"Nonsense!" Flint interrupted. "Nobility, eh? Read that, will you?"

Leering, despite himself, he handed the paper across the table to his daughter.

"Those marked passages," said he. "And remember, this is only the beginning. Wait till all the facts are known, the whole conspiracy laid bare and everything exposed to public view! Then tell me, if you can, that he is poor but noble! Bah! Sunday-school dope, that! Noble, yes!"

Catherine sat there staring at the paper, a minute, as though quite unable to decipher a word. Through a kind of wavering mist that seemed to swim before her eyes, she vaguely saw the words: "Socialist White Slaver!" but that these bore any relation to the man she remembered, back there at the sugar-house, had not yet occurred to her mind. She simply could not grasp the significance of the glaring headlines. And, turning a blank gaze on her father's face, she stammered:

"Why—why do you give me this? What has this got to do with—me? With him?"

"Everything!" snarled the Billionaire, violently irritated by his daughter's seeming obtuseness. "Everything, I tell you! That man, that strong and noble hero of yours, is this man! This white slaver! This wild beast—this Socialist—this Anarchist! Do you understand now, or don't you? Do you grasp the truth at last, or is your mind incapable of apprehending it?"

He had risen, and now was standing there at his side of the table, shaking with violent emotion, his glasses awry, face wrinkled and drawn, hands twitching. His daughter, making no answer to his taunts, sat with the paper spread before her on the table. A wine glass, overset, had spilled a red stain—for all the world like the workers' blood, spilled in war and industry for the greater wealth and glory of the masters—out across the costly damask, but neither she nor Flint paid any heed.

For he was staring only at her; and she, now having mastered herself a little, though her full breast still rose and fell too quickly, was struggling to read the slanderous lies and foul libels of the blue-penciled article.

Silently she read, paling a little but otherwise giving no sign to show her father how the tide of her thought was setting. Twice over she read the article; then, pushing the paper back, looked at old Flint with eyes that seemed to question his very soul—eyes that saw the living truth, below.

"It is a lie!" said she, at last, in a grave, quiet voice.

"What?" blurted the old man. "A—a lie?"

She nodded.

"Yes," said she. "A lie."

Furious, he ripped open the paper, and once more shoved it at her.

"Fool!" cried he. "Read that!" And his shaking, big-knuckled finger tapped the editorial on "Socialism Unveiled."

"No," she answered, "I need read no more. I know; I understand!"

"You—you know what?" choked Flint. "This is an editorial, I tell you! It represents the best thought and the most careful opinion of the paper. And it condemns this man, absolutely, as a criminal and a menace to society. It denounces him and his whole gang of Socialists or Anarchists or White-slavers—they're all the same thing—as a plague to the world. That's the editor's opinion; and remember, he's on the ground, there. He has all the facts. You—you are at a distance, and have none! Yet you set up your futile, childish opinion—"

"No more, father! No more!" cried Catherine, also standing up. She faced him calmly, coldly, magnificently. "You can't talk to me this way, any more. Cannot, and must not! As I see this thing—and my woman's intuition tells me more in a minute than you can explain away in an hour—this fabrication here has all, or nearly all, been invented and carried out by you. For what reason? This—to discredit this man! To make me hate and loathe him! To force me back to Waldron. To—"

"Stop!" shouted the old man, in a well-assumed passion. "No daughter of mine shall talk to me this way! Silence! It is monstrous and unthinkable. It—it is horrible beyond belief! Silence, I tell you—and—"

"No, father, not silence," she replied, with perfect poise. "Not silence now, but speech. Either this thing is true or it is false. In either case, I must know the facts. The papers? No truth in those! The finding of the courts? today, they are a by-word and a mockery! All I can trust is the evidence of my own senses; what I hear, and feel, and see. So then—"

"Then?" gulped the Billionaire, holding the back of his chair in a trembling grasp.

"Just this, father. I'm going to Rochester, myself, to investigate this thing, to see this man, to hear his side of the story, to know—"

"Do that," cried Flint in a terrible voice, "and you never enter these doors again! From the minute you leave Idle Hour on that fool's errand, my daughter is dead to me, forever!"

Swept clean off his feet by rage, as well as by the deadly fear of what might happen if his daughter really were to learn the truth, he had lost his head completely.

With quiet attention, the girl regarded him, then smiled inscrutably.

"So it be," she replied. "Even though you disinherit me or turn me off with a penny, my mind is made up, and my duty's clear.

"While things like these are going on in the world, outside, I have no right to linger and to idle here. I am no child, now; I have been thinking of late, reading, learning. Though I can't see it all clearly, yet, I know that every bite we eat, means deprivation to some other people, somewhere. This light and luxury mean poverty and darkness elsewhere. This fruit, this wine, this very bread is ours because some obscure and unknown men have toiled and sweat and given them to us. Even this cut glass on our table—see! What tragedies it could reveal, could it but speak! What tales of coughing, consumptive glass-cutters, bending over wheels, their lungs cut to pieces by the myriad spicules of sharp glass, so that we, we of our class, may enjoy beauty of design and coloring! And the silken gown I wear—that too has cost—"

"No more! No more of this!" gurgled old Flint, now nearly in apoplexy. "I deny you! I repudiate you, Anarchist that you are! Go! Never come back—never, never—!"

Stumbling blindly, he turned and staggered out of the room. She watched him go, nor tried to steady his uncertain steps. In the hallway, outside, she heard him ring for Slawson, heard the valet come, and both of them ascend the stairs.

"Father," she whispered to herself, a look of great and pure spiritual beauty on her noble face, "father, this had to come. Sooner or later, it was inevitable. Whatever you have done, I forgive you, for you are my father, and have surely acted for what you think my interest.

"But none the less, the end is here and now. Between you and me, a great gulf is fixed. And from tonight I face the world, to battle with it, learn from it, and know the truth in every way. Enough of this false, easy, unnatural life. I cannot live it any longer; it would crush and stifle me! Enough! I must be free, I shall be free, to know, and dare, and do!"

That night, having had no further speech with old Flint, Kate left Idle Hour, taking just a few necessities in a suit-case, and a few dollars for her immediate needs.

Giving no explanation to maid, valet or anyone, she let herself out, walked through the great estate and down Englewood Avenue, to the station, where she caught a train for Jersey City.

The midnight special for Chicago bore her swiftly westward. No sleeping car she took, but passed the night in a seat of an ordinary coach. Her ticket read "Rochester."

The old page of her Book of Life was closed forever. A new and better page was open wide.



CHAPTER XXV.

THROUGH STEEL BARS.

True to her plan, Catherine ended her journey at Rochester. She engaged a room at a second-rate hotel—marvelling greatly at the meanness of the accommodations, the like of which she had never seen—and, at ten o'clock of the morning, appeared at the Central Police Station. The bundle of papers in her hand indicated that she had read the latest lies and venom poured out on Gabriel's defenseless head.

The haughty, full-fed sergeant in charge of the station made some objections, at first, to letting her see Gabriel; but the tone of her voice and the level look of her gray eye presently convinced him he was playing with fire, and he gave in. Summoning an officer, he bade the man conduct her. Iron doors opened and closed for her. She was conscious of long, ill-smelling, concrete-floored corridors, with little steel cages at either side—cages where hopeless, sodden wrecks of men were standing, or sitting in attitudes of brutal despair, or lying on foul bunks, motionless and inert as logs.

For a moment her heart failed her.

"Good Lord! Can such things be?" she whispered to herself. "So this—this is a police station? And real jails and penitentiaries are worse? Oh, horrible! I never dreamed of anything like this, or any men like these!"

The officer, stopping at a cell-door and banging thereon with some keys, startled her.

"Here, youse," he addressed the man within, "lady to see youse!"

Catherine was conscious that her heart was pounding hard and her breath coming fast, as she peered in through those cold, harsh metal bars. For a minute she could find no thought, no word. Within, her eyes—still unaccustomed to the gloom—vaguely perceived a man's figure, big and powerful, and different in its bearing from those other cringing wretches she had glimpsed.

Then the man came toward her, stopped, peered and for a second drew back. And then—then she heard his voice, in a kind of startled joy:

"Oh—is it—is it you?"

"Yes," she answered. "I must see you! I must talk with you, again, and know the truth!"

The officer edged nearer.

"Youse can talk all y' want to," he dictated, hoarsely, "but don't you pass nothin' in. No dope, nor nothin', see? I'll stick around an' watch, anyhow; but don't try to slip him no dream powders or no 'snow.' 'Cause if you do—"

"What—what on earth are you talking about?" the girl demanded, turning on the officer with absolute astonishment. But he, only winking wisely, repeated:

"You heard me, didn't you? No dope. I'm wise to this whole game."

At a loss for his meaning, yet without any real desire to fathom it, Kate turned back toward Gabriel.

A moment they two looked at each other, each noting any change that might have taken place since that wonderful hour in the sugar-house, each hungering and thirsting for a sight of the other's face. In her heart, already Kate knew as well as she knew she was alive, that this man was totally innocent of the foul charges heaped upon him. And so she looked at him with eyes wherein lay no reproach, no doubt and no suspicion. And, as she looked, tears started, and her heart swelled hotly in her breast; for he was bruised and battered and a helpless captive.

"He, caged like a trapped animal!" her thought was. "He, so strong, and free, and brave! Oh, horrible, horrible!"

He must have read something of this feeling, in her face; for now, coming close to the bars, he said in a low tone:

"Girl—your name I don't know, even yet—girl, you mustn't pity me! That's one thing I can't have. I'm here because the master class is stronger than my class, the working class. Here, because I'm dangerous to that master class. This isn't said to make myself out a martyr. It's only to make you see things right. I'm not complaining at this plight. I've richly earned it—under Capitalism. So, then, that's settled.

"And now, what's more important, tell me how you are! And did your wound cause you much trouble? I confess I've passed many an anxious hour, thinking of your narrow escape and of your injury. It wasn't too bad, was it? Tell me!"

"No," she answered, still holding to the bars, for she somehow felt quite unaccountably weak. "It wasn't very bad. There's hardly any scar at all—or won't be, when it's fully healed. But all this is trifling, compared to what you've suffered and are suffering. Oh, what a horrible affair! What frightful accusations! Tell me the truth, Boy—how, why could—?"

He looked at her a moment, in silence, noting her splendid hair and eyes and mouth, the firm, well-moulded chin, the confident and self-reliant poise of the shapely head; and as he looked, he knew he loved this woman. He understood, at last, how dear she was to him—dearer than anything else in all the world save just his principles and stern life work. He comprehended the meaning of all, his dreams and visions and long thoughts. And, caring nothing for consequences, unskilled in the finesse of dealing with women, acting wholly on the irresistible impulses of a heart that overflowed, he looked deep into those gray eyes and said in a tone that set her heart-strings vibrating:

"Listen! The truth? How could I tell you anything else? I know not who you are, and care not. That you are rich and powerful and free, while I am poor and in captivity, means nothing. Love cares not for such trifles. It dares all, hopes all, trusts all, believes all—and is patient in adversity."

"Love?" she whispered, her face paling. "How do you dare to—?"

"Dare? Because my heart bids me. And where it bids, I care not for conventions or consequences!" He flung his hand out with a splendid gesture, his head high, his eyes lustrous in the half-light of the cell. "Where it leads, I have to follow. That is why I am a Socialist! That is why I am here, today, outcast and execrated, a prisoner, in danger of long years of living death in the pestilential tomb of some foul penitentiary!"

"You're here because—because you are a Socialist?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Yes," said he. "I tried to help a suffering, outcast woman—or one who posed as such. And she betrayed me to my enemies. And so—"

"There was a woman in this affair, then?" Catherine queried with sudden pain. "The newspapers haven't made the story all up out of whole cloth?"

"No. There was a woman. A Delilah, who delivered me into the hands of the Philistines, when I tried to help her in what she lied in telling me was her need. Will you hear the story?"

Still very pale, she formed a half-inarticulate "Yes!" with her full lips. Then, seeming to brace herself by a tighter clasp on the hard steel grating, she listened while he spoke.

Earnestly, honestly and with perfect straightforwardness, omitting nothing, adding nothing, he gave her the narrative of that fatal night's events, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the wonderfully-disguised woman, till her cudgel-blow had laid him senseless on the floor.

He told her the part that every actor therein had played; how the whole drama had been staged, to dishonor and convict him, to railroad him to the Pen for a long term, perhaps to kill him. He spoke in a low voice, to prevent the watching officer from overhearing; and as he talked, he thanked his stars that in all this network of conspiracy and crime against the Party and against himself, his captors had not yet placed him incommunicado. For some reason—perhaps because they thought their case against him absolutely secure and wanted to avoid any appearance of unfairness or of martyrizing him—this restriction had not yet been laid upon him. So now his message of the truth could reach the ears of her who, more than all the world beside, had grown dear to him and precious beyond words.

He told her, then, not only the story of that night, but also all that had since happened—the newspaper attacks on him and on the Party; the deliberate attempt to poison the community and the nation against him; the struggle to fix a foul and lasting blot upon his name, and ruin him beyond redemption.

"And why, all this?" he added, while she—listening so intently that she hardly breathed—knew that he spoke the living, vital truth. "Why this persecution, this plotting, this labor and expense to 'get' me. Do you want to know?"

"Yes, tell me!" she whispered. "I don't understand. I can't! It—it all seems so horrible, so unreal, so—so different from what I've always believed about the majesty and purity of the law! Can these things be, indeed?"

He laughed bitterly.

"Can they?" he repeated. "When you see that they are, isn't that answer enough? And the reason of it all is that I'm a Socialist and know certain secrets of certain men, which—if I should tell the world—might, nay, surely would precipitate a revolution. So, these men, and the System behind them, have tried to discredit me by this foul charge. After this, if the charge sticks, I may shout my head off, exposing what I know; and who will listen? You know the answer as well as I! Do I complain? No, not once! What I must suffer, for this wondrous Cause, is not a tenth what thousands suffer every day, in silence and high courage. What has happened to me, personally, is but the merest trifle beside what has already happened to thousands, fighting for life and liberty, for wife and home and children; for the right to work and live like men, not beasts!"

"You mean the—the working class?" she ventured, wonderingly. "Is this outrage really a minor one, compared with what they, who feed and warm and carry the whole world, have to suffer? Tell me, for I—God help me, I am ignorant! I am beginning to see, to half-see, awful, dim, ghostly shapes of huge, unspeakable wrongs. Tell me the truth about all this, as you have told it about yourself—and let me know!"

Then Gabriel talked as never he had talked before. To this, his audience of one, there in the dirty and ill-smelling police station, he unfolded the sad tale of the disinherited, the enslaved, the wretched, as never to a huge, and spell-bound audience in hall or park or city street. His eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.

With master strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad picture—the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and heartless drudging for a pittance.

He told her of child slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon's greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising, soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty, sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills. And as he talked, she saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little boys and girls, giving their lives drop by drop, and cough by cough, that she might have purple and fine linen and the rich, soft, easy paths of life.

* * * * *

Then, pausing not, he spoke to her of white slavery, of girls and women by the uncounted thousand forced to barter their own bodies for a mockery of life; and, stinging as a nagaika, he laid the lash of blame on Capitalism, evil cause of an evil and rotten fruit, of disease and crime, and misery, and death. He told her of political corruption beyond belief; of cheating, lying, trickery and greed, for power. Of war, he told her, and made all its inner, hideous motives clear. She seemed verily to see the trenches, the "red rampart's slippery edge," the spattered blood and brains and all the horror of Hell's nethermost infamy—and then the blasted, wrecked and wasted homes, the long trail of mourning and of hopeless ruin—the horror of this crime of crimes, all for profit, all for gold and markets, all for Capitalism!

And then, while the girl stood there listening, spell-bound by her first insight, her first understanding of the true character of this, our striving, slaving world, held by a few for their own inordinate pride and power, the man's voice changed.

With new intonations and a deeper tone, he launched into some outlines of the great hope, the splendid vision, the Wondrous Ideal—Socialism, the world-salvation.

Sentence by sentence, imagery of this vast, noble thought flowed from his inspired lips. Clearly he showed this woman all the causes of the world's travail and pain; and clearly made her see that only in one way, only through the ownership of the world by the world's children as a whole, could peace and justice, life and joy and plenty and the New Time come to pass, dreamed of and yearned for by many sages and prophets, and now close at hand on the very threshold of reality!

Socialism! It leaped from his spirit like a living flame, consuming dross and waste and evil, lighting up the future with its shining beacon, its message of hope to the hopeless, of rest and cheer and peace to all who labored and were heavy laden.

Socialism! The glory of the vision seemed to blind and dazzle Catherine. In its supernal light, things grievous to be understood and borne were now made clear. For the first time in all her life, the woman saw, and knew, and grasped the truths of this strange nexus of conflict, pain and sorrow, that we know as our existence.

"Socialism! The Hope of the World!" Gabriel finished. "And for this, and for what I know about its enemies, I stand here in this cell and may yet go to a living death. This is my crime, and nothing else—this battle for the freedom and the joy of the world—this struggle against the powers of ignorance and darkness, priestcraft and greed, lust, treachery and foulness, cruelty and hate and war! This, and this only. You have heard me. I have spoken!"

He fell silent, crossed his arms upon the bars of the cage that pent him, and laid his head upon them with a motion of weariness.

Something strangely stirred the heart of the woman. Her hand went out and touched his thick, black hair.

"Be of good cheer," she whispered. "Though I am ignorant and do not fully understand, as yet, some glimmer of the light has reached my eyes. I can learn, and I will learn, and dare, and do! All my life I have eaten the bread of this bitter slavery, taken the thing I had no right to take, unknowingly wielded the lash on bleeding backs of men and women and children.

"All my life have I, in ignorance and idleness, done these things. But never shall I do them again. That is all past and gone, an evil dream that is no more. From now, if you will be patient and forgive and teach me, I will stand with you and yours, and glory in the new-found strength and majesty of this supreme ideal!"

He made no answer, save to reach one hand to her, through the bars. Their hands met in a long, clinging tension. The policeman, somewhat down the corridor, moved officiously in their direction.

"Here, now, none o' that!" he blurted. "Break away! An' say, time's up. Yuh stayed too long, miss, as it is!"

Their hands parted. Still Gabriel did not look up.

"Are—are you coming back again?" he asked.

"Yes, Gabriel. Tomorrow."

"And will you tell me then who you are?"

"I'll tell you now, if you want to know."

"I do," he answered, and raised his head. Their eyes met, steadily. "I do, now that you too have seen the light, and that you understand. Tell me, who are you?"

A moment's pause.

Then, facing him, she answered:

"I am Catherine Flint, only daughter of Isaac Flint, the Billionaire!"



CHAPTER XXVI.

"GUILTY."

Speechless and dazed, Gabriel stared at her as though at some strange apparition.

"Daughter of—of Isaac Flint?" he stammered, clinging to the bars.

"Come, come, lady, yuh can't stay no longer!" the officer again insisted, tapping her on the shoulder. "Yuh'd oughta been out o' here ten minutes ago! No, nuthin' doin'!" he concluded, as she turned to him appealingly. "Not today! Time's up an' more than up!"

Catherine stretched out her hand to Gabriel, in farewell. He took it, silently.

"Good-bye!" said she. "Until I come again, good-bye. Keep up a stout heart, for I am with you. We—we can't lose. We shall win—we must win! Don't condemn me for being what I am and who I am, Gabriel. Only think what—with your help—I may yet be! And now again, good-bye!"

Their hands parted. Gabriel, still silent, stood there in his cell, watching her till she vanished from his sight down the long corridor of grief and tears. The officer, winking wisely to himself, thrust his tongue into his cheek.

"Daughter of Isaac Flint, th' Billionaire!" he was thinking, with derision. "Oh, yes, billionaires' daughters would be visitin' Socialists an' bums an' red-light con-workers like this geezer. Oh yes, sure, sure they would—I should worry!"

Which mental attitude was fortunate, indeed; for it, and it alone, preserved the girl from a wild blare of newspaper notoriety. Had the truth been known, who could have imagined the results?

For a long time after the girl had departed, Gabriel sat there in his cell, motionless and sunk in deepest thought. His emotions passed recording. That this woman, his ideal, his best-beloved, the cherished, inmost treasure of his heart and soul—she whom he had rescued, she who had lain in his arms and shared with him that unforgettable hour in the old sugar-house—should now prove to be the daughter of his bitterest enemy, surpassed belief and stunned all clear understanding.

Flint! The very name connoted, for Gabriel, all that was cruel and rapacious, hateful, vicious and greedy; all that meant pain and woe and death to him and his class. Visions of West Virginia and Colorado rose before his mind. He heard again the whistle of the "Bull Moose Death Special" as it sped on its swift errand of barbarism up Cabin Creek, hurling its sprays of leaden death among the slaves of this man and his vulturine associates.

Flint! He whispered the name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; and his thoughts, projected into the future, dwelt bitterly on the Air Trust now already under way—the terrible, coming slavery which he, Gabriel, had struggled to checkmate, only to find himself locked like a rat in a steel trap!

"And this woman," he groaned in agony of soul, "this woman, all in all to me, is—is his daughter!"

Flinging himself upon his hard and narrow bunk, he buried his head in his powerful arms, and tried to blot out thought from his fevered brain; but still the current ran on and on and on, endlessly, maddeningly. And to the problem, no answer seemed to come.

"She must know who I am," he pondered. "Even if her father has not told her, the papers have. True, she doesn't believe the infamous charge against me; but what then? Can she, on the other hand, believe the truth, that her father has conspired with Slade and those Cosmos thugs, and with the press and courts and the whole damnable prostituted system, to suppress and kill me?

"Can she believe her father guilty of all that? And of all the horrors of this capitalist Hell, that I have told her about? No! Human nature is incapable of such vast turnings from all the habits and environments of a lifetime. In her veins flows the blood of that arch-criminal, Flint. Her thoughts must be, to some extent, his thoughts. She must share his viewpoint, and be loyal to him. After this first flush of reaction against her father, she will go back to him. It is inevitable. Betwixt her and me is fixed a boundless space, wider than Heaven and earth. She is one pole, and I the other. If I have any strength or resolution or philosophy, now is the hour for its trial.

"This woman must be, shall be put away from every thought and wish and hope. And the word FINIS must be written at the end of the one brief chapter where our life-stories seem to have run along together in a false harmony and a fictitious peace!"

Thus pondered Gabriel, in the gloom of his harsh cell, branded with crime and writhing in the agony of soul that only those who love hopelessly can ever know.

And Catherine, what of her? What were her thoughts, emotions, inspirations as—seeming to live in a dream, with Gabriel's eloquence and the new vision of a better, saner, kindlier world shining through her soul—she made her way back to the dingy hotel where now, shabby as it was, she felt she had no right to stay, while others, homeless, walked the brutal streets?

Who shall know them? Who shall tell? A blind man, suddenly made to see, can find no words to express the wonder and bright glory of that sudden sight. A deaf man, regaining his lost sense, cannot describe the sudden burst of sound that fills the new, strange world wherein he finds himself. So, now, this cultured, gently bred woman, for the first time in her life understanding the facts, glimpsing the tragedy and grasping the answer to it all, felt that no words could compass her strange exultation and enlargement.

"It—it's like a chrysalis emerging into the form of a light, swift butterfly!" she pondered, as, back in her room once more, she prepared to write two letters. "Just for the present, I can't understand it all. I don't know, yet, whether I'm worthy to be a Socialist, to be one of that company of earnest, noble men and women striving for life and liberty and joy for all the world. But with the help of the man I trust and honor and believe in, and—and love—perhaps I may yet be. God grant it may be so!"

She thought, a few minutes more, her face lighted by an inner radiance that made its beauty spiritual and pure and calm. Then, having somewhat composed her thoughts, she wrote this letter to Maxim Waldron:

My Dear Wally:

I am writing you without date or place, just as I shall write my father, because whatever happens, I insist that you two let me go my way in peace, without trying to find, or hamper, or importune me. My mind is fully made up. Nothing can change it. We have come to the parting of the ways, forever.

Though I may feel bitterly toward you for what I now understand as your harsh and cruel attitude toward the world, and the role you play as an exploiter of human labor, I shall not reproach you. You simply cannot see these things as I have come to see them since my feet have been set upon the road toward Socialism. Don't start, Wally—that's the truth. Perhaps I'm not much of a Socialist yet, because I don't know much about it. But I am learning, and shall learn. My teacher is the best one in the world, I'm sure; and added to this, all my natural energy and innate radicalism have flamed into activity with this new thought. So, you see, the past is even more effectively buried than ever. How could anything ever be possible, now, between you and me?

Cease to think of me, Wally. I am gone out of your life, for all time, as out of that whole circle of false, insincere, wicked and parasitic existence that we call "society." That other world, where you still are, shall see me no more. I have found a better and a nobler kind of life; and to this, and to all it implies, I mean to be forever faithful. I beg you, never try to find me or to answer this.

Good-bye, then, forever.

Catherine.

After having read this over and sealed it, she wrote still another:

Dear Father:

It is hard to write these words to you. I owe you a debt of gratitude and love, in many ways; yet, after all, your will and mine conflict. You have tried to force me to a union abhorrent and impossible to me. My only course is this—independence to think, and act, and live as I, no longer a child but a grown woman, now see fit.

I shall never return to you, father. Life means one thing to you, another to me. You cannot change; I would not, now, for all the world. I must go my way, thinking my own thoughts, doing my own work, living up to my own ideals, whatever these may be. Your money cannot lure me back to you, back to that old, false, sheltered, horrible life of ease and idleness and veiled robbery! The skill you have given me as a musician will open out a way for me to earn my own living and be free. For this I thank you, and for much else, even as I say good-bye to you for all time.

I have written Wally. He will tell you more about me, and about the change in my views and ambitions, which has taken place. Do not think harshly of me, father, and I will try to forgive you for the burden I now know you have laid upon the aching shoulders of this sad, old world.

And now, good-bye. Though you have lost a daughter, you may still rejoice to know that that daughter has found peace and joy and vast outlets for the energies of her whole heart and soul and being, in working for Socialism, the noblest ideal ever conceived by the mind of man.

Farewell, father; and think sometimes, not too unkindly, of

Your

Kate.

One week after these letters were mailed, "Tiger" Waldron, fanning the fires of the old man's terrible rage, had decided Flint to disinherit Catherine and to name him, Waldron, as his executor. Gabriel's fervent wish that she might be penniless, was granted.

On the very day this business was put through, practically delivering the Flint interests into Waldron's hands in the case of the old man's death, a verdict was reached in Gabriel's case, at Rochester.

This case, crammed through the calendar, ahead of a large jam of other business, proved how well unlimited funds can grease the wheels of Law. It proved, also, that in the face of infinitely-subsidized witnesses, lawyers, judge and jurymen, black becomes white, and a good deed is written down a crime.

Catherine, working incognito, co-operated with the Socialist defense, and did all that could be humanely done to have the truth made known, to overset the mass of perjury and fraud enmeshing Gabriel, and to force his acquittal.

As easily might she have bidden the sea rise from its bed and flood the dry and arid wastes of old Sahara. Her voice and that of the Socialists, their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain. A solid battery of capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other means—particularly including the majority of the priests and clergy—swamped the man and damned him and doomed him from the first word of the trial.

Money flowed in floods. Perjury overran the banks of the River of Corruption. Herzog branded the man a thief and fire-eater. Dope-fiends and harlots from the Red-Light district, "madames" and pimps and hangers-on, swore to the white-slave activities of this man, who never yet in all his four and twenty years had so much as entered a brothel.

Forged papers fixed past crimes and sentences on him. By innuendo and direct statement, dynamitings, arsons, violence and rioting in many strikes were laid at his door. His Socialist activities were dragged in the slime of every gutter; and his Party made to suffer for evil deeds existing only in the foul imagination of the prosecuting attorneys. The finest "kept" brains in the legal profession conducted the case from start to finish; and not a juryman was drawn on the panel who was not, from the first, sworn to convict, and bought and paid for in hard cash.

After three days—days in which Gabriel plumbed the bitterest depths of Hell and drank full draughts of gall and wormwood—the verdict came. Came, and was flashed from sea to sea by an exulting press; and preached on, and editorialized on, and gloated over by Flint and Waldron and many, many others of that ilk—while Catherine wept tears that seemed to drain her very heart of its last drops of blood.

At last she knew the meaning of the Class Struggle and her terrible father's part in it all. At last she understood what Gabriel had so long understood and now was paying for—the fact that Hell hath no fury like Capitalism when endangered or opposed.

The Price! Gabriel now must pay it, to the full. For that foul verdict, bought with gold wrung from the very blood and marrow of countless toilers, opened the way to the sentence which Judge Harpies regretted only that he could not make more severe—the sentence which the detectives and the prison authorities, well "fixed," counted on making a death-sentence, too.

"Gabriel Armstrong, stand up!"

He arose and faced the court. A deathlike stillness hushed the room, crowded with Socialists, reporters, emissaries of Flint, private detectives and hangers-on of the System. Heavily veiled, lest some of her father's people recognize her, Catherine herself sat in a back seat, very pale yet calm.

"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say, why sentence should not be pronounced upon you?"

Gabriel, also a little pale, but with a steadfast and fearless gaze, looked at the legal prostitute upon the bench, and shook his head in negation. He deigned not, even, to answer this kept puppet of the ruling class.

Judge Harpies frowned a trifle, cleared his throat, glanced about him with pompous dignity; and then, in a sonorous and impressive tone—his best asset on the bench, for legal knowledge and probity were not his—announced:

"It is the judgment of this court that you do stand committed to pay a fine of three thousand dollars into the treasury of the United States, and to serve five years at hard labor in the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta!"



CHAPTER XXVII.

BACK IN THE SUNLIGHT.

Four years and two months from the day when this iniquitous verdict fell from the lips of the "bought and paid for" judge, a sturdily built and square jawed man stood on the steps of the Atlanta Penitentiary and, for the first time in all these weary months and years, faced the sun.

Pale with the prison-pallor that never fails to set its seal on the victims of a diseased society, which that society retaliates upon by shutting away from God's own light and air, this man stood there on the steps, a moment, then advanced to meet a woman who was coming toward him in the August glare. As he removed his cheap, convict-made cap, one saw his finely shaped head, close cropped with the infamous prison badge of servitude. Despite the shoddy miserable prison-suit that the prostituted government had given him—a suit that would have made Apollo grotesque and would have marked any man as an ex-convict, thus heavily handicapping him from the start—Gabriel Armstrong's poise and strength still made themselves manifest.

And the smile as they two, the woman and he, came together and their hands clasped, lighted his pale features with a ray brighter than that of the blistering Southern sunshine flooding down upon them both.

"I knew you'd come, Catherine," said he, simply, his voice still the same deep, vibrant, earnest voice which, all that time ago, had thrilled and inspired her at the hour of her great conversion. Still were his eyes clear, level and commanding; and through his splendid body, despite all his jailers had been able to do, coursed an abundant life and strong vitality.

Gabriel had served his time with consummate skill, courage and intelligence. Like all wise men, he had recognized force majeure, and had submitted. He had made practically no infractions of the prison rules, during his whole "bit." He had been quiet, obedient and industrious. His work, in the brush factory, had always been well done; and though he had consistently refused to bear tales, to spy, to inform or be a stool-pigeon—the quickest means of winning favor in any prison—yet he had given no opportunity for savagery and violence to be applied to him. Not even Flint's eager wish to have his jailers force him into rebellion had succeeded. Realizing to the full the sort of tactics that would be used to break, and if possible to kill him, Gabriel had met them all with calm self-reliance and with a generalship that showed his brain and nerves were still unshaken. On their own ground he had met these brutes, and he had beaten them at their own game.

Their attempt to make a "dope" out of him had ignominiously failed. He had detected the morphine they had cleverly mixed with his water; and, after his drowsiness and weird dreams had convinced him of the plot, had turned the trick on it by secretly emptying this water out and by drinking only while in the shop, where he could draw water from the faucet. The cell guards' intelligence had been too limited to make them inquire of the brush shop guards about his habits. Also, Gabriel, had feigned stupefaction while in the cell. Thus he had simulated the effects of the drug, and had really thrown his tormentors off the track. For months and months they were convinced that they were weakening his will and destroying his mentality, while as a matter of fact his reasoning powers and determination never had been more keen.

By bathing as often as possible, by taking regular and carefully planned calisthenics, by reading the best books in the prison library, by attention to every rule of health within his means, and by allowing himself no vices, not even his pipe, Gabriel now was emerging from the Bastile of Capitalism in a condition of mind and body so little impaired that he knew a few weeks would entirely restore him. The good conduct allowance, or "copper," which they had been forced to allow him for exemplary conduct, had cut ten months off his sentence. And now in mid-August of 1925, there he stood, a free man again, with purpose still unshaken and with a woman by his side who shared his high ambition and asked no better lot than to work with him toward the one great aim—Socialism!

Now, as these two walked side by side along the sunbaked street of the sweltering Southern town, Gabriel was saying:

"So I haven't changed as much as you expected? I'm glad of that, Kate. Only superficial changes, at most. Just give me a little time to pull together and get my legs under me again, and—forward march! Charge the forts! Eh, Catherine?"

She nodded, smiling. Smiles were rare with her, now. She had grown sober and serious, in these years of work and battle and stern endeavor. The Catherine Flint of the old times had vanished—the Catherine of country club days, and golf and tennis, and the opera—the Catherine of Newport, of the horse show, of Paris, of "society." In her place now lived another and a nobler woman, a woman known and loved the length and breadth of the land, a woman exalted and strengthened by new, high and splendid race-aspirations; by a vision of supernal beauty—the vision of the world for the workers, each for all and all for each!

She had grown more mature and beautiful, with the passing years. No mark of time had yet laid its hand upon her face or figure. Young, still—she was now but five-and-twenty, and Gabriel only twenty-eight—she walked like a goddess, lithe, strong and filled with overflowing vigor. Her eyes glowed with noble enthusiasms; and every thought, every impulse and endeavor now was upward, onward, filled with stimulus and hope and courage.

Thus, a braver, broader and more splendid woman than Gabriel had known in the other days of his first love for her—the days when he had wished her penniless, the days when her prospective millions stood between them—she walked beside him now. And they two, comrades, understood each other; spoke the same language, shared the same aspirations, dreamed the same wondrous dreams. Their smile, as their eyes met, was in itself a benediction and a warm caress.

"Charge the forts!" Gabriel repeated. "Yes, Kate, the battle still goes on, no matter what happens. Here and there, soldiers fall and die. Even battalions perish; but the war continues. When I think of all the fights you've been in, since I was put away, I'm unspeakably envious. You've been through the Tawana Valley strike, the big Consolidated Western lockout and the Imperial Mills massacre. You were a delegate to the 1923 Revolution Congress, in Berlin, and saw the slaughter in Unter den Linden—helped nurse the wounded comrades, inside the Treptow Park barricades. Then, out in California—"

She checked him, with a hand on his arm.

"Please don't, Gabriel," she entreated. "What I have done has been so little, so terribly, pitiably little, compared to what needs to be done! And then remember, too, that in and through all, this thought has run, like the red thread through every cable of the British navy—the thought that in my every activity, I am working against my own father, combatting him, being as it were a traitor and—"

"Traitor?" exclaimed the man. "Never! The bond between you two is forever broken. You recognize in him, now, an enemy of all mankind. Waldron is another. So is every one of the Air Trust group—that is to say, the small handful of men who today own the whole world and everything in it.

"Your father, as President of that world-corporation which potentially controls two thousand millions of human beings—and which will, tomorrow, absolutely control them, is no longer any father of yours.

"He is a world-emperor, and his few associates are princes of the royal house. Your life and thought have forever broken with him. No more can bonds and ties of blood hold you. Your larger duty calls to battle against this man. Treachery? A thousand times, no! Treason to tyrants is obedience to God! Or, if not God, then to mankind!"

He paused and looked at her. They had now reached a little park, some half mile from the grim and dour old walls of the Federal Pen. Trees and grass and playing children seemed to invite them to stop and rest. Though strong, moreover, Gabriel had for so long been unused to walking, that even this short distance had tired him a little. And the oppressive heat had them both by the throat.

"Shall we sit down here and wait a little?" asked he. "Plan a little, see where we are and what's to be done next?"

She nodded assent.

"Of course," she said, "even if I could have got word in to you, I wouldn't have given you our real plans."

"Hardly!" he exclaimed. Then, coming to a fountain, they sat down on a bench close by. Nobody, they made sure, was within ear-shot.

"Thank God," he breathed, "that you, Kate, and only you, met me as I came out! It was a grand good idea, wasn't it, to keep my time of liberation a secret from the comrades? Otherwise there might have been a crowd on hand, and various kinds of foolishness; and time and energy would have been used that might have been better spent in working for the Revolution!"

She looked at him a trifle curiously.

"You forget," said she, "that all public meetings have been prohibited, ever since last April. Federal statute—the new Penfield Bill—'The Muzzler' as we call it."

"That's so!" he murmured. "I forgot. Fact is, Kate, I am out of touch with things. While you've been fighting, I've been buried alive. Now, I must learn much, before I can jump back into the war again. And above all, I must lose my identity. That's the first and most essential thing of all!"

"Of course," she assented. "They—the Air Trust World-corporation—will trail you, everywhere you go. All this, as you know, has been provided for. You must vanish a while."

"Indeed I must. If they 'jobbed' me like that, in 1921, what won't they do now in 1925?"

"They won't ever get you, again, Gabriel," she answered, "if your wits and ours combined, can beat them. True, the Movement has been badly shot to pieces. That is, its visible organization has suffered, and it's outlawed. But under the surface, Gabriel, you haven't an idea of its spread and power. It's tremendous—it's a volcano waiting to burst! Let the moment come, the leader rise, the fire burst forth, and God knows what may not happen!"

"Splendid!" exclaimed Gabriel. "The battle calls me, like a clarion-call! But we must act with circumspection. The Plutes, powerful as they now are, won't need even the shadow of an excuse to plant me for life, or slug or shoot me. Things were rotten enough, then; but today they're worse. The hand of this Air Trust monopoly, grasping every line of work and product in the world, has got the lid nailed fast. We're all slaves, every man and woman of us. Even our Socialists in Congress can do nothing, with all these muzzling and sedition and treason bills, and with this conscription law just through. Now that the government—the Air Trust, that is to say—is running the railways and telegraphs and telephones, a strike is treason—and treason is death! Kate, this year of grace, 1925, is worse than ever I dreamed it would be. Oh, infinitely worse! No wonder our movement has been driven largely underground. No wonder that the war of mass and class is drawing near—the actual, physical war between the Air Trust few and the vast, toiling, suffering, stifling world!"

She nodded.

"Yes," said she, "it's coming, and soon. Things are as you say, and even worse than you say, Gabriel. I know more of them, now, than you can know. Remember London's 'Iron Heel?' When I first read it I thought it fanciful and wild. God knows I was mistaken! London didn't put it half strongly enough. The beginning was made when the National Mounted Police came in. All the rest has swiftly followed. If you and I live five years longer, Gabriel, we'll see a harsher, sterner and more murderous trampling of that Heel than ever Comrade Jack imagined!"

"Right!" said he. "And for that very reason, Kate, I've got to go into hiding till my beard and hair grow and I can reappear as a different man. Don't look, just now, but in a minute take a peek. Over on that third bench, on the other side of the park, see that man? Well, he's a 'shadow.' There were three waiting for me, at the prison gates. You couldn't spot them, but I could. One was that Italian banana-seller that stood at the curb, on the first corner. Another was a taxi driver. And this one, over there, is the third. From now till they 'get' me again, they'll follow me like bloodhounds. I can't go free, to do my work and take part in the impending war, till I shake them. Look, now, do you see the one I mean?"

Cautiously the girl looked round, with casual glance as though to see a little boy playing by the fountain.

"Yes," she murmured. "Who is he? Do you know his name?"

"No," answered Gabriel. "His name, no. But I remember him, well enough. He's the larger of the two detectives I knocked out, in that room in Rochester. Beside his pay, he's got a personal motive in landing me back in 'stir,' or sending me 'up the escape,' as prison slang names a penitentiary and a death. So then," he added, "what's the first thing? Where shall I go, and how, to hide and metamorphose? I'm in your hands, now, Kate. More than four years out of the world, remember, makes a fellow want a little lift when he comes back!"

She smiled and nodded comprehension.

"Don't explain, Gabriel," said she. "I understand. And I've got just the place in mind for you. Also, the way to get there. You see, comrade, we've been planning on this release. When can you go?"

"When? Right now!" exclaimed Gabriel, standing up. "The quicker, the better. Every minute I lose in getting myself ready to jump back into the fight, is a precious treasure that can never be regained!"

"Go, then," said she, with pride in her eyes. "I will wait here. Don't think of me; leave me here; I am self-reliant in every way. Go to the Cuthbert House, on Desplaines Street. Everything has been arranged for your escape. Every link in the chain is complete. Remember, we are working more underground, now, than when you were sentenced. And our machinery is almost perfect. Register at the hotel and take a room for a week. Then—"

"Register, under my own name?" asked he.

"Under your own name. Stay there two days. You won't be molested so soon, and things won't be ready for you till the third day. On that day—"

"Well, what then?"

"A message will come for you, that's all. Obey it. You have nothing more to do."

He nodded.

"I understand," said he. "But, Kate—who's paying for all this? Not you? I—I can't have you paying, now that every dollar you have must be earned by your own labor!"

She smiled a smile of wonderful beauty.

"Foolish, rebellious boy!" said she. "Have no fear! All expense will be borne by the Party, just as the Party paid your fine. It needs you and must have you; and were the cost ten times as great, would bear it to get you back! Remember, Gabriel, the Party is far larger than when you were buried alive in a cell. Even though in some ways outlawed and suppressed, its potential power is tremendous. All it needs is the electric spark to cause the world-shaking explosion. All that keeps us from power now is the Iron Heel—that, and the clutch of the Air Trust already crushing and mangling us!

"Go, now," she concluded. "Go, and rest a while, and wait. All shall be well. But first, you must get back your strength completely, and find yourself, and take your place again in the ranks of the great, subterranean army!"

"And shall I see you soon, again?" he asked, his voice trembling just a little as their hands clasped once more, and once more parted.

"You will see me soon," she answered.

"Where?"

"In a safe place, where we can plan, and work, and organize for the final blow! Now, you shall know no more. Good-bye!"

One last look each gave the other. Their eyes met, more caressingly than many a kiss; and, turning, Gabriel took his way, alone, toward Desplaines Street.

At the exit of the park, he looked around.

There Catherine sat, on the bench. But, seemingly quite oblivious to everything, she was now reading a little book. Though he lingered a moment, hoping to get some signal from her, she never stirred or looked up from the page.

Sighing, with a strange feeling of sudden loneliness and a vast, empty yearning in his heart, Gabriel continued on his way, toward what? He knew not.

The detective on the other side of the park, no longer sat there. Somehow, somewhere, he had disappeared.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

IN THE REFUGE.

Far on the western slopes of Clingman Dome in the great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, a broad, low-built bungalow stood facing the setting sun. Vast stretches of pine forest shut it off from civilization and the prying activities of Plutocracy. The nearest settlement was Ravens, twenty miles away to eastward, across inaccessible ridges and ravines. Running far to southward, the railway left this wilderness untouched. High overhead, an eagle soared among the "thunder-heads" that presaged a storm up Sevier Pass. And, red through the haze to westward, the great huge sunball slid down the heavens toward the tumbled, jagged mass of peaks that rimmed the far horizon.

Within the bungalow, a murmur of voices sounded; and from the huge stone chimney a curl of smoke, arising, told of the evening meal, within, now being made ready. On the wide piazza sat a man, writing at a table of plain boards roughly pegged together. Still a trifle pale, yet with a look of health and vigor, he sat there hard at work, writing as fast as pen could travel. Hardly a word he changed. Sheet by sheet he wrote, and pushed them aside and still worked on. Some of the pages slid to the porch-floor, but he gave no heed. His brow was wrinkled with the intensity of his thought; and over his face, where now a disguising beard was beginning to be visible, the light of the sinking sun cast as it were a kind of glowing radiance.

At last the man looked up, and smiled, and eyed the golden mountain-tops far off across the valley.

"Wonderful aerie in the hills!" he murmured. "Wonderful retreat and hiding-place—wonderful care and forethought to have made this possible for me! How shall I ever repay all this? How, save by giving my last drop of blood, if need be, for the final victory?"

He pondered a moment, still half-thinking of the poem he had just finished, half-reflecting on the strange events of the past week—the secret ways, by swift auto, by boat, by monoplane which had brought him hither to this still undiscovered refuge. How had it all been arranged, he wondered; and who had made it possible? He could not tell, as yet. No information was forthcoming. But in his heart he understood, and his lips, murmuring the name of Catherine, blessed that name and tenderly revered it.

At last Gabriel bent, picked up the pages that had fallen, and arranged them all in order.

"Tomorrow this shall go out to the world," said he, "and to our press—such of it as still remains. It may inspire some fainting heart and thrill some lagging mind. Now, that the final struggle is at hand, more than guns we need inspiration. More than force, to meet the force that has ravished our every right and crushed Constitution and Law, alike, we need spiritual insight and integrity. Only through these, and by these, come what may, can a true, lasting victory be attained!"

In the doorway of the bungalow a woman appeared, her smile illumined by the sunset warmth.

"Come, Gabriel," said she. "We're waiting—the Granthams, Craig, and Brevard. Supper's ready. Not one of them will sit down, till you come."

"Have I been delaying you?" asked Gabriel, turning toward the woman, with a smile that matched her own.

"I'm afraid so, just a little," she answered. "But no matter; I'm glad. When you get to writing, you know, nothing else matters. One line of your verse is worth all the suppers in the world."

"Nonsense!" he retorted. "I'm a mere scribbler!"

"We won't argue that point," she answered. "But at any rate, you're done, now. So come along, boy—or the comrades will begin 'dividing up' without us; for this mountain air won't brook delay."

Gabriel took a long breath, stretched his powerful arms out toward the mountains, and raised his face to the last light of day.

"Nature!" he whispered. "Ever beautiful and ever young! Ah, could man but learn thy lessons and live close to thy great heart!"

Then, turning, he followed Catherine into the bungalow.

Beautiful and restful though the outside was, the interior was more restful and more charming still.

In the vast fireplace, to left, a fire of pine roots was crackling. The room was filled with their pitchy, wholesome perfume, with the dancing light of their blaze and with the warmth made grateful by that mountain height.

Simple and comfortable all the furnishings were, hand-wrought for use and pleasure. Big chairs invited. Broad couches offered rest. No hunting-trophies, no heads of slaughtered wild things disfigured the walls, as in most bungalows; but the flickering firelight showed pictures that inspired thought and carried lessons home—pictures of toil and of repose, pictures of life, and love, and simple joy—pictures of tragedy, of reality and deep significance. Here one saw Millet's "Sower," and "Gleaners" and "The Man with the Hoe." There, Fritel's "The Conquerors," and Stuck's "War." A large copy of Bernard's "Labor,"—the sensation of the 1922 Paris Salon—hung above the mantelpiece, on which stood Rodin's "Miner" in bronze. Portraits of Marx, Engels, LaSalle and Debs, with others loved and honored in the Movement, showed between original sketches by Walter Crane, Balfour Kerr, Art Young and Ryan Walker. And in the well-filled bookshelves at the right, Socialist books in abundance all told the same tale to the observer—that this was a Socialist nest high up there among the mountains, and that every thought and word and deed was inspired by one great ideal and one alone—the Revolution!

At a plain but well-covered table near the western windows, where fading sunlight helped firelight to illumine the little company, sat three men—two of them armed with heavy automatics—and a woman. Another woman, Catherine, was standing by her chair and beckoning Gabriel to his.

"Come, Comrade!" she exclaimed. "If you delay much longer, everything will be stone cold, and then beg forgiveness if you dare!"

Gabriel laughed.

"Your own fault, if you wait for me," he answered, seating himself. "You know how it is when you get to scribbling—you never know when to stop. And the scenery, up here, won't let you go. Positively fascinating, that view is! If the Plutes knew of it, they'd put a summer resort here, and coin millions!"

"Yes," answered Craig, once Congressman Craig, but now hiding from the Air Trust spies. "And what's more, they'd mighty soon confiscate this resting-up place of the Comrades, and have us back behind bars, or worse. But they don't know about it, and aren't likely to. Thank Heaven for at least one place the Party can maintain as an asylum for our people when too hard-pressed! Not a road within ten miles of here. No way to reach this place, masked here in the cliffs and mountains, except by aeroplane. Not one chance in a thousand, fellows, that they'll ever find it. Confusion take them all!"

The meal progressed, with plenty of serious and earnest discussion of the pressing problems now close at hand. Brevard, a short, spare man, editor of the recently-suppressed "San Francisco Revolutionist" and now in hiding, made a few trenchant remarks, from time to time. Grantham and his wife, both active speakers on the "Underground Circuit" and both under sentence of long imprisonment, said little. Most of the conversation was between Catherine, Craig and Gabriel. Long before the supper was done, lamps had to be brought and curtains lowered. At last the meal was over.

"Dessert, now, Gabriel!" exclaimed Grantham. "Your turn!"

"Eh? What?" asked Armstrong. "My turn for what?"

"Your turn to do your part! Don't think that you're going to write a poem and then put it in your pocket, that way. Come, out with it!"

Gabriel's protests availed nothing. The others overbore him. And at last, unwillingly, he drew out the manuscript and spread it open on his knee.

"You really want to hear this?" he demanded. "If you can possibly spare me, I wish you would!"

For all answer, Craig pushed a lamp over toward him. The warm light on Gabriel's face, now slightly bearded, and on his strong, corded throat, made a striking picture as he cast his eyes on the manuscript and in vibrant and harmonious voice, read:

I SAW THE SOCIALIST

I saw the Socialist sitting at a great Banquet of Men, Sitting with honored leaders of the blind, unwitting Multitude; I saw him there with the writers, editors, painters, men of letters, Legislators and judges, the Leaders of the People, Leaders flushed with the wines of price, eating costly and rare foods, Making loud talk, and boastful, of that marvel, American Liberty! Thinking were they no thought of hunger and pinching cold; Of the blue-lipped, skinny children, the thin-chested, coughing men, The dry-breasted mothers, the dirt, disease and ignorance, The mangled workmen, the tramps, drunkards, pickpockets, prostitutes, thieves, The mad-houses, jails, asylums and hospitals, the sores, the blood of war, And all the other wondrous blessings that attend our civilization— That civilization through which the wines and foods were given them.

I saw the Socialist there, calm, unmoved, unsmiling, thoughtful, Sober, serious, full of dispassionate and prophetic vision, Not like the other men, the all-wise Leaders of the People. The political economists, the professors, the militarists, heroes and statisticians; Not like the kings and presidents and emperors, the nobles and gold-crammed bankers, But mindful, more than they, of the cellars under the House of Life Where blind things crawl in the dark, things men and yet not human, Things whose toil makes possible the Banquets of the Leaders of Men, Things that live and yet are not alive; things that never taste of Life; Things that make the rich foods, themselves snatching filthy crumbs; Things that produce the wines of price, and must be content with lees; Things that shiver and cringe and whine, that snarl sometimes, That are men and women and children, and yet that know not Life!

I saw the Socialist there; I sat at the banquet; beside him, Listened to the surging music, saw all the lights and flowers, Flowers and lights and crystal cups, whereof the price for each Might have brought back from Potter's Field some bloodless, starving baby. I heard the Leaders' speeches, the turgid oratory, The well-turned phrases of the Captains, the rotund babble of prosperity, (Prosperity for whom? Nay, ask not troublesome questions!) The Captains' vaunting I heard, their boasts of glory and victory, While red, red, red their hands dripped red with the blood of the butchered workers. I heard the Judges' self-glorification, Quixotic fighting of windmills, Heard also the unclean jests that those respected Leaders told. And as I looked and listened, I still observed the Socialist, Unmoved and patient and serious, calm, full of sober reflections.

Then there spake (among many others) an honored and full-paunched Bishop. Rubicund he was, and of portly habit of body, Shepherd of a well-pastured flock, mightily content with God, Out of whose omnipotent Hand (no doubt) the blessings of his life descended. I heard this exponent of Christ the Crucified, Christ the Carpenter, Christ the Leader of Workingmen, the Agitator, the Disturber, Christ the Labor-organizer, Christ the Archetypal Socialist, Friend of the dwellers in the pits of Life, Consoler of earth's exploited, Who once with the lash scourged from the Temple the unclean graft-brood of usurers. And the rotund Bishop's words were as the crackling of dry thorns Under a pot, bubbling without use in the desert of dreary platitudes. The story he told was spiced and garnished with profane words, Whereat the Leaders laughed in their cups, making great show of merriment, So that the banquet-hall rang, and wine was spilt on the linen. Wine as red as blood—the blood of the shattered miner, Blood of the boy in the rifle-pits, blood of the coughing child-slave, Blood of the mangled trainman, blood that the Carpenter shed.

And still I watched the Socialist. Sober, judicial, observant And full of greater wisdom he was than to laugh with the tipsy Leaders. His eyes were fixed on the Bishop, vice-regent of God upon earth. And as I watched the Socialist, the unmoved, the contemplative one, He thoughtfully took his pencil, he took the fine and large card Whereon the names of the rich foods and all the costly wines were printed, And made a few notes of the feast, notes of the Bishop's speech, Notes to remind him to search the slums for the great, God-given prosperity, Which all the Judges, Lawmakers, Captains and Leaders knew to be "our" portion; Notes of the flowers, the wine, the lights, the music, the splendor, Notes of the Leaders' oratory, notes of the Bishop's deep-voiced unctiousness, Notes he made; and as I looked at the notes he was carefully writing, The words ran red like wine and blood, they blazed like the blazing lights! Words they were of blood and fire, that spread, that filled the banquet-hall. Words of old, I read them—"MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSHIN!— Weighed in the Balance you are, ye Leaders respected of men, You Statesmen, Lawmakers, Judges, Captains, Bishops, vice-regents of God! Weighed and tried and found wanting. Give way, now, to what shall come after! Make ye way for the Men who shall do what ye have but neglected and shirked! Make ye way for a Time which hath more than Power and Greed for its watchwords! Soon your day shall decline forever, your sun shall sink and shall vanish. Then from the Cellars of Life the darkness-dwellers shall issue, Greeting another daunt which shall have more than pain for its portion. Then no more shall the humble, the lowly, the friends of the Nazarene Carpenter Be starved, be mangled for gold, be crucified, slaughtered, bled. Make ye way!...Make ye way!..."

Such was the message I read, the words of that fire-writ warning. Then peace came back to my spirit, calm peace, and hope and patience: Then, through my anger and heat, I thought of the Retribution. But even more clearly I saw the New Birth of this weary world, This world now groaning in chains, with the bloody sweat of oppression. These things and many more, such as were hard to write of, I read in the words of the Socialist, patient, peaceful and sober, Full of prophetic vision, above all things hopeful and patient, Written in living flame at the Feast of the Leaders of Men....



CHAPTER XXIX.

"APRES NOUS LE DELUGE!"

As Gabriel's voice fell to silence, after the last words, a stillness came upon the lamp-lit room, a hush broken only by the snapping of the pine-root fire on the hearth and by the busy ticking of the clock upon the chimneypiece. Then, after a minute's pause, Craig reached over and took Gabriel by the hand.

"I salute you, O poet of the Revolution now impending!" he cried, while Catherine's eyes gleamed bright with tears. "Would God that I could write like that, old man!"

"And would God that my paper was still being issued!" Brevard added, making a gesture with the pipe that, in his eagerness to hear, he had allowed to die. "If it were I'd give that poem my front page, and fling its message full in the faces of Plutocracy!"

Gabriel smiled a bit nervously.

"Don't, please don't," he begged. "If you really do like it help me spread it. Don't waste words on praise, but plan with me, tonight, how we can get this to the people—how we can perfect our final arrangements—what we must do, now, at once, to meet the Air Trust and defeat it before its terrible and unrelenting grip closes on the throat of the world!"

"Right!" said Craig. "We must act at once, while there's yet time. today, all seems safe. The Air Trust spies haven't ferreted this place out. A week from now, they may have, and one of the most secure and useful Socialist refuges in the country may be only a heap of ashes—like the ones at Kenwyck, Hampden, Mount Desert and Loftiss. Every day is precious. Every one helps to perfect Gabriel's disguise and adds materially to his strength."

"True," assented Gabriel. "We mustn't wait too long, now. That last report we got yesterday, by our wireless, ought to stimulate us. Brainard says, in it, that the Air Trust people are now putting the finishing touches on the Niagara plant. That will give them condensing machinery for over 90,000,000 horsepower, all told. As I see the thing, it looks absolutely as though, when that is done, the whole Capitalist system of the world will center right there—focus there, as at a point. Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall Street play at finance and power. All, all are empty and meaningless!

"Power has been sucked dry, out of them all, comrades. You know as well as I know—better, perhaps—that all real power in the world, today, whether economic or political—nay, even the power of life and death, the power of breath or strangulation, has clotted at Niagara, in the central offices of the Air Trust; nay, right in Flint and Waldron's own inner office!"

Gabriel had stood up, while speaking; and now, pacing the floor of the big living-room, glanced first at one eager and familiar face, then at another.

"Comrades," said he, "we should not sleep, tonight. We should get out all our plans and data, all the dispatches that have come to us here, all the information at hand about our organization, whether open or subterranean. We should make this room and this time, in fact, the place and the hour for the planning of the last great blow on which hangs the fate of the world. If it succeed, the human race goes free again. If it fail—and God forbid!—then the whole world will lie in the grip of Flint and Waldron! With our other centers broken up and under espionage, our press forced into impotence—save our underground press—and political action now rendered farcical as ever it was in Mexico, when Diaz ruled, we have but one recourse!"

"And that is?" asked Catherine. "The general strike?"

"A final, general, paralyzing strike; and with it, the actual, physical destruction of the colossal crime of crimes, the Air Trust works at Niagara!"

A little silence followed. They all drew round the reading-table, now, near the fireplace. Mrs. Grantham brought a lamp; and Brevard, opening a chest near the book-case, fetched a portfolio of papers, dispatches, plans, reports and data of all kinds.

"Gabriel's right," said he. "The time is ripe, now, or will be in a week or so. Nothing can be gained by delaying any longer. Every day adds to their power and may weaken ours. Our organization, for the strike and the attack on the works, is as complete as we can make it. We must come to extreme measures, at once, or world-strangulation will set in, and we shall be eternally too late!"

"Extreme measures, yes," said Gabriel, while Brevard spread the papers out and sorted them, and Craig drew contemplatively at his pipe. "The masters would have it so. Our one-time academic discussion about ways and means has become absurd, in the face of plutocratic savagery. We're up against facts, now, not theories. God knows it's against the dictates of my heart to do what must be done; but it's that or stand back and see the world be murdered, together with our own selves! And in a case of self-defense, no measures are unjustifiable.

"Whatever happens our hands are clean. The plutocrats are the attacking force. They have chosen, and must take the consequences; they have sown, and must reap. One by one, they have limited and withdrawn every political right. They have taken away free speech and free assemblage, free press and universal suffrage. They have limited the right to vote, by property qualifications that have deprived the proletariat of every chance to make their will felt. They have put through this National Censorship outrage and—still worse—the National Mounted Police Bill, making Cossack rule supreme in the United States of America, as they have made it in the United States of Europe.

"Before they elected that tool of tools, President Supple, in 1920, on the Anti-Socialist ticket, we still had some constitutional rights left—a few. But now, all are gone. With the absorption and annexation of Canada, Mexico and Central America, slavery full and absolute settled down upon us. The unions simply crumbled to dust as you know, in face of all those millions of Mexican peons swamping the labor-market with starvation-wage labor. Then, as we all remember, came the terrible series of strikes in 1921 and 1922, and the massacres at Hopedale and Boulder, at Los Angeles and Pittsburg, and, worst of all, Gary. That finished what few rights were left, that killing did. And then came the army of spies, and the proscriptions, and the electrocution of those hundred and eleven editors, speakers and organizers—why bring up all these things that we all know so well? We were willing to play the game fair and square, and they refused. Say that, and you say all.

"No need to dwell on details, comrades. The Air Trust has had its will with the world, so far. It has crushed all opposition as relentlessly as the car of Juggernaut used to crush its blind, fanatical devotees. True, our Party still exists and has some standing and some representatives; but we all know what power it has—in the open! Not that much!" And he snapped his fingers in the air.

"In the open, none!" said Craig, blowing a cloud of smoke. "I admit that, Gabriel. But, underground—ah!"

"Underground," Gabriel took up the word, "forces are now at work that can shatter the whole infernal slavery to dust! This way of working is not our choice; it is theirs. They would have it so—now let them take their medicine!"

"Yes, yes," eagerly exclaimed Catherine, her face flushed and intense. "I'm with you, Gabriel. To work!"

"To work, yes," put in Craig, "but with system, order and method. My experience in Congress has taught me some valuable lessons. The universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make possible, is theirs. And back of that, military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair! And back of all those, the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!"

Gabriel thought, a moment, before replying. Then said he:

"I know it, Craig. All the more reason why we must hit them at once, and hit hard! These reports here," and he gestured at the papers that Brevard had spread out under the lamp-light, "prove that, at the proper signal, every chance indicates that we can paralyze transportation—the keynote of the whole situation.

"True, the government—that is to say, the Air Trust, and that is to say, Flint and Waldron—can keep men in every engine-cab in the country. They can keep them at every switch and junction. But this isn't France, remember, nor is it any small, compact European country. Conditions are wholly different here. Everywhere, vast stretches of track exist. No power on earth—not even Flint and Waldron's—can guard all those hundreds of thousands of miles. And so I tell you, taking our data simply from these reports and not counting on any more organized strength than they show, we have today got the means of cutting and crippling, for a week at least, the movements of troops to Niagara. And that, just that, is all we need!"

A little silence. Then said Catherine:

"You mean, Gabriel, that if we can keep the troops back for a little while, and annihilate the Air Trust plant itself, the great revolution will follow?"

He nodded, with a smouldering fire in his eyes.

"Yes," said he. "If we can loosen the grip of this monster for only forty-eight hours, and flash the news to this bleeding, sweating, choking land that the grip is loosened—after that we need do no more. Apres nous, le deluge; only not now in the sense of wreck and ruin, but meaning that this deluge shall forever wash away the tyranny and crime of Capitalism! Forever and a day, to leave us free once more, free men and women, standing erect and facing God's own sunlight, our heritage and birthplace in this world!"

Catherine made no answer, but her hand clasped his. The light on her magnificent masses of copper-golden hair, braided about her head, enhanced her beauty. And so for a moment, the little group sat there about the table—the group on which now so infinitely much depended; and the lamp-glow shone upon their precious plans, reports and diagrams.

Into each others' eyes they looked, and knew the moment of final conflict was drawn very near, at last. The moment which, in failure or success, should for long years, for decades, for centuries perhaps, determine whether the world and all its teeming millions were to be slave or free.

They spoke no word and took no oath of life-and-death fidelity, those men and women who now had been entrusted with the fate of the world. But in their eyes one read unshakable devotion to the Cause of Man, unswerving loyalty to the Great Ideal, and a calm, holy faith that would make light of death itself, could death but pave the way to victory!



CHAPTER XXX.

TRAPPED!

Brevard was the first to speak. "Gabriel," said he, "we have agreed that you must be the leader in this whole affair. The actual, personal leader. To begin with, you're younger and physically stronger than any of us men. Your executive ability is, without any question whatever, far and away ahead of ours—for we are more in the analytical, compiling, organizing, preparing line. To cap all, your personality carries more, far more, with the mass of the comrades than any of ours. Your career, in the past, your conflict with Flint and Waldron, and your long imprisonment, have given you the necessary following. You, and you alone, must issue the final call, lead the last, supreme attack, and carry the old flag, the Crimson Banner of Brotherhood, to the topmost battlement of an annihilated Capitalism!"

Gabriel demurred, but they overruled him. So, presently, he consented; and pledged his life to it; and thrilled with pride and joy at thought of what now lay written in the Book of Fate, for him to read.

Catherine's eyes shone with a strange light, as she looked upon him there, so modest yet so strong. And he, smiling a little as his gaze met hers, foresaw other things than war, and was glad. His heart sang within him, that memorable and wondrous night, up there in the hiding-place among the Great Smokies—there with Catherine and the other comrades—there planning the last great blow to strike away forever the shackles from the bleeding limbs of all the human race!

But serious and urgent things were to be thought of, and at once, for on the morrow Brevard was going down, disguised, to Louisville, in one of the two monoplanes, to attend a final secret meeting of the North-middle Section Committee. From this he would proceed to the refuge near Port Colborne, Ontario.

"Let us make that our meeting-place, one week from tonight," said Gabriel, "in case anything happens. Should we be detected, or should any accident befall, we must have some time and place to rally by. Is my suggestion taken?"

They all agreed, after some discussion.

"But," added Mrs. Grantham, "let's hope we're still secure here, for a while. It doesn't seem possible they could find us here, in this broad mountain wilderness!"

Brevard, meanwhile, was spreading out diagrams and plans.

"The plant at Niagara," said he. "Gabriel, study this, now, as you never yet have studied anything! For on your intimate knowledge of these plans—which, by the way, have been obtained only at the cost of eight lives of our comrades, and through adventures which alone would make a wonderful book—depends everything. With all communications cut, and troops kept away, and our own people storming the works, you will yet fail, Gabriel, unless you know every building, every courtyard, wall and passage, every door and window, almost, I might say. For the place is more than a manufacturing plant. It's a fortress, a city in itself, a wonderful, gigantic center to the whole web of world-domination!

"So now, to the plans!"

For hours, while Gabriel took notes and listened keenly, asked questions and made minute memoranda, Brevard explained the situation at the great Air Trust works. The others looked on, listened, and from time to time made suggestions; but for the most part they kept silent, unwilling to disturb this most important work.

Carefully and with painstaking accuracy he showed Gabriel how the plant now embraced more than two square miles of territory around the Falls, all guarded by tremendous barricades mounting machine-guns and search-lights. On both sides of the river this huge monster had squatted, effectually shutting out all sight of the Falls and depriving the people of their birthright of beauty, at the same time that it had harnessed the vast waterpower to the task of enslaving the world.

"From the Grand Trunk steel arch bridge up to and including the former plant of the Niagara Falls Power Company," said Brevard, "you see the plant extends. And, on the Canadian side—or what was the Canadian, before 'we' absorbed Canada—it stretches from the Ontario Power Company's works to those of the Toronto-Niagara Power Company, including both. In addition to having absorbed these, it has taken over the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company, the Canadian Power Company and half a dozen others, and has, as you see, established its central offices and plant on Goat Island.

"Here Flint and Waldron have what may be called a citadel within a citadel—twelve acres of administration buildings, laboratories (in charge of your old friend Herzog, by the way!) and experimental works, including also the big steel chambers, vacuum-lined, where they are already storing their liquid oxygen to be turned into their pipe-lines and tank-cars. This Goat Island central plant will be the real kernel in the nut, Gabriel. Once that is gone, you'll have ripped the heart out of the beast, smashed the vital ganglia, and given the world the respite, the breathing-space it must have, to free itself!"

"And if I don't?" asked Gabriel. "If anything happens to upset our blockading tactics, or if our attacking forces are defeated or our aeroplanes shot down, what then?"

"Then," said Brevard, slowly, "then the world had better die than survive under the abominable slavery now impending. Already the pipe-lines have been laid to Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany and Scranton. Already they're under way to New York City itself, and to Cincinnati. Already other plants have been projected for Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and New Orleans, to say nothing of half a dozen in the Old World. At this present moment, as we all sit here in this quiet room on this remote mountain-slope, the world's air is being cornered! All the atmospheric nitrogen is planned for, by Flint and Waldron, to pass under their control—and with it, every crop that grows. All the oxygen will follow. They're already having their domestic-service apparatus manufactured—their cold-pipe radiators, meters, evaporators and respirators. I tell you, comrades, this thing is close upon us, not as a theory, now, but as a terrible, an inconceivably ghastly reality!