—unless I marry you?" she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

"I will do them all, Carmen, if you will come to me!"

"But—oh, you were only deceiving me all the time! And now—if I refuse—then what?"

"It depends upon you, entirely—and you will come? Not now—but within the next few months—within the year—tell me that you will!"

"But—you will do these things whether I come to you or not?" she persisted.

"I've put it all into your hands," he answered shortly. "I've named the condition."

A strange look crossed the girl's face. She stood as if stunned. Then she glanced about in helpless bewilderment.

"I—I—love—you," she murmured, as she looked off toward the window, but with unseeing eyes. "I would do anything for you that was right. I—love—everybody—everybody; but there are no conditions to my love. Oh!" she suddenly cried, burying her face in her hands and bursting into tears. "You have tried to buy me!"

Ames rose and came to her. Taking her by the hand he led her, unresisting, back to her chair.

"Listen," he said, bending toward her. "Go home now and think it all over. Then let me know your answer. It was sudden, I admit; I took you by surprise. But—well, you are not going to prevent the accomplishment of all that good, are you? Think! It all depends upon your word!"

The girl raised her tear-stained face. She had been crushed; and another lesson in the cruelty of the human mind—that human mind which has changed not in a thousand years—had been read to her. But again she smiled bravely, as she wiped her eyes.

"It's all right now," she murmured. "It was all right all the time—and I was protected."

Then she turned to him. "Some day," she said gently, and in a voice that trembled just a little, "you will help the people of Avon, but not because I shall marry you. God does not work that way. I have loved you. And I love them. And nothing can kill that love. God will open the way."

"Then you refuse my offer, do you?" he asked sharply, as his face set. "Remember, all the blame will be upon you. I have shown you a way out."

She looked up at him. She saw now with a clairvoyance which separated him from the mask which he had worn. Her glance penetrated until it found his soul.

"You have shown me the depths of the carnal mind," she slowly replied. "The responsibility is not with me, but with—God. I—I came to-day to—to help you. But now I must leave you—with Him."

"Humph!"

He stooped and took up her muff which lay upon the floor. As he did so, a letter fell out. He seized it and glanced at the superscription.

"Cartagena! To Jose de Rincon! Another little billet-doux to your priestly lover, eh?"

She looked down at the letter which he held. "It is money," she said, though her thought seemed far away. "Money that I am sending to a little newsboy who bears his name."

"Ha! His brat! But, you still love that fallen priest?"

"Yes," was the whispered answer.

He rose and opened a drawer in his desk. Taking out a paper-bound book, he held it out to the girl. "Look here," he sneered. "Here's a little piece of work which your brilliant lover did some time ago. 'Confessions of a Roman Catholic Priest.' Do you know the penalty your clerical paramour paid for that, eh? Then I'll tell you," bending over close to her ear, "his life!"

Carmen rose unsteadily. The color had fled from her cheeks. She staggered a few steps toward the door, then stopped. "God—is—is—everywhere!" she murmured. It was the refuge of her childhood days.

Then she reeled, and fell heavily to the floor.



CHAPTER 15

If additional proof of the awful cost of hating one's fellow-men were required, the strike which burst upon the industrial world that winter must furnish it in sickening excess. But other facts, too, were rendered glaringly patent by that same desperate clash which made Avon a shambles and transformed its fair name into a by-word, to be spoken only in hushed whispers when one's thought dwells for a moment upon the madness of the carnal mind that has once tasted blood. The man-cleft chasm between labor and capital, that still unbridged void which separates master and servant, and which a money-drunk class insolently calls God-made, grows wider with each roar of musketry aimed by a frenzied militia at helpless men and women; grows deeper with each splitting crack of the dynamite that is laid to tear asunder the conscienceless wielder of the goad; and must one day fall gaping in a cavernous embouchure that will engulf a nation.

Hitt saw it, and shuddered; Haynerd, too. Ames may have dimly marked the typhoon on the horizon, but, like everything that manifested opposition to this superhuman will, it only set his teeth the firmer and thickened the callous about his cold heart. Carmen saw it, too. And she knew—and the world must some day know—that but one tie has ever been designed adequate to bridge this yawning canon of human hatred. That tie is love. Aye, well she knew that the world laughed, and called it chimera; called it idealism, and emotional weakness. And well she knew that the most pitiable weakness the world has ever seen was the class privilege which nailed the bearer of the creed of love upon the cross, and to-day manifests in the frantic grasping of a nation's resources, and the ruthless murder of those who ask that they, too, may have a share in that abundance which is the common birthright of all. Do the political bully, the grafter, the tout, know the meaning of love? No; but they can be taught. Oh, not by the hypocritical millionaire pietists who prate their glib platitudes to their Sunday Bible classes, and return to their luxurious homes to order the slaughter of starving women and babes! They, like their poor victims, are deep under the spell of that mesmerism which tells them that evil is good. Nor by the Church, with its lamentable weakness of knowledge and works. Only by those who have learned something of the Christ-principle, and are striving daily to demonstrate its omnipotence in part, can the world be taught a saving knowledge of the love that solves every problem and creates a new heaven and a newer, better concept of the earth and its fullness.

That morning when Carmen went to see Ames the Express received word of the walk-out of the Avon mill employes. Almost coincident with the arrival of the news, Carmen herself came unsteadily into Hitt's office. The editor glanced up at her, then looked a second time. He had never before seen her face colorless. Finally he laid down his papers.

"What's happened?" he asked.

"Nothing," answered the girl. "What work have you—for me—to-day?" She smiled, though her lips trembled.

"Where have you been?" he pursued, scanning her closely.

She did not reply at once. Then, so low that he scarcely caught the words, "I—I have been with—a friend."

Sidney Ames came puffing into the office at that moment. "Hello!" he cried as he saw Carmen. "How does it happen you're out riding with Willett? Saw him help you out of an auto just now."

"He brought me here," she answered softly.

"Where from?"

"Your father's office."

Hitt and the lad stared at her with open mouths. She turned, and started for her own room, moving as if in a haze. As she neared the door she stumbled. Sidney sprang after her and caught her in his arms. When she turned her face, they saw that her eyes were swimming in tears.

Hitt was on his feet instantly. "Look here!" he cried. "Something's wrong! Leave us, Sidney. Let me talk with her alone."

The boy reluctantly obeyed. Hitt closed the door after him, then took the girl's hand and led her back to his own chair. "Now, little one," he said gently, "tell me all about it."

For a moment she sat quiet. Then the tears began to flow; and then she leaned her head against him and sobbed—sobbed as does the stricken mother who hangs over the lifeless form of her babe—sobbed as does the strong man bereft of the friend of his bosom—sobbed as did the Man of Sorrow, when he held out his arms over the worldly city that cruelly rejected him. He was the channel for the divine; yet the wickedness of the human mind broke his great heart. Carmen was not far from him at that moment.

Hitt held her hand, and choked back the lump that filled his throat. Then the weeping slowly ceased, and the girl looked up into his anxious face.

"It's all past now," she said brokenly. "Jesus forgave them that killed him. And—"

"You have been with—Ames?" said Hitt in a low, quiet tone. "And he tried to kill you?"

"He—he knew not what he was doing. Evil used him, because as yet he has no spiritual understanding. But—God is life! There is—no—death!" Her voice faded away in a whisper.

"Well, little girl, I am waiting for the whole story. What happened?"

Carmen got to her feet. "Nothing happened, Mr. Hitt—nothing. It didn't happen—it wasn't real. I—I seemed to manifest weakness—and I fell—to the floor—but I didn't lose consciousness. And just then Mr. Willett came in—and Mr. Ames sent me here with him."

"But what had Ames said to you, Carmen?" persisted Hitt, his face dark with anger.

The girl smiled feebly. "I see Mr. Ames only as—as God's child," she murmured. "Evil is not real, and it doesn't happen. Now I want to work—work as I never did before! I must! I must!"

"Will you not tell me more about it?" he asked, for he knew now that a deadly thrust had been made at the girl's life.

She brushed the tears away from her eyes. "It didn't happen," was her reply. "Good is all that is. God is life. There is no death!"

A suspicion flashed into Hitt's mind, kindled by the girl's insistence upon the nothingness of death. "Carmen," he asked, "did he tell you that—some one had died?"

She came to him and laid her head against him. Her hands stole into his. "Don't! Please, Mr. Hitt! We must never speak of this again! Promise me! I shall overcome it, for God is with me. Promise that no one but us shall know! Make Sidney promise. It—it is—for me."

The man's eyes grew moist, and his throat filled. He drew the girl to him and kissed her forehead. "It shall be as you wish, little one," he said in a choking voice.

"Now set me to work!" she cried wildly. "Anything! This is another opportunity to—to prove God! I must prove Him! I must—right here!"

He turned to his desk with a heavy heart. "There is work to be done now," he said. "I wonder—"

She took the telegram from his hands and scanned it. At once she became calm, her own sorrow swallowed up in selfless love. "Oh, they have gone out at Avon! Those mothers and children—they need me! Mr. Hitt, I must go there at once!"

"I thought so," he replied, swallowing hard. "I knew what you would do. But you are in higher hands than mine, Carmen. Go home now, and get ready. You can go down in the morning. And we, Sidney and I, will say nothing of—of your visit to his father."

* * * * *

That night Hitt called up the Beaubien and asked if he and Haynerd might come and talk with her after the paper had gone to press, and requesting that she notify Carmen and Father Waite. A few hours later the little group met quietly in the humble cottage. Miss Wall and Sidney were with them. And to them all those first dark hours of morning, when as yet the symbol of God's omnipresence hung far below the horizon, seemed prescient with a knowledge of evil's further claims to the lives and fortunes of men.

"I have asked you here," Hitt gravely announced when they were assembled, "to consider a matter which touches us all—how deeply, God alone knows. At ten o'clock to-night I received this message." He opened the paper which he held in his hand and read:

"'Property of Hitt oil company, including derricks, pump houses, storage tanks, destroyed by fire. Dynamite in pump houses exploded, causing wells to cave and choke. Loss complete. Wire instructions.'"

The news burst over them like the cracking of a bomb. Haynerd, who, like the others, had been kept in ignorance of the message until now, started from his chair with a loud exclamation, then sank back limp. Carmen's face went white. Evil seemed to have chosen that day with canny shrewdness to overwhelm her with its quick sallies from out the darkness of the carnal mind.

Hitt broke the tense silence. "I see in this," he said slowly, "the culmination of a long series of efforts to ruin the Express. That my oil property was deliberately wrecked, I have not the slightest doubt. Nor can I doubt by whose hand."

"Whose?" demanded Haynerd, having again found his voice. "Ames's?"

Hitt replied indirectly. "The Express has stood before the world as a paper unique and apart. And because of its high ideals, the forces of evil singled it out at the beginning for their murderous assaults. That the press of this country is very generally muzzled, stifled, bought and paid for, I have good reason now to know. My constant brushes with the liquor interests, with low politicians, judges, senators, and dive-keepers, have not been revealed even to you. Could you know the pressure which the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, has tried to exert upon us, you would scarce credit me with veracity. But the Express has stood out firm against feudalism, mediaevalism, and entrenched ecclesiasticism. It has fearlessly opposed the legalizing of drugging. It has fought the debauching of a nation's manhood by the legalized sale of a deadly poison, alcohol. And it has fought without quarter the pernicious activity of morally stunted brewers and distillers, whose hellish motto is, 'Make the boys drink!' It has fought the money octopus, and again and again has sounded to the world the peril which money-drunken criminals like Ames and his clique constitute. And for that we must now wear the crown of martyrdom!"

Silence, dismal and empty, lay over the little room for a long time. Then Hitt resumed. "The Express has not been self-supporting. Its growth has been steady, but it has depended for its deficit upon the revenue from my oil property. And so have we all. Ames ruined Madam Beaubien financially, as well as Miss Wall. He cleaned you out, Ned. And now, knowing that we all depended upon my oil wells, he has, I doubt not, completely removed that source of income."

"But," exclaimed Haynerd, "your property was insured, wasn't it?"

"Yes," replied Hitt, with a feeble attempt at a smile. "But with the proviso that dynamite should not be kept on the premises. You will note that dynamite wrecked the wells. That doubtless renders my policies void. But, even in case I should have a fighting chance with the insurance companies, don't you think that they will be advised that I purposely set fire to the wells, in order to collect the insurance? I most certainly do. And I shall find myself with a big lawsuit on my hands, and with no funds to conduct the fight. Ames's work, you know, is always thorough, and the Express is already facing his suit for libel."

"But you told us you were going to mortgage your property," said Miss Wall.

"I stood ready to, should the Express require it. But, with its recent little boom, our paper did not seem to need that as yet," he returned.

"Good God!" cried Haynerd. "We're done for!"

"Yes, Ned, God is good!" It was Carmen who spoke.

Hitt turned quickly to the girl. "Can you say that, after all you have endured, Carmen?"

He looked at her for a moment, lost in wonder. "An outcast babe," he murmured, "left on the banks of a great river far, far away; reared without knowledge of father or mother, and amid perils that hourly threatened to crush her; torn from her beloved ones and thrust out into an unknown and unsympathetic world; used as a stepping-stone to advance the low social ambitions of worldly women; blackened by the foulest slander, and ejected as an outcast by those who had fawned at her feet; still going about with her beautiful message of love, even though knowing that her childhood home is enveloped in the flames of war, and her dear ones scattered, perhaps lost; spurned from the door of the rich man whom she sought to save; carrying with her always the knowledge that the one upon whom her affections had centered had a son in distant Cartagena, and yet herself contributing to the support of the little lad; and now, this morning—" He stopped, for he remembered his promise.

"This morning," she finished, "shielded by the One who is both Father and Mother to me."

"That One surely ought to love you, Carmen—"

"He does," she answered softly.

"Well!" put in Haynerd, torn with anger and fear. "What are we going to do now?"

"Everything, Ned, that error seems to tell us not to do," replied the girl.

She reached over to the little table that stood near, and took from it a Bible. Opening it, she read aloud, very slowly, the entire fourteenth chapter of Exodus. Then she concluded by reading the last two verses of the eighth chapter of Romans.

"Now," she said, looking up, "we know what we are going to do, don't we? We are going right on, as 'seeing Him who is invisible' to men like Mr. Ames."

They sat looking at her in silence.

"There is no curse, whether of the Church, or of business, or of any department of human thought, that can overthrow legitimate business; and we are in the legitimate business of reflecting God to the world. If the physical sense of supply is now lost, we are fortunate, for now we are obliged to acquire a higher sense. All that we have comes from God. And we become aware of it in our own consciousness. It is there that we interpret His supply. Mr. Ames interprets it one way; we, in a very different way. God has always been able to prepare a table in the wilderness of human thought. If we look for supply from without, we shall not find it, for everything is within. And the very fact that there is a legitimate demand shows that there is the supply to meet it, for—though the world hasn't learned this yet—it is the supply itself that really creates the demand!"

"But money makes the wheels go!" retorted Haynerd.

"Money, Ned, is the counterfeit of God. He is our only supply. He is our Principle—infinite, inexhaustible. He is our credit—without limit! We are facing a crisis, but, like every seeming disturbance of the infinite harmony, it will vanish in a little while if we but cling to the divine Mind that is God for guidance."

Hitt folded the telegram and returned it to his pocket. "Are you going to Avon to-morrow?" he abruptly asked of the girl.

"Yes, why not?"

"We can't afford it now!" cried Haynerd.

Hitt reflected a moment. Then he rose. "And we sit here lamenting!" he exclaimed. "And when we have in our midst this girl, who has borne, without one word of complaint or reviling, the world's most poignant sorrows! I—I really regret that I told you of—of this telegram. I seemed for a moment to be overwhelmed. But I am on my feet again now!"

He reached into a pocket and took out some bills, which he handed to Carmen. "That will see you through for a day or so down there. If you need more, wire me. I'll get it from some source! Come," he added, beckoning to Haynerd, "the Express will be issued to-morrow as usual, and we must get to bed. I've really had quite a strenuous day!" He turned, then paused and looked at Carmen.

The girl caught the meaning in his glance, and went directly to the piano. Hitt followed and bent over her.

"Don't," he said, "if you do not feel like it. This day has been a hard one for you, I know. And—"

"But I do feel like it," she answered, smiling up at him. "I want to sing for you. And," her voice dropped low, "I want to sing to—Him."

Hitt gulped down something in his throat. "The bravest little girl in the whole wide world!" he muttered through his set teeth.

* * * * *

The carnage at Avon was not incidental; it was the logical effect of definite mental causes. It was the orderly sequence of an endless train of hatred of man for man, bred of greed and the fear of starvation. And starvation is the externalized human belief that life is at the caprice of intelligent matter. But that is an infraction of the first Commandment, given when the human race was a babe.

When the mill hands left their looms at evening of the day following Ames's rejection of their demands, the master closed the doors behind them and locked them out. Were not these mills his?

No, they were a sacred trust asset.

Bah! The parrot-cry of the maudlin sentimental!

But, four thousand men, women, and little children, with never a dollar beyond their earnings of the day, thrust out into the blasts of the bitterest winter the New England states had known in years!

True; but why, then, did they strike? For, you see, that of itself proved the soundness of Ames's single reply to all further appeal: "There is nothing whatever to arbitrate."

In the garden of the human mind waves many a flower, both black and red, fanned by the foul winds of carnal thought. There grow the brothel, the dive, the gin-shop, the jail. About these hardier stems twine the hospital, the cemetery, the madhouse, the morgue. And Satan, "the man-killer from the beginning," waters their roots and makes fallow the soil with the blood of fools. But of those for whom the gardener waits, there is none whose blood is so life-giving to these noxious plants as that type of the materially rich who, like Ames, have waxed gross upon the flesh of their own brothers.

Ames was a gambler in human lives. They were his chips, by which he gained or lost, and of themselves were void of intrinsic value. The world was the table whereon he played; the game rouge et noir, with the whirl of predatory commercialism as the wheel, and the ball weighted to drop where he might direct. He carried millions on margin, and with them carried the destinies, for weal or for woe, of millions of his fellow-men, with not one thought that he did so at the cost of their honor and morality, not less than their life-blood.

It had been his custom to close his mills for several months each year, in order to save expense when times were dull. And he did this as casually as he closed the doors of his stables, and with much less thought for the welfare of those concerned. It is doubtful if he had ever really considered the fact that these four thousand human beings were wholly dependent upon him for their very existence. For he was a business man, and gold was far weightier in the scale of values than human flesh, and much less easily obtained. Cain's comforting philosophy was quite correct, else would the business world not have been so firmly established upon it. Besides, he was terribly busy; and his life was lived upon a plane high, high above that upon which these swarming toilers groveled with their snouts in the dust.

And now, with the doors of his mills barred against the hungry hordes, he would frame the terms upon which they should be reopened. The eight-hour law must not be enforced. Perhaps he could influence the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional, as depriving the mill hands of the right to labor as long as they pleased. Wages should not be raised. And the right to organize and band together for their common good would be contemptuously denied the ignorant rats who should be permitted to toil for him once more. If they offered violence, there was the state militia, armed and impatient to slay. Also, this was an excellent opportunity to stamp out trade-unionism within the confines of his activities. He would win the plaudits of the whole industrial world by so doing. He therefore immediately got in touch with the Governor, a Tammany puppet, and received that loyal henchman's warm assurances of hearty support for any measures which the great magnate might wish to enforce. He then approached the officers of the state guard, and secured them to a man. Times were hard, and they welcomed his favor. He finally posted armed guards in all his buildings at Avon, and bade them remember that property rights were of divine institution. Then he sat down and dictated the general policy to be followed by the Amalgamated Spinners' Association throughout the country in support of his own selfish ends.

His activity in these preparations, as in everything, was tremendous. His agents swarmed over the state like ants. The Catholic Archbishop was instructed that he must remove Father Danny from Avon, as his influence was pernicious. But the objection was made that the priest was engaged only in humanitarian labors. It availed not; Ames desired the man's removal. And removed he was. The widow Marcus likewise had been doing much talking. Ames's lawyer, Collins, had her haled into court and thoroughly reprimanded. And then, that matters might be precipitated, and Congress duly impressed with the necessity of altering the cotton schedule in favor of the Spinners' Association, Ames ordered his agents to raise the rents of his miserable Avon tenements. There were few, he knew, who dared even attempt to meet the raise; and those who could not, he ordered set into the streets.

It was a wild winter's day that the magnate chose for the enforcement of this cruel order. A driving blizzard had raged throughout the night, and the snow had banked up in drifts in places many feet deep. The temperature was freezing, and the strong east wind cut like a knife. It was Ames's desire to teach these scum a needed lesson, and he had chosen to enlist the elements to aid him in the righteous task.

For a week, ever since the strike was declared, Carmen had lived among these hectored people. Daily her reports of the unbearable situation had gone to Hitt. And through them the editor had daily striven to awaken a nation's conscience. Ames read the articles, and through the columns of the Budget sought to modify them to the extent of shifting the responsibility to the shoulders of the mill hands themselves, and to a dilatory Congress that was criminally negligent in so framing a cotton tariff as to make such industrial suffering possible. Nor did he omit to foully vilify the Express and calumniate its personnel.

Amid curses, screams, and despairing wails, the satanic work of ejecting the tenement dwellers went on that day. Ames's hirelings, with loaded rifles, assisted the constables and city police in the miserable work, themselves cursing often because of the keen blasts that nipped their ears and numbed their well-cased limbs. More than one tiny, wailing babe was frozen at the breast that dull, drab afternoon, when the sun hung like a ghastly clot of human blood just above the horizon, and its weird, yellow light flitted through the snow-laden streets like gaunt spectres of death. More than one aged, toil-spent laborer, broken at the loom in the service of his insatiable master, fell prone in the drifts and lay there till his thin life-current froze and his tired heart stopped. More than one frenzied, despairing father, forgetful for the moment of the divine right of property, rushed at a guard and madly strove with him, only to be clubbed into complaisance, or, perchance, be left in a welter of crimson on the drifting snow. Carmen saw it all. She had been to see Pillette that same morning, and had been laughed from his presence. She did not understand, she was told, what miserable creatures these were that dared ask for bread and human rights. Wait; they themselves would show their true colors.

And so they did. And the color was red. And it spurted like fountains from their veins. And they saw it with dimming eyes, and were glad, for it brought sweet oblivion. That night there were great fires built along the frozen creek. Shacks and tents were hastily reared; and the shivering, trembling women and babes given a desperate shelter. Then the men, sullen and grim, drew off into little groups, and into the saloons and gambling halls of the town. And when the blizzard was spent, and the cold stars were dropping their frozen light, these dull-witted things began to move, slowly at first, circling about like a great forming nebula, but gaining momentum and power with each revolution. More than a thousand strong, they circled out into the frozen streets of the little town, and up along the main thoroughfare. Their dull murmurs slowly gained volume. Their low curses welled into a roar. And then, like the sudden bursting of pent-up lava, they swept madly through the town, carrying everything to destruction before them.

Stores, shops, the bank itself, burst open before this wave of maddened humanity. Guns and pistols were thrown from laden shelves to the cursing, sweating mob below. Axes and knives were gathered by armfuls, and borne out into the streets to the whirling mass. Great barrels of liquor were rolled into the gutters and burst asunder. Bread and meat were dragged from the shops and savagely devoured. The police gathered and planted themselves with spitting pistols before the human surge. They went down like grass under stampeded cattle. Frightened clerks and operators rushed to the wires and sent wild, incoherent appeals for help to New York. Pandemonium had the reins, the carnal mind was unleashed.

On rolled the mob, straight on to the massive stone house of Pillette, the resident manager of the great Ames mills. On over the high iron fence, like hungry dock rats. On through the battered gate. On up the broad drive, shouting, shooting, moaning, raving. On over the veranda, and in through broken windows and shattered doors, swarming like flies over reeking carrion, until the flames which burst through the peaked roof of the mansion drove them forth, and made them draw sullenly, protestingly away, leaving the tattered bodies of Pillette and his wife and daughters to be consumed in the roaring furnace.

Oh, ye workers, ye toilers at loom and forge, it is indeed you who bear the world's burdens! It is you who create the rich man's wealth, and fight his battles. So ye fought in the great war between North and South, and protected the rich man at home, hovering in fright over his money bags. It is you who put into his hands the bayonet which he turns against you to guard his wealth and maintain his iniquitous privilege. It is indeed in your hands that the destinies of this great nation lie; but what will ye do with your marvelous opportunity? What, with your stupendous, untried strength? Will ye once more set up the golden calf, and prostrate yourselves before it? Will ye again enthrone ecclesiastical despotism, and grovel before image of Virgin and Saint? Will ye raise high the powers of mediaeval darkness, and bend your necks anew to the yoke of ignorance and stagnation? But think you now that flames and dynamite will break your present bonds? Aye, America may be made a land without a pauper, without a millionaire, without industrial strife. But fire and sword will not effect the transformation. Yes, perhaps, as has been said, our "comfortable social system and its authority will some day be blown to atoms." But shall we then be better off than we are to-day? For shall we know then how to use our precious liberty?

Blood-drunk and reeling, the mob turned from the flaming wreckage and flowed down toward the mills. There were some among them, saner, and prescient of the dire consequences of their awful work, who counseled restraint. But they were as chips in a torrent. Down into the creek bottom rolled the seething tide, with a momentum that carried it up the far side and crashing into the heavily barred oak doors of the great mills. A crushing hail of bullets fell upon them, and their leaders went down; but the mass wavered not. Those within the buildings knew that they would become carrion in the maws of the ravening wolves outside, and fought with a courage fed with desperation.

In the solemn hush of death Socrates said, "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better, God only knows." And mankind through the ages in their last hours have echoed this sentiment of the gentle philosopher. For all human philosophy leads to a single end—resignation.

But hunger transforms resignation into madness. And madness is murder. The frenzied hordes swarming about the Ames mills knew in their heart of hearts that death was preferable to life in death under the goad of human exploitation. But such knowledge came only in rational moments. Now they were crazed and beyond reason.

In the distance, across the swale, the sky glowed red where the souls of the agent of predatory wealth and his family had gone out in withering heat. In the stricken town, men huddled their trembling loved ones about them and stood with loaded muskets. Somewhere on the steel bands that linked this scene of carnage with the great metropolis beyond, a train plunged and roared, leaping over the quivering rails at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, bringing eager militiamen and their deadly instruments of civilization. For the Ames mills were private property. And that was a divine institution.

* * * * *

In his luxurious office in the tower of the Ames building the master sat that black night, surrounded by his laboring cohorts. Though they strained under the excitement of the hour, Ames himself remained calm and determined. He was in constant communication with the Governor at Albany, and with the municipal officers of both New York and Avon. He had received the tidings of the destruction of the Pillette family with a grim smile. But the smile had crystallized into an expression of black, malignant hatred when he demanded of the Governor that the New York contingent of the state guard be sent at once to protect his property, and specified that the bullets used should be of the "dum-dum" variety. For they added to the horrors of death. Such bullets had been prohibited by the rules of modern warfare, it was true. But this was a class war. And Ames, foreseeing it all, had purchased a hundred thousand rounds of these hellish things for the militia to exchange for those which the Government furnished. And then, as an additional measure of precaution, he had sent Hood and Collins into the United States District Court and persuaded the sitting judge to issue an injunction, enjoining any possible relief committees from furnishing food and shelter to such as might enter the industrial conflict being waged against him.

Had the man gone mad? That he had! And in the blood-red haze that hung before his glittering eyes was framed the face of the girl who had spurned him but a few days before. She was the embodiment of love that had crossed his path and stirred up the very quintessence of evil within him. From the first she had drawn him. From the first she had aroused within his soul a conflict of emotions such as he had never known before. And from the night when, in the Hawley-Crowles box at the opera he had held her hand and looked down into her fathomless eyes, he had been tortured with the conflicting desires to possess that fair creature, or to utterly destroy her.

But always she had eluded him. Always she hovered just within his grasp; and then drew back as his itching fingers closed. Always she told him she loved him—and he knew she lied not. But such love was not his kind. When he loved, he possessed and used. And such love had its price—but not hers. And so hope strove with wrath, and chagrin with despair. She was a babe! Yet she conquered him. He was omnipotent in this world! Her strength she drew from the world invisible. And with it she had laid the giant low and bound him with chains.

Not so! Though he knew now that she was lost to him forever; though with foul curses he had seen hope flee; yet with it he had also bidden every tender sentiment, every last vestige of good depart from his thought forever more. And:

"——with hope, farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good!"

That same night Hitt's wells burned. And that night the master slept not, but sat alone at his desk in the great Fifth Avenue mansion, and plotted the annihilation of every human being who had dared oppose his worldly ambitions. Plotted, too, the further degradation and final ruin of the girl who had dared to say she loved him, and yet would not become his toy.

* * * * *

There is no need to curse the iniquitous industrial and social system upon which the unstable fabric of our civilization rests, for that system is its own fell curse in the rotting fruit it bears. A bit of that poisonous fruit had now dropped from the slimy branch at Avon. Up from the yards came the militiamen at double-quick, with rifles unslung and loaded with the satanic Ames bullets. Behind them they dragged two machine guns, capable of discharging three hundred times a minute. The mob had concentrated upon the central building of the mill group, and had just gained entrance through its shattered doors. Before them the guards were falling slowly back, fighting every inch of the way. The dead lay in heaps. The air was thick with powder smoke. One end of the building was in flames. The roar of battle was deafening.

Quickly swinging into action, the militia opened upon the mill hands. Hemmed in between two fires, the mob broke and fled down the frozen stream. The officers of the guard then ordered their men to join in the work of extinguishing the flames, which were beginning to make headway, fanned by the strong draft which swept through the long building. Until dawn they fought the stubborn fire. Then, the building saved, they pitched their tents and sought a brief rest.

At noon the soldiers were again assembled, for there remained the task of arresting the leaders of the mob and bringing them to justice. The town had been placed under martial law with the arrival of the militia. Its streets were patrolled by armed guards, and a strong cordon had been thrown around the shacks which the mill hands had hastily erected the afternoon before. And now, under the protection of a detachment of soldiers, the demand was made for the unconditional surrender of the striking laborers.

Dull terror lay like a pall over the miserable shacks huddled along the dead stream. It was the dull, hopeless, numbing terror of the victim who awaits the blow from the lion's paw in the arena. Weeping wives and mothers, clasping their little ones to them, knelt upon the frozen ground and crossed themselves. Young men drew their newly-wed mates to their breasts and kissed them with trembling lips. Stern, hard-faced men, with great, knotted hands, grouped together and looked out in deadly hatred at the heartless force surrounding them.

Then out from among them and across the ice went Carmen, up the slippery hillside, and straight to the multi-mouthed machine gun, at the side of which stood Major Camp. She had been all night with these bewildered, maddened people. She had warmed shivering babes at her own breast. She had comforted widows of a night, and newly-bereaved mothers. She had bound up gaping wounds, and had whispered tender words of counsel and advice. And they had clung to her weeping; they had called upon Virgin and Saint to bless her; and they named her the Angel of Avon—and the name would leave her no more.

"Take me," she said, "take me into court, and let me tell all."

The major fell back in amazement. This beautiful, well-clad girl among such miserable vermin!

"You have demanded their leaders," she continued. "I have been trying to lead them. Leave them, and take me."

The major's eyes roved over her face and figure. He could make nothing out of her words, but he motioned to an aid, and bade him place the girl under arrest.

A wild shout then rose from the shacks, as Carmen moved quietly away under guard. It was the last roar of raging despair. The girl was being taken from them! A dozen men sprang out and rushed, muskets in hand, up toward the soldiers to liberate her. The major called to them to halt. Poor, dull-witted creatures! Their narrow vision could comprehend but one thing at a time; and they saw in the arrest of the girl only an additional insult piled upon their already mountainous injuries.

The major shouted a command. A roar burst from the soldiers' rifles. It was answered by a shriek of rage from the hovels, and a murderous return fire. Then the major gave another loud command, and the machine guns began to vomit forth their clattering message of death.

At the sound of shooting, Carmen's guard halted. Then one of them fell, pierced by a bullet from the strikers. The others released the girl, and hurried back to the battle line. Carmen stood alone for a moment. Bullets whizzed close about her.

One sang its death-song almost in her ear. Another tore through her coat. Then she turned and made her way slowly up the hill to the paralyzed town.

Down in the vale beneath, Death swung his scythe with long, sweeping strokes. The two machine guns poured a flaming sheet of lead into the little camp below. The shacks fell like houses of cards. The tents caught fire, and were whirled blazing aloft by the brisk wind. Men dropped like chaff from a mill. Hysterical, screaming women rushed hither and yon to save their young, and were torn to shreds by the merciless fusillade from above. Babes stood for a moment bewildered, and then sank with great, gaping wounds in their little, quivering bodies. And over all brooded the spirit of the great manipulator, Ames, for the protection of whose sacred rights such ghastly work is done among civilized men to-day.

* * * * *

That night, while the stars above Avon drew a veil of gray between them and the earth below, that they might not see the red embers and stark bodies, Carmen came slowly, and with bent head, into the office of the Express. As she approached Hitt's door she heard him in earnest conversation with Haynerd.

"Yes," the editor was saying, "I had a mortgage placed on the Express to-day, but I couldn't get much. And it's a short-term one, at that. Stolz refused point blank to help us, unless we would let him dictate the policy of the paper. No, he wouldn't buy outright. He's still fighting Ames for control of C. and R. And I learn, too, that the Ketchim case is called for next week. That probably means an attempt by Ames to smoke Stolz out through Ketchim. It also means that Carmen—"

"Yes; what about her?"

"That she will be forced to go upon the stand as a witness."

"Well?"

"And that, as I read it, means a further effort on Ames's part to utterly discredit her in the eyes of the world, and us through her association with the Express."

"But—where is she, Hitt? No word from her since we got the news of the massacre at Avon this afternoon! Nothing happened to her, do you think?"

Hitt's face was serious, and he did not answer. Then Carmen herself came through the open door. Both men rose with exclamations of gladness to welcome her. The girl's eyes were wet, and her wonted smile had gone.

"Mr. Hitt," she said, "I want a thousand dollars to-night."

"Well!" Hitt and Haynerd both sat down hard.

"I must go back to Avon to-morrow," she announced. "And the money is for the—the people down there." Her voice caught, and her words stumbled.

The two men looked at each other blankly. Then Hitt reached out and took her hand. "Tell us," he said, "about the trouble there to-day."

Carmen shook her head. "No," she said, "we will not talk about evil. You—you have the money? A thousand—"

"I have that much on deposit in the bank now, Carmen," he replied gravely. His thought was on the mortgage which he had signed that morning.

"Then write me a check at once, and I will deposit it in the Avon bank when I get there to-morrow. I must go home now—to see mother."

"But—let me think about it, Carmen. Money is—well, won't less than that amount do you?"

"No, Mr. Hitt. Write the check now."

Hitt sighed, but made no further protest. If the Express must founder, then this money were well spent on the stricken people of Avon. He took out his book, and immediately wrote the check and handed it to the girl.

"Hitt," said Haynerd, after Carmen had left them and he had exhausted his protests over the size of the check, "something's killing that girl! And it isn't only the trouble at Avon, either! What is it? I believe you know."

Hitt shook his head. "She's no longer in this world, Ned. She left it two days ago."

"Eh? Say! News about that Rincon fellow?"

But Hitt would say nothing to further illuminate his cryptic remark, and Haynerd soon switched to the grim topic of the industrial war in progress at Avon.

"What are we coming to?" he cried. "What's going to be the end? A social and industrial system such as ours, which leaves the masses to starve and consume with disease under intolerable burdens, that a handful may rot in idleness and luxury, marks us in this latest century as hopelessly insane!"

"Well, Ned, whence came the idea, think you, that it is divine justice for a majority of the people on earth to be poor in order that a few may be rich? And how are we going to get that perverted idea out of the minds of men? Will legislation do it?"

"Humph!" grunted Haynerd. "Legislation arouses no faith in me! We are suffering here because, in our immensely selfish thought of ourselves only, we have permitted the growth of such men as Ames, and allowed them to monopolize the country's resources. Heavens! Future generations will laugh themselves sick over us! Why, what sane excuse is there for permitting the commonest necessities of life to be juggled with by gamblers and unmoral men of wealth? How can we ask to be considered rational when we, with open eyes, allow 'corners' on foodstuffs, and permit 'wheat kings' to amass millions by corralling the supply of grain and then raising the price to the point where the poor washerwoman starves? Lord! We are a nation gone mad! The existence of poverty in a country like America is not only proof positive that our social system is rotten to the core, but that our religion is equally so! As a people we deserve to be incarcerated in asylums!"

"A considerable peroration, Ned," smiled Hitt. "And yet, one that I can not refute. The only hope I see is in a radical change in the mental attitude of the so-called enlightened class—and yet they are the very worst offenders!"

"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 amass 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 God. 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 bloody 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, God! 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, God, 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, lass, it's but love that I'm dealin' out to 'em, God 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 hit '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, assembling 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 passed his hands heavily across his eyes. He had chanced to read in the grewsome accounts of the Avon massacre 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. God! 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!

Then, his head sunk upon his breast, he fell to wondering if he might not secure a mortgage upon the Beaubien cottage, and turn its occupants into the street. Ah, what a power was money! It was the lever by which he moved the world, and clubbed its dull-witted inhabitants into servile obeisance! Who could stand against him—

That girl!

He sprang to his feet and called Hood. That obedient lackey hastened into his master's presence.

"The Ketchim trial?" snarled Ames.

"Called for this week, sir," replied Hood, glad that the announcement could not possibly offend his superior.

"Humph! The—that girl?"

"Brought up from Avon, and lodged in the Tombs, sir."

"You tell Judge Spencer that if he allows her bail I'll see that his federal appointment is killed, understand?"

"You may rely upon him, sir."

Ames regarded the man with a mixture of admiration and utter contempt. For Hood stood before him a resplendent example of the influence of the most subtle of all poisons, the insidious lure of money. Soul and body he had prostituted himself and his undoubted talents to it. And now, were he to be turned adrift by Ames, the man must inevitably sink into oblivion, squeezed dry of every element of genuine manhood, and weighted with the unclean lucre for which his bony fingers had always itched.

"Will Cass defend Ketchim?" the master asked.

"Oh, doubtless. He knows most about the formation of the defunct Simiti company."

"Well, see him and—you say he's young, and got a wife and baby? Offer him twenty-five thousand to quit the case."

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do, sir," returned Hood, shaking his head dubiously. "I've had men talking with him regarding the trial, and he—"

"Then get him over here. I'll see if I can't persuade him," growled Ames in an ugly tone.

Hood bowed and went out. A few minutes later Reverend Darius Borwell was ushered into the financier's private office.

"Mr. Ames," cried that gentleman of the cloth, "it's shocking, terribly so, what those unbridled, unprincipled mill hands have drawn upon themselves down in Avon! Goodness! And four members of the Church of the Social Revolution came to my study last evening and demanded that I let them speak to my congregation on the coming Sabbath!"

"Well?"

"Why, I told them certainly not! My church is God's house! And I shall have policemen stationed at the doors next Sunday to maintain order! To think that it has come to this in America! But, Mr. Ames, is your house guarded? I would advise—"

"Nobody can get within a block of my house, sir, without ringing a series of electric bells," replied Ames evenly. "I have fifty guards and private detectives in attendance in and about my premises all the time. My limousine has been lined with sheet steel. And my every step is protected. I am not afraid for my life. I simply want to keep going until I can carry out a few plans I have in hand." His thought had reverted again to the fair girl in the Tombs.

"But now, Borwell," he continued, "I want to talk with you about another matter. I am drawing up my will, and—"

"Why, my dear Mr. Ames! You are not ill?"

Ames thought of his physician's constantly iterated warning; but shook his head. "I may get caught in this Avon affair," he said evasively. "And I want to be prepared. The President has sent his message to Congress, as you may be aware. There are unpleasant suggestions in it regarding dispossession in cases like my own. I'm coming back by magnanimously willing to Congress a hundred millions, to stand as a fund for social uplift."

"Ah!" sighed the clergyman. Great was Mammon!

"But the little matter I wish to discuss with you is the sum that I am setting aside for the erection of a new church edifice," continued Ames, eying the minister narrowly.

"You don't mean it!" cried that worthy gentleman, springing up and clasping the financier's hand. "Mr. Ames! So magnanimous! Ah—the amount?"

"Well, will half a million do?" suggested Ames.

The minister reflected a moment. One should not be too precipitate in accepting tentative benefactions. "Ah—we really should have—ah—a trifle more, Mr. Ames. There's the settlement home, and the commons, you know, and—"

"Humph! Well, we'll start with half a million," replied Ames dryly. "By the way, you know Jurges, eh? Reverend William Jurges? Er—have you any particular influence with him, if I may ask?" His sharp eyes bored straight through the wondering divine.

"Why—yes—yes, I know the gentleman. And, as for influence—well, I may—"

"Yes, just so," put in Ames. "Now there is a trial coming up this week, and Jurges will be called to the stand. I want you to give him the true facts in regard to it. I'll call Hood, and we'll go over them in detail now. Then you see Jurges this afternoon, and—say, he's raising a building fund too, isn't he?"

The magnate summoned Hood again; and for an hour the trio discussed the forthcoming trial of the unfortunate Philip O. Ketchim. Then Ames dismissed the clergyman, and bade his office boy admit the young lawyer, Cass, who had come in response to Hood's request.

For some moments after Cass entered the office Ames stood regarding him, studying what manner of man he was, and how best to approach him. Then he opened the conversation by a casual reference to the unsatisfactory business situation which obtained throughout the country, and expressed wonder that young men just starting in their professions managed to make ends meet.

"But," he concluded with deep significance, "better go hungry than take on any class of business which, though promising good money returns, nevertheless might eventually prove suicidal." He looked hard at the young lawyer when he paused.

"I quite agree with you, Mr. Ames," returned Cass. "But as I am particularly busy this morning, may I ask why you have sent for me? Have you anything that I can—"

"I have," abruptly interrupted the financier. "We need additions to our legal staff. I thought perhaps you might like to talk over the matter with me, with a view to entering our employ."

"Why, Mr. Ames, I—I have never thought of—" The young man's eyes glistened.

"Well, suppose you think of it now," said Ames, smiling graciously. "I have heard considerable about you of late, and I must say I rather like the way you have been handling your work."

Cass looked at him with rising wonder. The work which he had been doing of late was most ordinary and routine, and called for no display of legal skill whatever. Suspicions slowly began to rise.

"I'd hate to see you tackle anything at this stage of your career, Mr. Cass, that would bring discredit upon you. And I am afraid your association with Ketchim is going to do just that. But possibly you do not intend to handle further business for him?"

Ketchim, though long confined in the Tombs, had at length secured bail, through the not wholly disinterested efforts of his uncle, Stolz, the sworn enemy of Ames. And, because of his loyal efforts in behalf of Ketchim, Stolz had insisted that Cass be retained as counsel for the latter when his trial should come up.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Cass," said Ames suddenly. "Mr. Hood will take you on at a salary of, say, five thousand to start with. We'll try you out for a few weeks. Then, if we don't mutually fit, why, we'll quietly separate and say nothing. How about it?"

Cass thought hard. Half of that salary would have looked large to him then. But—

"May I ask," he slowly said in reply, "what class of work Mr. Hood would give me to start with?"

"Why, nothing of great importance, perhaps, while you are getting into the harness. Possibly court work, as a starter. You've had experience in that, eh?"

Cass reflected again. The temptation was tremendous. That little house which he had passed and stopped to look at so wistfully every night on his way home was now within his grasp.

He glanced up at the great man, sitting so calmly before him. Then he thought suddenly of Avon. Then of Carmen.

"Mr. Ames," he said, "if I enter your employ, it must be with the stipulation that I shall have nothing to do with the Ketchim trial."

Ames's face went suddenly dark. "If you enter my employ, sir, it will be with the stipulation that you do as I say," he returned coldly.

And then the young lawyer saw through the mask. And his anger flamed high at what he discerned behind it. He rose and faced the great man.

"Mr. Ames," said he, "you have made a mistake. I am poor, and I need business. But I have not as yet fallen so completely under the spell of fortune-hunting as to sell my honor to a man like you! To enter your employ, I now see, would mean the total loss of character and self respect. It would mean a lowering of my ideals, whatever they may be, to your own vulgar standard. I may have done wrong in becoming associated with Mr. Ketchim. In fact, I know that I have. But I pledged myself to assist him. And yet, in doing so, I scarcely can blacken my reputation to the extent that I should were I to become your legal henchman. I want wealth. But there are some terms upon which even I can not accept it. And your terms are among them. I bid you good morning."

Ames gave a snort of anger when Cass went out. Summoning Hood, he vented his great wrath upon that individual's bald pate. "And now," he concluded, "I want that fellow Cass so wound up that he will sneak off to a lonely spot and commit suicide! And if you can't do it, then I'll accept your resignation!"

"Very well, sir," replied Hood. "And, by the way, Mr. Ames, I have just learned that Judge Harris, father of the young man who came up with that girl, is in Colombia. Seems that he's taken some wealthy man down there to look at La Libertad mine."

"What!" Ames's eyes snapped fire.

"They believe you put one over on Ketchim, with the help of Monsignor Lafelle, and so they've gone down to get titles to that mine."

"By G—"

"And they say that—"

"Never mind what they say!" roared Ames. "Cable Wenceslas at once to see that those fellows remain permanently in Colombia. He has ways of accomplishing that. Humph! Fools! Judge Harris, eh? Ninny! I guess Wenceslas can block his little game!"

His great frame shook slightly as he stood consuming with rage, and a slight hemorrhage started from his nostrils. He turned to the lavatory. And as he walked, Hood thought his left foot dragged slightly. But the lawyer made no comment.

* * * * *

And then, with the way well cleared, came the Ketchim trial, which has gone down in history as containing the most spectacular denouement in the record of legal procedure in the New World. Had it been concerned, as was anticipated, only with routine legal procedure against the man Ketchim, a weak-souled compound of feeble sycophancy and low morals, it would have attracted slight attention, and would have been spread upon the court records by uninterested clerks with never a second thought. But there were elements entering into it of whose existence the outside world could not have even dreamed. Into it converged threads which now may be traced back to scenes and events in three continents; threads whose intricate windings led through trackless forest and dim-lit church; through court of fashion and hut of poverty; back through the dark mazes of mortal thought, where no light shines upon the carnal aims and aspirations of the human mind; back even to the doors of a palace itself, even to the proudest throne of the Old World.

But none of these elements found expression in the indictment against the frightened defendant, the small-visioned man who had sought to imitate the mighty Ames, and yet who lacked sufficient intelligence of that sort which manifests in such a perversion of skill and power. Ames was a tremendous corruptionist, who stood beyond the laws simply because of the elemental fact that he himself made those laws. Ketchim was a plain deceiver. And his deception was religious fervor. Mingling his theology with fraud, he employed the unholy alliance for the purpose of exploiting the credulous who attended his prayer meetings and commented with bated breath upon his beautiful showing of religious zeal. He was but one of a multitude afflicted with the "dollar mania." His misfortune was that his methods were so antique that they could not long fail of detection. And it was because of his use of the mails for the purpose of deceit that the indictment had been drawn against Philip O. Ketchim et al. by the long-suffering, tolerant complainant, called the people.

Nominally the people's interests were in the hands of the Public Prosecutor, a certain smug young worldling named Ellis. But, as that gentleman owed his appointment to Ames, it is not surprising that at his right hand sat Hood and his well trained staff. Nominally, too, Judge Spencer conducted the trial strictly upon its merits, not all of which lay with the people. But the judge might have been still prosecuting petty cases back in the unknown little district from which he came, had it not been for the great influence of Ames, long since, who had found him on a certain occasion useful. And so the jury panel contained none but those who, we may be very sure, were amenable to the tender pressure of a soft hand lined with yellow gold. And only those points of evidence were sustained which conduced to the incrimination of the miserable defendant. Ketchim was doomed before the trial began.

And yet, to subserve the dark schemes of Ames, and to lengthen the period of torture to which his victims should be subjected, the trial was dragged through many days. Besides, even he and his hirelings were bound to observe the formalities.

It was at the suggestion of Cass that no effort had been made to procure bail for Carmen after her arrest. The dramatic may always be relied upon to carry a point which even plain evidence negatives. And she, acquiescing in the suggestion, remained a full two weeks in the Tombs before Ames's eager counsel found their opportunity to confront her on the witness stand and besmirch her with their black charges. The Beaubien was prostrated. But, knowing that for her another hour of humiliation and sorrow had come, she strove mightily to summon her strength for its advent. Father Waite toiled with Cass day and night. Hitt and Haynerd, without financial resources, pursued their way, grim and silent. The Express was sinking beneath its mountainous load. And they stood at the helm, stanch to their principles, not yielding an iota to offers of assistance in exchange for a reversal of the policy upon which the paper had been launched.

"We're going down, Hitt," said Haynerd grimly. "But we go with the flag flying at the mast!"

Yet Hitt answered not. He was learning to know as did Carmen, and to see with eyes which were invisible.

It was just when the jury had been impaneled, after long days of petty wrangling and childish recrimination among the opposing lawyers, that Stolz came to Ames and laid down his sword. The control of C. and R. should pass unequivocally to the latter if he would but save Ketchim from prison.

Then Ames lay back and roared with laughter over his great triumph. C. and R! Poof! He would send Stolz' nephew to prison, and then roll a bomb along Wall Street whose detonation would startle the financial world clean out of its orbit! Stolz had failed to notice that Ames's schemes had so signally worked out that C. and R. was practically in his hands now! The defeated railroad magnate at length backed out of the Ames office purple with rage. And then he pledged himself to hypothecate his entire fortune to the rescue of his worthless nephew.

Thus, in deep iniquity, was launched the famous trial, a process of justice in name only, serving as an outlet for a single man's long nurtured personal animosities. The adulterous union of religion and business was only nominally before the bar. The victims, not the defendant only, not the preachers, the washerwomen, the factory girls, the widows, and the orphans, whose life savings Ketchim had drawn into his net by the lure of pious benedictions, but rather those unfortunates who had chanced to incur the malicious hatred of the great, legalized malefactor, Ames, by opposition to his selfish caprice, and whose utter defeat and discrediting before the public would now place the crown of righteous expediency upon his own chicanery and extortion and his wantonly murderous deeds.

The prosecution scored from the beginning. Doctor Jurges, utterly confused by the keen lawyers, and vainly endeavoring to follow the dictates of his conscience, while attempting to reconcile them with his many talks with Darius Borwell, gave testimony which fell little short of incriminating himself. For there were produced letters which he had written to members of his congregation, and which for subtlety and deception, though doubtless innocently done, would have made a seasoned promoter look sharp to his own laurels.

Then Harris was called. He had been summoned from Denver for the trial. But his stuttering evidence gave no advantage to either side. And then—crowning blunder!—Cass permitted Ketchim himself to take the stand. And the frightened, trembling broker gave his own cause such a blow that the prosecution might well have asked the judge to take the case from the jury then and there. It was a legal faux pas; and Cass walked the floor and moaned the whole night through.

Then, as per program, the prosecution called Madam Beaubien. Could not that sorrowing woman have given testimony which would have aided the tottering defense, and unmasked the evil genius which presided over this mock trial? Ah, yes, in abundance! But not one point would the judge sustain when it bordered upon forbidden territory. It was made plain to her that she was there to testify against Ketchim, and to permit the Ames lawyers to bandy her own name about the court room upon the sharp points of their cruel cross-questions and low insinuations.

But, she protested, her knowledge of the Simiti company's affairs had come through another person.

And who might that be?

Mr. J. Wilton Ames.

Ah! But Mr. Ames should give his own testimony—for was it not he who had, not long since, legally punished the witness on a charge of defamation of character? The witness was dismissed. And the spectators knew that it was because the righteous prosecution could no longer stain its hands with one who bore such a tarnished name as she.

And then, taunted and goaded to exasperation, the wronged woman burst into tears and flayed the bigamist Ames there before the court room crowded with eager society ladies and curious, non-toiling men. Flayed him as men are seldom flayed and excoriated by the women they trample. The bailiffs seized her, and dragged her into an ante-room; the judge broke his gavel rapping for order, and threatened to clear the court; and then Cass, too young and inexperienced to avoid battle with seasoned warriors, rose and demanded that Madam Beaubien be returned to the stand.

The astonished judge hesitated. Cass stood his ground. He turned to the people, as if seeking their support. A great murmur arose through the court room. The judge looked down at Ames. That man, sitting calm and unimpassioned, nodded his head slightly. And the woman was led back to the chair.

"It may have an important bearing upon the case, Your Honor!" cried the young lawyer for the defense. "Mr. Ames is to take the stand as an important witness in this case. If Madam Beaubien brings such a charge against him, it gives us reason to believe his honor peccable, and his testimony open to suspicion!"

It was a daring statement, and the whole room gasped, and held its breath.

"I object, Your Honor!" shouted the chief prosecutor, Ellis. "The lawyer for the defense is in contempt of court! Madam Beaubien has been shown to be a—"

"The objection is sustained!" called the judge. "The charge is utterly irrelevant! Order in the court!"

"His first wife's portrait—is in a glass window—in his yacht!" cried the hysterical Beaubien. Then she crumpled up in a limp mass, and was led from the chair half fainting.

At the woman's shrill words a white-haired man, dressed in black, clerical garb, who had been sitting in the rear of the room close to the door, rose hastily, then slowly sat down again. At his feet reposed a satchel, bearing several foreign labels. Evidently he had but just arrived from distant lands.

Consternation reigned throughout the room for a few minutes. Then Cass, believing that the psychological moment had arrived, loudly called Carmen Ariza to the stand. The dramatic play must be continued, now that it had begun. The battle which had raged back and forth for long, weary days, could be won, if at all, only by playing upon the emotions of the jury, for the evidence thus far given had resulted in showing not only the defense, but likewise the Beaubien, and all who had been associated with the Simiti company, including Cass himself, to be participators in gross, intentional fraud.

The remaining witness, the girl herself, had been purposely neglected by the prosecution, for the great Ames had planned that she must be called by the defense. Then would he bring up the prostitute, Jude, and from her wring testimony which must blast forever the girl's already soiled name. Following her, he would himself take the stand, and tell of the girl's visits to his office; of her protestations of love for him; of her embracing him; and of a thousand indiscretions which he had carefully garnered and stored for this triumphant occasion.

But the judge, visibly perturbed by the dramatic turn which the case seemed to be taking, studied his watch for a moment, then Ames's face, and then abruptly adjourned court until the following day. Yet not until Cass had been recognized, and the hounded girl summoned from her cell in the Tombs, to take the stand in the morning for—her life!