“Sally — Sally!” he groaned.
From the street the roar came beating through the closed windows into the room. “There’s no time, child!”
“I will run away,” she repeated.
“What shall I do with her?” he asked loudly, lifting his eyes to the ceiling.
He wheeled and crossed the room and opened Lucinda’s door. She was in the next room with Georgia and Lucie, and all of them were packing the bags.
“Lucinda!” he shouted. “Sally is playing the fool—”
“I sent her to you,” Lucinda said briefly. “I can do nothing with her. She insists on staying with you. You’ve spoiled her, Pierce, though I’ve warned you again and again.”
In the doorway Sally stood smiling, triumphant. “Neither of you can do anything with me,” she said pleasantly. “So — I’m not going!”
Her parents looked at her, Lucinda coldly, Pierce savagely. “I’ve a good mind to give you a beating,” he muttered through his teeth.
“It’s too late,” Lucinda reminded him. “You wouldn’t lay a finger on her when she was little.”
Georgia looked up. “If you are willing, ma’am — sir — could I take Miss Sally to Philadelphia? Joe can go in my place to Washington, ma’am.”
They turned to her, grasping at the straw of escape.
“I’ve been thinking I would ask you to let me visit Bettina, please,” Georgia said. “If you’re willing, ma’am — Miss Sally can come, too.”
“No,” Lucinda said.
“Yes!” Sally cried. “Yes — yes — Papa, I’ve always wanted to see Uncle Tom again—”
“Sally!” Lucie’s prim whisper, horror-struck, hissed across the room.
“I don’t care — I do,” Sally insisted.
“Sally can stay at a hotel,” Pierce reasoned to Lucinda. “Georgia can be with her and look after her and Tom can come and see her.”
A volley of shots struck in the street and a window pane shattered.
Lucinda put her hands to her ears. “We’ve got to get away before we’re all killed—”
An hour later Pierce stood alone on the platform of the railroad station. His private car had gone, the last in a line of passage cars headed for the south. No one knew when the next train would leave, if ever. Trains were still leaving irregularly for the north, and on one of them he had put Sally and Georgia into a day coach, jammed with frightened people trying to leave Baltimore. He had held Sally close for a moment, exasperated with love for this wilful child of his. But Sally had been gay and excited.
“Mind you stay at a hotel,” he had commanded. “Your mama will never let me hear the end of it if you don’t.”
“Of course,” she had promised, without, he felt, in the least meaning it. He saw them on the train, squeezed against the window, and through the open window he had continued to talk.
“If things quiet down,” he said, “I may run up myself for a day or so, tell Tom. If I find you’ve been disobedient, Sally—”
“Oh, no!” she trilled.
The whistle blew and she waved and laughed. He saw Georgia’s face, softly alight, behind her.
“I hold you responsible for your young mistress, Georgia!” he shouted. The train was moving and he did not hear her answer, whatever it was. He caught her smile, and had a pang of foreboding.
But there was no time to think of what he felt. Across the platform a group of guardsmen were carrying the body of a young man. They laid him down and Pierce saw that he was dead. He drew near and looked down at him. He was bleeding from a gunwound and his face was mangled to a pulp, the features wiped away.
“A brickbat out of the damned mob,” one of the men muttered.
Before Pierce could speak the mob surged into the station.
“Get out of here, sir!” the guardsmen begged him—“They’ll tear you to pieces — in that silk hat!”
They surrounded him and hurried him across the tracks, and he made his way alone by back streets to the offices where the directors awaited him.
Pierce had never before faced the Board without John. Now as he looked down the long mahogany table, lined with grim faces, he felt his resolution fade. The power was in the hands of these men. He had been all for wielding that power while he was in Malvern. What threatened Malvern threatened the world. But now in the great dim board room, hung with red velvet from ceiling to floor at every window and paneled with the portraits of dead directors, he was confused. Feelings that he had forgotten came crowding back into his mind, memories so distant that he would have said they had ceased to exist.
He remembered again the young men who had died under his command in the war. They had fought with heartbreaking bravery, the pure bravery of the young, who alone are unselfish enough to die for a cause. The young man whom he had just seen in the street had died, too. How uselessly! A brick flung at random had crushed him. He had been ordered out this morning to do his duty and now he was dead.
He was distracted by his memories, confused and mingled with the news in telegrams and messages which lay before him.
“Military action must be taken all along the railroad,” Henry Mallows was saying in his high clear cold voice. “Nothing else will suffice.”
“The mob has command,” Jim McCagney said. He had aged greatly in the years that he had sat on the Board. His bitter grey eyes were set deep under eyebrows like bunches of dry heather.
Daniel Rutherford, the youngest of them all, turned at the sound of an open door, and took an envelope from a messenger boy. He tore it open and read it. “The Mayor has sworn in three thousand citizens as special police,” he cried. “He promises that the ringleaders of the mob will be in jail tonight.”
“Tut!” Jim McCagney growled, “don’t give a hoot for citizens in a case like this. Mallows is right. Guns are what’s wanted.”
“A detachment of one hundred marines is expected this evening,” Baird Hancock said drily.
“It’s the shops I’m thinking of,” Jonathan Yates put in. He was the one man in the room who had come up from the ranks, a thin, tired-looking man in a broadcloth suit too large for him. The heavy, velvet-lined collar rode up the back of his head and now and again he struggled with it.
Pierce was staring at the dispatches before him. “Pittsburgh, Reading, Harrisburg, Shamokin, Hornellsville, Chicago, Cincinnati, Zanesville, Columbus, Fort Wayne, St. Louis, Kansas City,” he read the names aloud solemnly.
Murmurs of anger rose from the men around the table. Pierce lifted his head. “I came into this room as fixed as any of you in my determination to put down these strikes,” he said slowly. “Now, as I see these foes catching from one place to another clear across the country, I ask myself — what have we done that was wrong?”
“Man, it’s not us — it’s the Reds!” McCagney shouted. “Our men alone wouldn’t have dared! The foreign communists have used our honest working folk as a pretext for their infamous machinations to overthrow the government of the United States!” He leaped to his feet, towering six foot six, his white hair flying, his beard a tangle. He banged the table with his fists. “Ne’er-do-wells!” he bellowed. “Rascals — robbers — internationalists!” He ground out the last word between his teeth with special hatred.
Silence followed, and in the silence Pierce drove away his memories. What had the past to do with today? “If we have proof that these strikes are inspired by foreigners,” he said slowly, “then it is time to put on our uniforms again and fight.”
“Amen, amen—” The word roared around the table from mouth to mouth.
They sat far into the night, while messages continued to pour in from the four corners of the nation. At midnight a last message was sent by the mayor. Two hundred and fifty rebels had been imprisoned. “Upon inquiry,” the mayor reported, “it was found that not one of them had been a worker on the railroad.”