osed; the shutters to the shops were up. But there
were many police and watchmen in evidence, and now and again automobile
patrols of the Mercenaries slipped swiftly past.

Hartman and I agreed that it was useless to report ourselves to the
local chiefs of the secret service. Our failure so to report would be
excused, we knew, in the light of subsequent events. So we headed for
the great labor-ghetto on the South Side in the hope of getting in
contact with some of the comrades. Too late! We knew it. But we could
not stand still and do nothing in those ghastly, silent streets. Where
was Ernest? I was wondering. What was happening in the cities of the
labor castes and Mercenaries? In the fortresses?

As if in answer, a great screaming roar went up, dim with distance,
punctuated with detonation after detonation.

"It's the fortresses," Hartman said. "God pity those three regiments!"

At a crossing we noticed, in the direction of the stockyards, a gigantic
pillar of smoke. At the next crossing several similar smoke pillars were
rising skyward in the direction of the West Side. Over the city of the
Mercenaries we saw a great captive war-balloon that burst even as we
looked at it, and fell in flaming wreckage toward the earth. There was
no clew to that tragedy of the air. We could not determine whether the
balloon had been manned by comrades or enemies. A vague sound came to
our ears, like the bubbling of a gigantic caldron a long way off, and
Hartman said it was machine-guns and automatic rifles.

And still we walked in immediate quietude. Nothing was happening where
we were. The police and the automobile patrols went by, and once half
a dozen fire-engines, returning evidently from some conflagration. A
question was called to the fireman by an officer in an automobile, and
we heard one shout in reply: "No water! They've blown up the mains!"

"We've smashed the water supply," Hartman cried excitedly to me. "If we
can do all this in a premature, isolated, abortive attempt, what can't
we do in a concerted, ripened effort all over the land?"

The automobile containing the officer who had asked the question darted
on. Suddenly there was a deafening roar. The machine, with its human
freight, lifted in an upburst of smoke, and sank down a mass of wreckage
and death.

Hartman was jubilant. "Well done! well done!" he was repeating, over
and over, in a whisper. "The proletariat gets its lesson to-day, but it
gives one, too."