“You shall tell her,” said Jason, “or I’ll take you out and explain to the mob that is howling for your blood.”
Again Martin Moreland shook his head.
Suddenly Jason swung him around; he shoved him in front of him across the room and into the hall from the back end of which there could be seen the big plate glass window, shattered at the top, and the glass door. Pressed against what remained of the broken glass of the window and the door, and reinforced by the width of the packed street behind them, there were faces topping the forms of men, yet one scarcely would have recognized them as the faces of men,—menacing faces by the hundred, upon the bodies of men who had been men of peace, men of patience, godly men. They were farmers and business men and day labourers. They had been outraged to a degree that had turned them into a compact mob of snarling, blood-thirsty beasts. In their hands could be seen revolvers, rifles, sickles; some of them carried axes, some of them bricks and stones, or clubs. At the sight of the banker a snarling cry broke from them and they surged forward until the front of the building shook with their impact.
Galvanized with terror, Moreland summoned strength to break from Jason’s grasp and rush back toward the directors’ room. But Jason was at his heels as he reached the door, he caught and whirled him around, once more forcing him to face Rebecca. She struggled to a sitting posture and stretched out both hands in a last appeal.
“My baby! Give me back my baby. Let me have him only one minute before I die!”
Martin Moreland shook his ghastly white head.
Then Jason gripped his other arm and brought his strength to bear until the old banker shrank and winced. Rebecca was rapidly losing strength. Great tears began running down her cheeks.
“Martin, I loved you so,” she pleaded. “Don’t you remember that I gave you everything? And you took all I had to give and you took my baby, too, and you threw me away and God punished me. He made me an outcast and a wanderer, while you had everything. It wasn’t fair. I’ve spent my life searching for my baby, and I can’t find him——”
Suddenly the beast broke in Doctor Grayson, in Albert Rich, in the sheriff, in the cashier. With black menace on their faces, they crowded up to reinforce Jason. The old banker looked around wildly for an avenue of escape; and there was none. He hesitated an instant longer and then he lifted a shaking hand as he said: “If you will have it, then, there is your baby.” He indicated Jason.
Rebecca lifted herself free of all support. She stared at Martin Moreland and then she studied Jason. Her eyes seemed to leap to his face and to cling there. A desperate inquiry was running in waves over her tortured face. She began to see lines that she recognized, a likeness to herself in the colouring of the hair and the eyes, suggestions of the lean face of Moreland, reproduced in Jason. A look of wonder crept into her face, and then one of horror. She drew back from Martin Moreland, a look of repulsion on her face, on every line of her figure.