Part 5 (2/2)

”Thanks, my boy,” the Colonel gravely replied, ”I trust we may know each other still better in the future.”

CHAPTER IV

AMONG THE SHADOWS

Under the tutelage of Barbara, the young millionaire plunged into the study of Socialism with the zeal of the fresh convert to a holy crusade.

At first he had listened to her stories of the sufferings of the poor and the unemployed with mild incredulity. She laid her warm little hand on his and said:

”Come and see. If you think that Socialism is a dream, I'll show you that capitalism is a nightmare.”

He followed her down the ugly pavements of a squalid street into the poorest quarter of the city. She entered a dingy hall and pushed her way through a swarm of filthy children to the rear room. On a bed of rags lay the body of a suicide--a working-man who had shot himself the day before. The wife sat crouching on a broken chair, with eyes staring out of the window at the sunlit skies of a May morning in California. Her body seemed to have turned to stone and her eyes to have frozen in their sockets. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her shoulders drooped, her mouth hung hopelessly open. She was as dead to every sight and sound of earth as though shrouded and buried in six feet of clay instead of sunlight.

Barbara touched her shoulder, but she did not move.

”Have you been sitting there all night, Mrs. Nelson?” she asked, gently.

The woman turned her weak eyes toward the speaker and stared without reply.

”You haven't tasted the food I brought you,” Barbara continued.

The drooping figure stirred with sudden energy, as if the realization of the question first asked had begun to stir her intelligence.

”Yes. I set up all night with Jim. He'd a-done as much fer me. There's n.o.body else that cared enough to come. Ye know it ain't respectful to leave your dead alone----”

”But you must eat something,” Barbara urged.

”I can't eat--it chokes me.” She paused a moment, and looked at Norman in a dazed sort of way. ”I tried to eat and something choked me--what was it? O G.o.d, I remember now!” she cried, with strangling emotion.

”They are going to bury him in the potter's field unless we can save him, and I know we can't. He's got an old mother way back East that thinks he's doing well out here. Hit'll kill her dead when she finds out he wuz buried by the city.”

”He shan't go to the potter's field,” Norman interrupted, looking out of the window.

The woman rose, and tried to speak, but sank sobbing:

”Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!”

When the first flood of grateful emotion had spent itself, she looked up at Norman and said:

”You see, sir, he wasn't strong, and kept losin' his job in Chicago.

We'd heard about California all our lives. We sold out everything and got enough to come. For two years we've made a hard fight, but it was no use. Jim couldn't git work. I tried and I couldn't. Folks have helped us, but he was proud. He wouldn't beg and he wouldn't let me.

He wouldn't sell his gun. I think he always meant to use it that way when he got to the end, and it come yesterday when they give us notice to git out.”

She staggered over to the bed and fell across the body, sobbing:

”My poor old boy. He loved me. He was always good to me. I tried to go with him. But I couldn't pull the trigger! I was afraid! I was afraid!”

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