Sleeping on it, however, was the one thing that they did not do. Nancy had put out the light and was putting up the curtains when she aroused her drowsy sister with a sudden cry:
“O, Beatrice, come here and look.”
They stood together at the open window, startled and terrified by what they saw. The big hall in the next block was plainly visible, with its shutters down and its door wide open, as though the air within had become close and stifling beyond endurance. The place was still packed with men, but no orderly company now. They were all standing, some of them had climbed upon the benches, and every one seemed to be shouting at once. In the depths of the building, almost beyond where they could see, somebody was waving a red flag. Presently a group of men came rushing down the steps, then more and more, until the street was filled with an irregular, shouting throng, waving hats, bandannas, and banners and shrieking together, so many of them in foreign tongues that it was impossible to guess what they said.
“It is the strike,” Nancy gasped. “Christina did not tell you it would begin so soon or be so—so terrible.”
“That man walking at the head of them all is her brother Thorvik,” said Beatrice. “I wonder where they are going and what they mean to do.”
They lingered at the open window until Nancy, sniffing suddenly, declared, “I smell smoke.”
Before Beatrice could answer, they heard in the next room the voice of Aunt Anna, who had been awakened by the uproar.
“It is just a public meeting breaking up,” Beatrice reassured her, although the sharp smell of burning wood began to fill the room as the blue smoke drifted in at the window. The girls were about to go on with some explanation when Nancy caught her sister’s arm and, by a sign, made her look out.
The side door, just below them, was opening and closing silently, to allow the passing of a stealthy figure. Joe Ling, with a pole balanced over his shoulder and at either end of it a heavy basket, was slipping away into the dark with that short-stepping trot of a hurried Chinaman. He had brought those same baskets, containing all his worldly possessions, to their house three days before. It was plain that he not only considered his term of employment with them at an end but that he was about to shake the dust of Ely from his silent, Chinese-slippered feet.
“And oughtn’t we to go too?” Beatrice wondered desperately.