This mutiny had a short life, for the hard times and the vast mobs of unemployed made it easy for the contractors to replace the strikers, and the magistrates were severe. The contractors caused a panic by agreeing never on any terms to re-employ the ringleaders, and there were soon no ringleaders. The others made haste to beg for mercy and to resume their picks and shovels with gratitude.
One day Patty, to escape from the gloom of her parents, ordered Cuff to hitch up the carry-all and drive her over to see the construction camp. As she sat gossiping with Harry Chalender, who pointed out the rising walls of masonry, a quarrel arose between two laborers in a ditch. They bandied words like Hamlet and Laertes in the tomb of Ophelia, and then as if the first and second gravediggers had fallen afoul, they raised their picks and began a dreadful fencing match that set Patty to shrieking and swooning.
Chalender was capable as any other carpet knight of prodigies of valor so long as a lady’s eyes were upon him. He left Patty’s carriage wheel and ran shouting commands to desist. When the battlers paid him no heed, he was foolhardy enough to leap down between them. One pick dealt him a glancing blow on the skull, while the other struck deep into the sinews across his shoulder blades.
Cuff told RoBards afterward that Miss Patty, instead of fainting at the sight of Chalender’s blood, sprang to the ground across the wheel and ran to him like a fury, slashing at the laborers with her fingernails.
The workmen were aghast enough at the white victim they had unwittingly laid low, and they lifted him from the ditch. Patty dropped to the heap of fresh soil and took his bleeding form into her arms, tore away his shirt and with desperate immodesty made bandages of her own white pantaloons and stenched the gouts of red.
Then she ordered that Chalender be picked up and placed in her own carry-all. And she brought him home with her.
When RoBards came up from New York, Cuff told him the story before he reached the house. On the doorsill Patty confronted him with white defiance. She waited for him to speak.
She dared him to speak. What could he say?
She had saved the life of a wounded man. She had brought home a dying friend. The Good Samaritan had done no more and no less.
RoBards could have wished the victim had been anyone else in the world, but he could hardly have wished his wife unequal to such a crisis.