"I suppose you're a damned, sneaking deputy."
"Hold on, you drunken fool!" Sommers exclaimed. "It's lucky for you I am not a deputy."
He could hear the mob as it came down the yards in the direction of the burning cars.
"If you don't want to be locked up, come on with me."
The fellow obeyed, and they walked down through the lane of cars until they reached a fence. Sommers forced his companion through a gap, and followed him. Then the man began to run, and at the corner ran into a file of soldiers, who were coming into the yards. Sommers turned up the street and walked rapidly in the direction of the city. The first drops of a thunder-shower that had been lowering over the city for hours were falling, and they brought a pleasant coolness into the sultry atmosphere. That was the end! The "riot" would be drowned out in half an hour.
The sense of overwhelming loneliness came back, and instinctively he turned south in the direction of the cottage. From the loneliness of life, the sultry squalor of the city, the abortive folly of the mob, he fled to the one place that was still sweet in all this wilderness of men.
* * * * *
The cottage windows were dark when he arrived an hour later, but Alves met him at the door.
"I have been waiting for you," she said calmly. "I knew you would come as soon as you could."
"Didn't Miss M'Gann stay?" he asked remorsefully.