ne and knowing she was losing "time."

Susie fainted three times that morning, and Katie lost an hour in all,
bringing water and making a fan out of a newspaper. Also she had an
angry altercation with the foreman. He said if Susie "played up" this
way she'd have to quit; there were plenty of girls waiting to take her
place, and he hadn't time to fool with kids that wanted to lie around
and be fanned. It was his last few words as she was reviving that stung
Susie to life again and put her back at her machine for the last time in
nervous panic, with the thought of what would happen at home if she lost
her job. Up above her the great heavy machines thrashed on and the floor
trembled with their movement. Black and thick and hot was the air around
Susie and she scarcely could see, for dizziness, the machinery which she
worked from habit, as she stood swaying in her place, and wondering if
she could hold out till the noon whistle blew.

Down in the basement, near one of the elevator shafts, a pile of waste
lay smoldering, out of sight. One of the boys from the lumber-yard down
the next block had stopped to light his cigarette as he passed out into
the street after bringing a bill to the head manager. He tossed his
match away, not seeing where it fell. The big factory thundered on in
full swing of a busy, driving morning, and the little match lay nursing
its flame and smoldering.

How long it crept and smoldered no one knew. It seemed to come from
every floor at once, that smell of smoke and cry of fire! More smoke in
volumes pouring up suddenly through cracks and bursting from the
elevator shaft; a lick of flame darting out like a serpent ready to
strike, menacing against the heat of the big rooms.

Panic and smoke and fire! Cries and clashing of machinery thundering on
like a storm above an angry sea!

The girls rushed together in fear, or, screaming, ran desperately to
windows which they knew they could not raise! They pounded at the locked
doors and crowded in the narrow passages, frantically surging this way
and that. There was no one to quiet them or tell them what to do. If
some one would only stop that awful machinery! Was the engineer dead?

Mockingly the little cool vines crept in about the window-sills and over
the imprisoning panes, as if to taunt the victims who were caught in the
death-trap.

"At any rate, if we die you'll die too!" cried Katie Craigin, shaking
her fist at the long green tendrils that swep