"Aye, he's in the pay-house safe enough," shouted another—a man. "An' if them as is defendin' of 'un won't give 'un up, there's ways o' makin' them."
The procession of the dead approached—all the men baring their heads, and the women wailing. In front came a piteous group—a young half-fainting wife, supported by an older woman, with children clinging to her skirts. Catharine went forward, and lifted a baby or two that was being dragged along the ground. Mary took up another child, and they both joined the procession.
As they did so, there was a shout from below.
Mary, white as her dress, asked an elderly miner beside her, who had shown no excitement whatever, to tell her what had happened. He clambered up on the bank to look and came back to her.
"They've beaten 'un back, miss," he said in her ear. "They've got the surface men to help, and Muster Meynell he's doing his best; if there's anybody can hold 'em, he can; but there's terrible few on 'em. It is time as the Cradock men came up. They'll be trying fire before long, an' the women is like devils."
On went the procession into the village, leaving the fight behind them. In Mary's heart, as she was pushed and pressed onward, burnt the memory of Meynell on the steps—speaking, gesticulating—and the surging crowd in front of him.
There was that to do, however, which deadened fear. In the main street the procession was met by hurrying doctors and nurses. For those broken bodies indeed—young men in their prime—nothing could be done, save to straighten the poor limbs, to wash the coal dust from the strong faces, and cover all with the white linen of death. But the living—the crushed, stricken living—taxed every energy of heart and mind. Catharine, recognized at once by the doctors as a pillar of help, shrank from no office and no sight, however terrible. But she would not permit them to Mary, and they were presently separated.
Mary had a trio of sobbing children on her knee, in the living-room of one of the cottages, when there was a sudden tramp outside. Everybody in Miners' Row, including those who were laying out the dead, ran to the windows.
"The police from Cradock!"—fifty of them.
The news passed from mouth to mouth, and even those who had been maddest half an hour before felt the relief of it.