Horrible thoughts of somebody's having kidnapped Sam flashed across my brain as I threw on my clothes. How had he happened to come to New York, anyway, and then disappear right after the play? What kind of trouble could he be in, and how could I help? I looked in my purse and found only ten dollars, but I felt the roll that I always carry in my stocking and it still felt a respectable size. I never count money when I am spending it, because you don't enjoy it so much; and I had been away from home three weeks. Still, if I had to bribe or buy Sam out of anything, I could get more some place. I must hurry to do as he told me, and then he would direct me how to rescue him.
In less time than it would take most girls, as soggy with sleep as I was, to get dressed and down to a taxi, I was on my way to Sam. I forgot to get the maid to go with me; and, anyway, what was the use, with a nice young white man like that taxi-car driver? He said, looking at me so pleasantly that I was sure he didn't really mean anything, "It's early, isn't it, miss?"
I was so hustled and so dazed, and had such trouble in making the little new kind of hook-buttons on my gloves stay fastened, that before I knew it we drew up at a queer kind of old warehouse down in a part of New York where I had never been, with a line of the ocean or the bay or the river or the harbor, I couldn't tell which, just beyond. Then I was scared, for instead of Sam being in danger, I felt that maybe I was being kidnapped. I hesitated at the curbing as I got out of the taxi.
"Through that warehouse and to your left you'll find the gentleman. Good morning, miss," said the nice taxi-man as he touched his cap and drove off and left me to my fate. If I had had only my own fate to consider I would have taken to my good strong legs and fled, but Sam was also concerned. At the thought of his needing me my courage came back, and I went on into the long shed where queer dirty boxes and bales and barrels and things were piled. At last I came to a turn and stepped into a low room that was almost at the water's edge. It was still very early morning, and a mist from the sea made things dim, but in a crowd of queer people and bundles and voices I saw Sam standing and looking perfectly helpless, while that Commissioner of Agriculture stood over by the window, evidently perfectly furious and growling out expletives to the saddest crowd of pitiful people I had ever seen.
Sam was in his dress-suit with his overcoat off and his hair in a mop; and in a faltering jumble of several languages he was trying to tell something to a gaunt, fierce woman in a wide ragged skirt, a shapeless, torn man's coat, with a faded woolen scarf over her head. In her arms she had a baby, and a woman with a baby in her arms knelt beside her; while a dozen other women with children, ragged, pale, frightened little children in their arms, and at their skirts, hung in a sullen group back of her. A crowd of dejected, hungry, gaunt men stood to one side, and one very old man had his old woolen cap off his white head, which I could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to Sam and grasped his arm.
"Oh, what is it, Sam, and what do they want?" I asked.
"They are emigrants from Belgium. The Commissioner has had me appointed to settle them in the Harpeth Valley on lands near my own, for which he has options. I came on in response to his telegram to meet them to-morrow, but they were landed here on the dock at one o'clock in the night, because of a fire on the steamer. I came right down from the theater, but they are frightened and the women have lost all confidence in everything. They don't seem to want to go with me to the car that we have ready to take them to Tennessee. I can't understand them, nor they me, and I sent for you. You're a woman, Betty. See what you can do to comfort and hearten them and make them ready to go with me when the train leaves in less than two hours."
Oh, I know I am young and have been sheltered, and don't know what it is to be shot at and killed, and have my children torn from my arms and to be hungry and cold. But women do understand other suffering women, and when I stretched out my hands to the fierce woman with her starving child at her breast, I knew what to falter out in a mixture of her own patois and mine.
"Il est bon—a good, good man. Alle avec—go with him," I pleaded.
"But it is a fine gentleman! No, we come to a master, to work that we do not starve. A landowner," she said, and regarded Sam in his purple and fine broadcloth with fierce and desperate distrust that the other women also expressed with hissing breaths which brought surly growls of suspicious acquiescence from the men.