The Witness

by Grace Livingston Hill

The room seemed about to burst with the heat. Timbers were cracking. All the stories they had heard of the frailty of the building came now to goad them as they hurtled from one end of their pen to the other, while intermittent clouds of smoke and darting flames conspired to bewilder their senses.

Katie sprang to seize her friend and draw her out of the path of the stampede. As she lifted her a cry arose, like the wail of a lost world facing the judgment. The floor swayed, the machines about seemed to totter, and the floor above seemed bending down with some great weight. There was a cracking, wrenching, twisting, as of the whole great building in mortal pain, and just as Katie drew her unconscious friend away to the window the floor above gave way and down crashed three awful machines, like great devouring juggernauts, to crush and bear away whatever came in their way.

After that, hell itself could scarcely have presented a more terrible spectacle of writhing, tortured souls, pinned anguishing amid the flames; of white faces below looking up to ghastly ones above that gazed down with horror into the awful cavern, closed their eyes, clung to walls and windows, and knew not what to do!

The fearful noise of machinery had suddenly ceased and been succeeded by a calm in which the soft sound of rushing flames, the babble of the crowd outside, the gong of fire-engines, and the cry of firemen seemed balm of music in the ears. Water hissed on hot machinery and burning walls. It splashed inside the window and on the white face of Susie. It touched the hot hands of Katie as she lifted her friend nearer to the blessed spray. A shadow of a ladder somewhere crossed the window. Splintered glass fell all about her, and a hand reached in and crushed the window frame.

It was Pat who lifted out the limp Susie and handed her down to Courtland, who was just below, while Katie turned and looked back at the fearful pit of fire beneath her, knowing that in but a few more seconds, if help came not, she, too, would be a part of that writhing, awful heap! She saw the white face and staring eyes of the gray-haired woman who ran the machine next to hers lying beneath a pile of dead. She reeled and felt her senses going. Her hot hands clung to the hotter window-ledge. The flames were leaping nearer! She could not hold out—

Then a strong hand grasped her and drew her out into the blessed air, and she felt herself being carried down, down, safely, wondering, as she went, if the vine was roasted yet, or if it still smirked greenly outside this holocaust; wished she had strength to shake a mocking finger at it; and then she knew no more.

For three long hours Courtland and Pat worked side by side, bringing out the living, searching for the dead and dying, carrying them to an improvised hospital in an old warehouse in the next block. Grim and soiled and gray, with singed hair, blistered hands and faces, and sickened hearts, they toiled on.

To Courtland the experience was like walking with God and being shown the way he might have gone, and how he had been saved. If he had accepted Ramsey Thomas's proposition he would have been a sharer in the sin that caused this catastrophe. He would have been a murderer, almost as much responsible for that charred body lying at his feet, for all those dead and dying, as if he had owned the place.

The whited sepulcher lay a heap of blackened ruins. Only one small corner rose, of blackened marble, to which clung a fragment of brave green to show what had been but a few short hours before. The morning's sun would see it, too, withered and black like the rest. The model factory was gone! But the money that had built it, the money that it had made, was still in existence to build it over again, a perpetual blind to the lawmakers who might have otherwise put a stop to its abuses! It would undoubtedly be built again, more whited, more sepulchral than before.

As he looked upon the ruin a great resolve came to him. He would give his life to fight the power that was setting its heel upon humanity and putting a price upon its blood. He would devote all his powers to the uplifting of people who had been downtrodden and oppressed in the simple act of earning their daily bread!