“Old Barry's sick. She's with him.”
He did not tell her that the old night watchman was dying, two thin walls and half a dozen feet away.
Saxon's lips were trembling, and she began to cry weakly, clinging to Billy's hand with both of hers.
“I—I can't help it,” she sobbed. “I'll be all right in a minute.... Our little girl, Billy. Think of it! And I never saw her!”
She was still lying on her bed, when, one evening, Mary saw fit to break out in bitter thanksgiving that she had escaped, and was destined to escape, what Saxon had gone through.
“Aw, what are you talkin' about?” Billy demanded. “You'll get married some time again as sure as beans is beans.”
“Not to the best man living,” she proclaimed. “And there ain't no call for it. There's too many people in the world now, else why are there two or three men for every job? And, besides, havin' children is too terrible.”
Saxon, with a look of patient wisdom in her face that became glorified as she spoke, made answer:
“I ought to know what it means. I've been through it, and I'm still in the thick of it, and I want to say to you right now, out of all the pain and the ache and the sorrow, that it is the most beautiful, wonderful thing in the world.”
As Saxon's strength came back to her (and when Doctor Hentley had privily assured Billy that she was sound as a dollar), she herself took up the matter of the industrial tragedy that had taken place before her door. The militia had been called out immediately, Billy informed her, and was encamped then at the foot of Pine street on the waste ground next to the railroad yards. As for the strikers, fifteen of them were in jail. A house to house search had been made in the neighborhood by the police, and in this way nearly the whole fifteen, all wounded, had been captured. It would go hard with them, Billy foreboded gloomily. The newspapers were demanding blood for blood, and all the ministers in Oakland had preached fierce sermons against the strikers. The railroad had filled every place, and it was well known that the striking shopmen not only would never get their old jobs back but were blacklisted in every railroad in the United States. Already they were beginning to scatter. A number had gone to Panama, and four were talking of going to Ecuador to work in the shops of the railroad that ran over the Andes to Quito.