ll held the wrench with which he had been working on the
machinery down stairs. "Git back thar, or I'll make you wish you had.
When I tell you to do a thing, don't you name Johnnie to me. Git
back thar!"

With a faint cry the child cowered away from him. It is unlikely he
would have struck her with the upraised tool he held. Perhaps he did not
intend a blow at all, but one or two small frame tenders paused at the
ends of their lanes to watch the scene with avid eyes, to extract the
last thrill from the sensation that was being kindly brought into the
midst of their monotonous toilsome hours; and Lissy, who was creeping up
anxiously, yet keeping out of the range of Himes's eye, crouched as
though the hammer had been raised over her own head.

"Johnnie said--" began the little girl, desperately; but the old man,
stung to greater fury, sprang at her; she stumbled back and back; fell
against the slowly moving belt; her frock caught in the rivets which
were just passing, and she was instantly jerked from her feet. If any
one of the three men looking on had taken prompt action, the child might
have been rescued at once; but stupid terror held them motionless.

At the moment Johnnie, Shade and Mandy, coming up the stairs, got sight
of the group, Pap with upraised hammer, the child in the clutches of
imminent death.

With shrill outcries the other juvenile workers swiftly gathered in a
crowd. One broke away and fled down the long room screaming.

"You Pony Consadine! Milo! Come here. Pap Himes is a-killing yo'
sister."

The old man, shaking all through his bulk, stared with fallen jaw. Mandy
shrieked and leaped up the few remaining steps to reach Deanie, who was
already above the finger-tips of a tall man.

"Pap! Shade! Quick! Don't you see she'll be killed!" Mandy screamed in
frenzy.

Something in the atmosphere must have made itself felt, for no sound
could have penetrated the din of the weaving room; yet some of the women
left their looms and came running in behind the two pale, scared little
brothers, to add their shrieks to the general clamour. Deanie's fellow
workers, poor little souls, denied their childish share of the world's
excitements, gazed with a sort of awful relish. Only Johnnie, speeding
down the room away from it all, was doing anything rational to avert the
catastrophe. The child hung on the slowly moving belt, inert, a tiny rag
of life, with her mop of tangled yellow curls, her white, little face,