"Betty!"
She wrenched her hand.
"Let me go! I want to go to father! Let me go!"
"But, Betty, wait—listen——"
She freed her hand.
"I shan't tell him. Don't be afraid. He has enough to worry him. Only don't let me ever see you again!"
§4. All that night Luke walked the streets. It was breakfast-time when he returned to the Arapahoe. His letters and the morning papers were lying on the floor of his sitting-room where they had fallen when the bell-boy dropped them through the slit in the door.
He read the letters first. There were not many, for his correspondence had of late declined to almost nothing. The only things of interest were a note from Porcellis, announcing that he would soon return to New York and a letter from Luke's mother, saying that she had written Betty to pay her a visit: "It is only right that your fiancée should do this," wrote Mrs. Huber, "and that I should have an early chance of knowing the girl that is to be my son's wife."
Luke wondered how Betty would reply to the invitation. As he was thinking of this, his eye caught the heaviest headlines on the first page of the newspaper: during the night, a body of strikers at the Forbes factory had marched to the main entrance and battered down the door in an endeavor to drag out the Breil men who slept there as guards by night and worked there by day; the Breil men resisted; there was a general battle with at least two deaths; the attacking party were repulsed, but the police, summoned by a riot-call, gained what appeared to be no more than a preliminary skirmish, for the entire neighborhood was in arms and more bloodshed was expected to-day.
Luke dropped the paper with an oath. He was more hungry than before for a part in this fight—in any fight. If Religion was a coward, he would make one more appeal to Government, to force. He called Albany on the long-distance telephone. He kept on calling until he had brought the Governor to the other end of the wire, and then he was astonished to hear that the proper civil authorities in New York had already asked for troops.