Ten o'clock—the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.
Eleven o'clock—oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!—she saw them all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery and—....
She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute—half a dozen threads had broken.
It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.
This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,—a Sunday School song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not hear it—no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's Den—nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,—but she knew from the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.
Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood—ay, her life—going on by the Beast Thing and his men.
God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an instinct there.
Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious roar which drowned all others.
Then it purred and paused for breath—purred softer and softer and—slept at last.
It was noon.