rsing might have been
heard for blocks around. Father Danny stood in front of the table,
beneath which lay the girl. He strove desperately to maintain his
position, that he might protect her, meantime frantically calling to
the mill hands to drag her out to the rear, and escape by the back
door.

In the midst of the _melee_ a soldier mounted a chair near the door
and raised his rifle. The shot roared out, and Father Danny pitched
forward to the floor. Another shot, and still another followed in
quick succession. The strikers fell back. Confusion seized them. Then
they turned and fled precipitately through the rear exit.

The lieutenant dragged Carmen from beneath the table and out through
the door. Then, assembling his men, he gave an order, and they marched
away with her up the icy street to the town jail.

CHAPTER 16

With the wreckage which he had wrought strewn about him, J. Wilton
Ames sat at his rich desk far above the scampering human ants in the
streets below and contemplated the fell work of his own hands. And
often and anon as he looked, great beads of perspiration welled out
upon his forehead, and his breath came hot and dry. In the waste
basket at his feet lay crumpled the newspapers with their shrieking,
red-lettered versions of the slaughter at Avon. He was not a coward,
this man! But he had pushed that basket around the desk out of his
sight, for when he looked at it something rose before him that sent a
chill to his very soul. At times his vision blurred; and then he
passed his hands heavily across his eyes. He had chanced to read in
the grewsome accounts of the Avon massacre that little children had
been found among those fallen shacks, writhing in their last agonies.
And the reports had said that great, red-dripping holes had been
ripped in their thin little bodies by those awful "dum-dum" bullets.
God! Why had he used them? And why had the demoniac soldiers down
there blown the brains from harmless women and helpless babes? He
really had not intended to go so far!

And yet, he had! Curse them! The brats would have grown up to oppose
the vested privileges of the rich! They, too, would have become
anarchists and rioters, bent on leveling the huge industrial fabric
which such as he had so laboriously erected under the legal protection
afforded their sacred rights! He had done well to remove them now! And
the great captains of industry would thank him for the example he had
thus fearlessly