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?”