“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 mêlée 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!