Before twenty minutes had passed, the surrounding hills were alive with people who had come to look upon the burning breaker.
The spectacle was a grand one.
For many minutes the fire played about in the lower part of the building, among the pockets and the screens, and dashed up against the base of the shaft-tower like lapping waves. Then the small square windows, dotting the black surface of the breaker here and there up its seventy feet of height, began to redden and to glow with the mounting flames behind them; a column of white smoke broke from the topmost cornice, little red tongues went creeping up to the very pinnacle of the tower, and then from the highest point of all a great column of fire shot far up toward the onlooking stars, and the whole gigantic building was a single body of roaring, wavering flame.
It burned rapidly and brilliantly, and soon after midnight there was but a mass of charred ruins covering the ground where once the breaker stood.
There was little that could be saved; the cars in the loading-place, the tools in the engine-room, some loose lumber, and the household effects from a small dwelling-house near by; that was all. But among the many men who helped to save this little, none labored with such energetic effort, such daring zeal, such superhuman strength, as the huge-framed, big-bearded man they called Jack Rennie.
The strike had become general. The streets of the mining towns were filled with idle, loitering men and boys. The drinking saloons drove a brisk business, and the merchants feared disaster. Tom had not told any one as yet of his adventure at the breaker on the night of the fire. He knew that he ought to disclose his secret; indeed, he felt a pressing duty upon him to do so in order that the crime might be duly punished. But the secret order of Molly Maguires was a terror in the coal regions in those days; the torch, the pistol, and the knife were the instruments with which it carried out its desperate decrees, and Tom was absolutely afraid to whisper a word of what he knew, even to his mother or to Bennie.
But one day the news went out that Jack Rennie had been arrested, charged with setting fire to the Valley Breaker; and soon afterward a messenger came to the house of the Widow Taylor, saying that Tom was wanted immediately in Wilkesbarre at the office of Lawyer Pleadwell.
Tom answered this summons gladly, as it might possibly afford a means by which he would be compelled to tell what he knew about the fire, with the least responsibility resting on him for the disclosure. But he resolved that, in no event, would he speak any thing but the truth.
After he was dressed and brushed to the satisfaction of his careful mother, Tom went with the messenger to the railroad station, and the fast train soon brought them into the city of Wilkesbarre, the county town of Luzerne County.