The eyes of Laura Van Dorn were filled with tears. They were streaming down her face.
“Oh, yes,” she cried, “no deeper symbol of peace is in the earth than the child-bearing woman. Let her go.”
Grant Adams rose and addressed the chair: “Mr. Chairman–I move that all men and all women except those chosen by these who have just spoken, be asked to keep out of the Park to-morrow morning, that all the world may know how sacred we hold this cause and with what weapons of peace we would win it.”
So it was ordered, and the crowd sang the International Hymn again, and then the Marseillaise, and went home dreaming high dreams.
560As Grant and Laura walked from the hall, the last to leave the meeting, after the women had finished making out their list of pickets, the streets were empty and they met–or rather failed to meet, Mrs. Dick Bowman, with Mugs in tow, who crossed the street obviously to avoid Grant and his companion.
Grant and Laura, walking briskly along and planning the next day’s work, passed the smelters where the soldiers were on sentry duty. They passed the shaft houses where Harvey militiamen were bunked and guarded by sentinels. They passed the habiliments of war in a score of peaceful places.
“Grant,” cried Laura, “I really think now we’ll win–that the strike of peace will prove all that you have lived for.”
“But if we fail,” he replied, “it proves nothing–except perhaps that it was worth trying, and will be worth trying and trying and trying–until it wins!”
It was half past twelve. Grant Adams, standing before the Vanderbilt House, talking with Henry Fenn, was saying, “Well, Henry, one week of this–one week of peace–and the triumph of peace will be–”
A terrific explosion shut his mouth. Across the night he saw a red glare a few hundred feet away. An instant later it was dark again. He ran toward the place where the glare had winked out. As he turned a corner, he saw stars where there should have been shaft house No. 7 of the Wahoo Fuel Company’s mines, and he knew that it had been destroyed. In it were a dozen sleeping soldiers of the Harvey Militia Company, and it flashed through his mind that Lida Bowman at last had spoken.