The Spider's Web

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

He leaned through the battered window and filled his lungs with the pure night air. He looked up to the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow moon was riding.

"I haven't let their corruption destroy my purpose," he said to the moon. "I've simply put myself where they can't destroy me. I've put myself where they can't lie to me again. I'll fight them as one man against the world; I'll lose, but I won't be using their weapons; I won't be what they are, and I'll lose as a free man. So far as the world inside of me's concerned, they invaded it and bossed it. I've chucked them out of it, and I've destroyed them!"

It seemed wonderfully simple now and wonderfully peaceful. He would go to Forbes to-morrow and draw up a legal paper, the last legal paper he would ever put his name to, his last compromise, turning over his interest in this factory to his mother; and Forbes—poor old Forbes! He was sorry for Forbes, but he knew what would happen; left alone, Forbes would end by selling out, profitably, to the trust. And then for Luke the open road, the old open road that he had always loved, the learning of a manual trade, the sale of his labor-power no more than was necessary to keep him alive and free to go wherever slaves fought the system of corruption for their liberty, until sometime, when the soldiers would have Luke before them instead of behind them, and did not shoot over the heads of the mob. He was tasting of contentment for the first time in his life. He was glad that he had not died out there in the riot. There was so much to do. There was so much to do in this life that he did not see how he had ever had time to think of any other. And now he was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with open eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with complete power over himself, using no compulsion upon others and allowing no other to use compulsion upon him. Luke had conquered. For every soul there is, somewhere, a separate road to salvation. Luke had found his own....

Somewhere out in the city a clock struck eleven. He knew that he had been standing at the window for a long time, but he had no idea it was so long as this. If he had been so engrossed, what, he wondered, had finally roused him. He remembered: it was something about the door. He had not heard it move; he merely thought that it was moving. He turned to it, but it did not move. Perhaps a draught of air had deceived him.

The factory was very quiet....

§4. "Don't open your trap! I got you covered! If you let out one yip, I'll croak you."

The door had opened and closed, letting in a figure that quickly bolted it and then discreetly avoided the light from the window. Luke saw a dim form in the shadow. All that projected into the shaft of light was a fist tightly clenched about a leveled revolver.

"What do you want?" asked Luke.

He was not afraid to disregard this intruder's command to silence. He was curiously fearless. He supposed that this unseen man was some fanatic from the mob. Anybody could have slipped into the factory through the door that Luke had left open when the terror of the soldiers' fire swept the street and the smoke of it clouded the doorway. This was an avenger thus arrived. Luke felt the presence of a certain crude justice. He had deserved this.

"Don't worry; I'm not going to yell," he said.