The Spider's Web

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

§1. He could not stay in the factory while she was there. To go to the upper office where he had left her, to attempt to explain, to offer a shoddy apology—this would be to add the last insult to the wrong that he had done her. He thought that worse than to have completed the thing that he had begun.

He cut northwestward toward the more peopled part of the borough, not because he wanted to be among people, but because he did not even yet want to have to think. He tried to think, but he did not want to. He saw clearly his new duties and his new restrictions; but they presented themselves to him as isolated facts which, offending his reason, spurred his reason to demand their credentials, and these he could not yet read. Moreover, the memory of the scene with Betty would rise before his restless mind, burning all else away, and, to burn memory away, his heart drove him into the more crowded streets.

Women of the streets accosted him. He passed a house from a window on the ground-floor of which two girls with painted faces beckoned. He passed brightly lighted saloons that sent into the street inviting streams of light and the lure of clinking glasses and laughter. In a jostling thoroughfare he noticed that passersby were looking strangely at him and, recollecting what a queer picture his disordered clothes and bloody face must present, he blamed himself for not repairing the damages of the fight before setting out. He turned again into the less frequented quarters.

Here he looked at his watch, but his watch had stopped at half-past seven, the moment, probably, of his charge to Betty's rescue. Seeing the lighted window of a jeweler's shop near by, he went to it and looked at the clock displayed there. It was nine o'clock. As he could not have been walking for more than an hour, and as the active rioting must have begun no later than seven-fifteen, all the events of the riot must have been massed within forty-five minutes. He turned back toward the factory. He hated these city thoroughfares. His boyish dreams of the open road and the tramping carpenter returned to him....

If he could only read his credentials....

§2. When Luke entered the office on the ground floor, the little militia captain was there. He had come for whiskey and finished the bottle. He was quite drunk, and evinced a thick but facile desire to describe the victory that his troops had won.

"Oh, go away!" said Luke.

He turned Facciolati out.

Breil came next, and some of the policemen, the former anxious to report the present condition of the mill, the latter that of the streets; but to these men Luke was scarcely more civil than he had been to the Italian. Whether he liked it or not, he must think things out.

"There's no reason for you to stay any longer, if you don't want to," said Breil.