The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.
And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.
They sat in a circle, these five children—and ate their lunch of cold soda biscuits and fat bacon.
Not a word did they say—not a laugh nor a sound to show they were children,—not even a sigh to show they were human.
Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then—O men and women who love your own little ones—look!
Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle. Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that he went to sleep as he tried to climb into it.
In other parts of the mill, other little ones slept and even large girls and boys, after eating, dozed or chatted. Spoolers, weavers, slubbers, warpers, nearly grown but all hard-faced, listless—and many of them slept on shawls and battings of cotton.
They were awakened by the big whistle at twenty minutes to one o'clock. At the same time, Jud Carpenter, the foreman, passed down the aisles and dashed cold water in the sleeping faces. Half laughingly he did it, but the little ones arose instantly, and with stooped forms, and tired, cowed eyes, in which the Anglo-Saxon spirit of resentment had been killed by the Yankee spirit of greed, they looked at the foreman, and then began their long six hours' battle with the bobbins.
Three o'clock! The warm afternoon's sun poured on the low flat tin roof of the mill and warmed the interior to a temperature which was uncomfortable.
Shiloh grew sleepy—she dragged her stumbling little feet along, and had she stopped but a moment, she had paid the debt that childhood owes to fairy-land. The air was close—stifling. Her shoulders ached—her head seemed a stuffy thing of wood and wooly lint.