seemed for a moment to be overwhelmed. But I am on my feet again
now!"

He reached into a pocket and took out some bills, which he handed to
Carmen. "That will see you through for a day or so down there. If you
need more, wire me. I'll get it from some source! Come," he added,
beckoning to Haynerd, "the Express will be issued to-morrow as usual,
and we must get to bed. I've really had quite a strenuous day!" He
turned, then paused and looked at Carmen.

The girl caught the meaning in his glance, and went directly to the
piano. Hitt followed and bent over her.

"Don't," he said, "if you do not feel like it. This day has been a
hard one for you, I know. And--"

"But I do feel like it," she answered, smiling up at him. "I want to
sing for you. And," her voice dropped low, "I want to sing to--Him."

Hitt gulped down something in his throat. "The bravest little girl in
the whole wide world!" he muttered through his set teeth.

* * * * *

The carnage at Avon was not incidental; it was the logical effect of
definite mental causes. It was the orderly sequence of an endless
train of hatred of man for man, bred of greed and the fear of
starvation. And starvation is the externalized human belief that life
is at the caprice of intelligent matter. But that is an infraction of
the first Commandment, given when the human race was a babe.

When the mill hands left their looms at evening of the day following
Ames's rejection of their demands, the master closed the doors behind
them and locked them out. Were not these mills his?

No, they were a sacred trust asset.

Bah! The parrot-cry of the maudlin sentimental!

But, four thousand men, women, and little children, with never a
dollar beyond their earnings of the day, thrust out into the blasts of
the bitterest winter the New England states had known in years!

True; but why, then, did they strike? For, you see, that of itself
proved the soundness of Ames's single reply to all further appeal:
"There is nothing whatever to arbitrate."

In the garden of the human mind waves many a flower, both black and
red, fanned by the foul winds of carnal thought. There grow the
brothel, the dive, the gin-shop, the jail. About these hardier stems
twine the hospital, the cemetery, the madhouse, the morgue. And Satan,
"the man-killer from the beginning," waters their roots and makes
fallow the soil with the blood of fools. But of those for whom the