In much the same spirit that her
brother John perhaps had faced a lonely night watch in Flanders fields,
Adam Ward's daughter forced herself to do this thing that had so
unexpectedly fallen to her.
For some minutes she walked the floor, listening to the noises of the
neighborhood. Anxiously she opened the door and looked out into the
fast, gathering darkness. No one of her own people knew where she was.
She had heard terrible things of Jake Vodell and his creed of
terrorism. McIver had pressed it upon her mind that the strikers were
all alike in their lawlessness. What if Sam Whaley should return to
find her there? She listened--listened.
A faint, moaning sound came from the next room. She went quickly to the
doorway, but in the faint light she could see only the shadowy outline
of a bed. Taking the lamp she entered fearfully.
Save for the bed, an old box that served as a table, and one chair,
this room was as bare as the other. With the lamp in her hand Helen
stood beside the bed.
The tiny form of little Maggie was lost under the ragged and dirty
coverlet. The child's face in the tangled mass of her unkempt hair was
so wasted and drawn, her eyes, closed under their dark lids, so deeply
sunken, and her teeth so exposed by the thin fleshless lips, that she
seemed scarcely human.
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