Even after I had left the shop, having at last secured the position as book-keeper at the —— Mills which I had for years been working for, he kept up the former intimacy, and often I found him waiting for me when I returned late from my work, and I liked nothing so well as to sit and smoke, and listen to him and Barbara, their singing, and laughter, and foolish talk.
It went on so for a good while. I was beginning to lay by money, and the time for our marriage was not far off. But a strike broke out just then among the spinners. I had known it was coming, and done what I could to prevent it, knowing what the result would be, but it was all in vain. Their wrongs were too real and of too long standing. The crisis came; the mills were closed; for a few days the strikers believed they would win the day.
At the end of a week the mills opened with a new set of operatives hired from a neighboring town. Riots and bloodshed followed. Those were troublous times. I could not keep my hand from giving aid to the suffering wives and children of men I had lived among all my life. I took no thought for consequences. One day I received my discharge. I was dazed by the cruel blow; I went about like a man walking in his sleep.
One night as I walked the streets, some one I met told me that my friend, the man I am writing of, was ill. I went at once to his room, which was in the building over the printing office where he had now gotten to be foreman. I found him restless and feverish, and at his request I stayed with him until the small hours of the night. Then I went home. No one saw me going in or out of his room, but I met two or three stragglers on my way home. I had been half an hour in bed when an alarm of fire was sounded, and I rose and joined the crowd in the streets. The —— Mills were burning, and in a short time were burned to the ground. The same day I was arrested on a charge of having set the fire. I laughed at the charge. My friend, who was now delirious with fever, would soon put me right. My trial was deferred until he was able to appear. When the day came at last, he stood up, white and haggard, in that crowded court-room, and swore he had not seen me at all on the night I had spent with him—the night of the fire. There were other things against me: my known friendship for the leaders of the strike, my discharge, my absence from home at the time the fire must have been started, and other small but damning evidence. I was convicted, and sentenced to transportation. I saw my old mother fall as if dead! I saw Barbara’s white face bending over her; plainer than all, I saw that man who had been my friend, and the look he gave the woman who was to have been my wife! Something leaped into life within me then—something which has never died. If I could have reached him then and there!
I do not suppose twenty people in the town believed me guilty. I do not believe the jury which convicted me, nor the judge who sentenced me, believed me guilty; but everything was against me, except my past life, and that had no weight with the law. My sentence was commuted to a term of years in the penitentiary. I will not write of my prison-life. Three months after it began I received a letter from Barbara, telling me of my mother’s death, bidding me keep up courage, and pray, but saying nothing of herself, or of him.
At the end of five years came freedom. The real criminals had been discovered, and I was discharged. The man who went out of that prison door was not the man who had entered it. The law, conscious of the fact that no human power can make amends to an innocent man for a punishment unjustly inflicted, takes no notice of it. It is dumb before a wrong so monstrous. I went back to my native town. Every hand was stretched out to me. My old employers at the mill would have put me in my old place, but I refused. I inquired for Barbara and for him. They had married after my mother’s death and gone, it was said, to America. I took measures to prove this; then I went to work at my old trade. I worked day and night, and lived on next to nothing. At the end of a year I had what I wanted. A fortnight later I was in New York.
My plan was to work my way over the country—to work and watch. I felt sure that the man I was looking for would work at his trade, too, and I believed in time I should get on his track. I stayed several months in New York, and found plenty to do. The only fault found with me was my love of change. “You know what is said of ‘rolling stones,’ Jordan,” my employers would say, as I was about to leave. “It isn’t moss-gathering I am after,” I would answer.
I took no man into my confidence, but I lost no chance of getting acquainted with men of our craft. I frequented places where they congregated, set them to talking, asking them as to Englishmen they had known, etc.
“You are looking for some one, Jordan,” was said more than once.
“Maybe I am,” I would answer.