“It is the strike,” Nancy gasped. “Christina did not tell you it would begin so soon or be so—so terrible.”
“That man walking at the head of them all is her brother Thorvik,” said Beatrice. “I wonder where they are going and what they mean to do.”
They lingered at the open window until Nancy, sniffing suddenly, declared, “I smell smoke.”
Before Beatrice could answer, they heard in the next room the voice of Aunt Anna, who had been awakened by the uproar.
“It is just a public meeting breaking up,” Beatrice reassured her, although the sharp smell of burning wood began to fill the room as the blue smoke drifted in at the window. The girls were about to go on with some explanation when Nancy caught her sister’s arm and, by a sign, made her look out.
The side door, just below them, was opening and closing silently, to allow the passing of a stealthy figure. Joe Ling, with a pole balanced over his shoulder and at either end of it a heavy basket, was slipping away into the dark with that short-stepping trot of a hurried Chinaman. He had brought those same baskets, containing all his worldly possessions, to their house three days before. It was plain that he not only considered his term of employment with them at an end but that he was about to shake the dust of Ely from his silent, Chinese-slippered feet.
“And oughtn’t we to go too?” Beatrice wondered desperately.
She looked at Aunt Anna, thin, weak, and exhausted, lying on the bed. She heard outside the crash of falling timbers and a great shout as a shower of red sparks went sailing past the window. A moment later there came a violent knocking at the door.
Was it Christina she wondered as she ran down the stairs, or had some of those shouting men——?
She called softly before she dared draw the bolt, and was relieved to hear the sound of a woman’s voice. Christina stood on the threshold, and with her Dan O’Leary’s helper at the livery-stable, Sam.
“Things have broken loose quicker than we thought,” the woman began quickly, since there was no need for explanations with that red flare lighting up the whole village. “The men are burning the empty warehouse, just to show what devilment is in them. With this wind the whole town may catch and they don’t care. You and your aunt must get away as quickly as you can. There is a train goes through in less than half an hour, so you must hurry. We couldn’t find Dan, but Sam here has hitched up and will take you down.”