The woman paused with one leg of a pair of overalls unpinned. The children straightened up, feeling for each other with mud-bedaubed hands. Emily felt as if her ears were about to burst with the strain of the silence.
Crack! Crack! Crack! An answering volley of oaths. A scream of derision and rage from a mob.
The children fled into the house. The woman gathered in a great armful of clothes from the line as if a rain storm had suddenly come. She ran, entangled in her burden, her thick legs in drab stockings interfering one with the other. Emily jumped to her feet.
“I cannot stay here,” she exclaimed. “I must see!”
She flew down the hall to the front of the house. There was a parlour and Camp’s paper and drawing materials were scattered about. He was barricading a window with the bedding from a room to the rear. He glanced at her. “Go back!” he said in a loud, harsh voice. “This is no place for a woman.”
“But it’s just the place for a reporter,” she replied. “I’ll help you.”
They arranged the mattresses so that, sheltered by them and the thick brick wall, they could peer out of the window from either side.
The square was empty. The gates in the stockade were closed. In each of the barricaded upper windows of the mill appeared the glittering barrels of several rifles at different heights.
“See that long, low building away off there to the left?” said Camp. “The ‘scabs’ and their militia guard are behind it. The strikers are in the houses along this side of the street.”
Crack! A bullet crashed into the mirror hanging on the rear wall of their parlour. It had cut a clean hole through the window pane without shivering it and had penetrated the mattresses as if they had been a single thickness of paper.