“No—I saw it,” said Emily. “Mr. Camp and I watched from the parlour window. Is there going to be more trouble?”
“Not for a good many hours. The ‘scabs’ retreated, and won’t come back until they’re sure the way is clear.”
Emily took up her pencil and looked at her paper. “I’ll call again later,” said Holyoke, as he departed. “You can file your despatch downstairs. The Postal telegraph office is in the hotel.”
She wrote about four thousand words, and went over her “copy” carefully three times. It did not please her, but she felt that she had told the facts, and that she had avoided “slopping over”—the great offence against which every newspaper man and woman who had given her advice had warned her. She filed the despatch at nine o’clock.
“We can put it on the wire at once,” said the telegraph manager. “We’ll get a loop straight into the Democrat office. We knew you people would be flocking here, and so we provided against a crush. We’ve got plenty of wires and operators.”
Emily ate little of the dinner that had been saved for her, and at each sudden crash from the kitchen where noisy servants were washing dishes, her nerves leaped and the blood beat heavily against her temples. She went back to the little reception room and stood at the window, looking out into the square. In the bright moonlight she saw the soldiers marching up and down before the entrance to the stockade. The open space between it and her was empty, and the soft light flooded round the great dark stains which marked the site of the tragedy.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” It was Marlowe’s voice, and it so startled her that she gave a low cry and clasped her clinched hands against her breast. She had been thinking of him. The death of those lovers, its reminder of the uncertainty of life and of the necessity of seizing happiness before it should escape forever, had brought him, or, rather, love with him as the medium, vividly into her mind.
“You frightened me—I’m seeing ghosts to-night,” she said. “How did you reach here when there is no train?”
“Several of us hired a special and came down—just an engine and tender. We fancied there might be more trouble. But it’s all over. The Union knows it can’t fight the whole State, and the Company is very apologetic for the killing of those people, especially the woman. Still, her death may have saved a long and bloody strike. That must have been an awful scene this afternoon.” He was talking absently. His eyes, his thoughts were upon her, slender, pale, yet golden.
Emily briefly described what she had seen.