“It is a sign,” the girl whispered. “In the end troubles shall be banished!” For the moment her face was transfigured by some strange light from within. Then she turned to walk slowly down the hill.
As she entered the grounds that surrounded the mill, she was startled to see a strange figure half hidden by a wild cranberry bush at a spot near the gate. At first she believed him to be hiding there and thought swiftly, “This may be the spy!” Next instant she realized that he was raking dead leaves from beneath the bush.
A strange, rather horrible sort of person he appeared to be. His hair was kinky and cut short, his dark face all but covered with a short curly beard. His bare arms were long and hairy. As he rested there, bent over, clawing at the leaves, he resembled an ape. He grinned horribly at the girl as she passed, but did not speak.
“One more newcomer to the community,” was her mental comment. “But of course, since he works about the yard he does not enter the mill. He could scarcely be the spy. And yet—” she wondered how strong the locks and bolts of doors and windows were and whether it were possible, after all, for the spy to come from without, at night.
On enquiry she was to discover that at night the plant was guarded by a watchman, one of the oldest employees of the place, and entirely trustworthy.
For the moment, however, she was bent on entering the mill. She liked its din, loved to see the speeding shuttles and feel the movement of life about her. Besides, she had not forgotten what Danby Force had said: “Things often happen in the mill after a jazz night.” She thought of the girl who had fallen into a vat of blue dye. “Has anything happened today, I wonder?” she whispered to herself.
CHAPTER XVII
A SURPRISE VISIT
To Florence with her interest in mechanical things and her love for the glorious throb of life, the cotton mill was a place of great enchantment. As she entered now she was greeted by the crack-crack-crack of a hundred shuttles and by the boom-bang of weavers’ beams.
“It sounds like a battle,” she told herself. “And so it is—a battle against depression, cold, hunger and despair.” She looked about her. Everywhere hands were busy, faces bright and hearts light.
“And to think,” she whispered, “all unknown to these honest, happy ones, there hangs above them a shadow like some great bombing airplane, a shadow that some day may drop a bomb as if from the sky upon all this glorious harmony of noise and still it forever. Unless—” she was thinking of the spy who, all undiscovered, lingered in their midst. He was a thief. No, he did not take their money, nor their other trifling treasures. He took their means of living—or would if he could.