Late in the afternoon, as Tom lay stretched in glowering melancholy on the greasy, dirt-browned board that did service as chair and bed to the transitory tenants of the cell, steps paused in the corridor without and a key rattled in his door. He rose dully out of his dejection. A scowling officer admitted a man, round and short and with side whiskers, and locked the door upon his back.

"This is a pretty how-to-do!" growled the man, coming forward.

Tom stared at his visitor. "Why, Mr. Driscoll!" he cried.

"That's who the most of my friends say I am," the contractor admitted gruffly.

He deposited himself upon the bench that had seated and bedded so much unwashed misfortune, and, his back against the cement wall, turned his sour face about the bare room. "This is what I call a pretty poor sort of hospitality to offer a visitor," he commented, in his surly voice. "Not even a chair to sit on."

"There is also the floor; you may take your choice," Tom returned, nettled by the other's manner. He himself took the bench.

Mr. Driscoll stared at him with blinking eyes, and he stared back defiantly. In Tom's present mood of wrath and depression his temper was tinder waiting another man's spark.

"Huh!" Mr. Driscoll ran his pudgy forefinger easefully about between his collar and his neck, and removing his spectacles mopped his purple face. "What's this funny business you've been up to now?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Tom demanded, his irritation mounting.

"You ought to read the papers and keep posted on what you do. I just saw a Star. There's half a page of your face, and about a pint of red ink."

Tom groaned, and his jaws clamped ragefully.

"What I read gave me the impression you'd been having a sort of private Fourth of July celebration," Mr. Driscoll pursued.

Tom turned on the contractor half savagely. "See here! I don't know what you came here for, but if it was for this kind of talk – well, you can guess how welcome you are!"

Mr. Driscoll emitted a little chuckling sound, or Tom thought for an instant he did. But a glance at that sour face, with its straight pouting mouth, corrected Tom's ears.

"Now, what was your fool idea in blowing up the Avon?"

Tom uprose wrathfully. "Do you mean to say you believe the lies those blackguards told this morning?"

"I only know what I read in the papers."

"If you swallow everything you see in the papers, you must have an awful maw!"

"Yes, I suppose you have got some sort of a story you put up."

Tom glared at his pudgy visitor who questioned with such an exasperating presumption. "Did I ask you here?" he demanded.

The contractor's eyes snapped, and Tom expected hot words. But none came. "Don't get hot under the collar," Mr. Driscoll advised, running his comforting finger under his own. "Come, what's your side of the story?"

Tom was of half a mind to give a curt refusal. But his wrong was too great, too burning, for him to keep silent upon it. He would have talked of it to any one – to his very walls. He took a turn in the cell, then paused before his old employer and hotly explained his innocence and Foley's guilt.

While Tom spoke Mr. Driscoll's head nodded excitedly.

"Just what I said!" he cried when Tom ended, and brought his fist down on his knee. "Well, we'll show him!"

"Show him what?" Tom asked.

Mr. Driscoll stopped his fist midway in another excited descent. He stood up, for he saw the officer's scowling face at the grated front of the cell. "Oh, a lot of things before he dies. As for you, keep your courage up. What else's it for?"

He held out his hand. Tom took it with bewildered perfunctoriness.

Mr. Driscoll passed through the door, held open by the officer. Outside he turned about and growled through the bars: "Now don't be blowing up any more buildings!"

Tom, stung anew, would have retorted in kind, but Mr. Driscoll's footsteps had died away down the corridor before adequate words came to him.

It was about an hour later that the officer appeared before his cell again and unlocked his door. "Come on," he said shortly.

Tom, supposing he was at length to be removed to the county jail, put on his hat and stepped outside the cell. He had expected to find policemen in the corridor, and to be handcuffed. But the officer was alone.

Two cells away he saw Jake's malignant face peering at him through the bars. "I guess this puts us about even!" Jake called out.

Tom shook his fist. "Wait till the trial! We'll see!" he cried vengefully.

"Shut up, youse!" shouted the surly watchman. He pushed Tom through the corridor and up a stairway. At its head Tom was guided through a door, and found himself in the general hall of the police station.

"Here youse are," said the officer, starting for the sergeant's desk. "Come on and sign the bail bond."

Tom caught his arm. "What's this mean?" he cried.

"Don't youse know? Youse're bailed out."

"Bailed out! Who by?"

"Didn't he tell youse?" Surprise showed in the crabbed face of the officer. "Why, before he done anything he went down to talk it over with youse."

"Not Mr. Driscoll?"

"I don't know his name. That red-faced old geezer in the glasses. Huh! – his coin comes easier'n mine."

Tom put his name to the bond, already signed by Mr. Driscoll, and stumbled out into the street, half blinded by the rush of sunlight into his cell-darkened eyes, and struck through with bewilderment at his unexpected liberation. He threw off a number of quizzing reporters, who had got quick news of his release, and walked several aimless blocks before he came back to his senses. Then he set out for Mr. Driscoll's office, almost choking with emotion at the prospect of meeting Ruth again. But he reached it too late to spend his thanks or to test his self-control. It was past six and the office was locked.

He started home, and during the car ride posted himself upon his recent doings by reading the accounts of the trial and his part in the Avon outrage. On reaching the block in which he lived he hesitated long before he found the courage to go up to the ordeal of telling Maggie his last misfortune. When he entered his flat it was to find it empty. He sat down at the window, with its backyard view of clothes-lines and of fire-escape landings that were each an open-air pantry, and rehearsed the sentences with which he should break the news to her, his suspense mounting as the minutes passed. At length her key sounded in the lock, he heard her footsteps, then saw her dim shape come into the sitting-room.

In the same instant she saw him at the window. "What – Tom!" she cried, with the tremulous relief of one who ends a great suspense.

He had been nerving himself to face another mood than this. He was taken aback by the unexpected note in her voice – a sympathetic note he had not heard for such a time it seemed he had never heard it at all.

He rose, embarrassed. "Yes," he said.

She had come quickly to his side, and now caught his arm. "You are here, Tom?"

"Why, yes," he answered, still dazed and at a loss. "Where have you been, Maggie?"

Had the invading twilight not half blindfolded him, Tom could have seen the rapid change that took place in Maggie's face – the relief at finding him safe yielding to the stronger emotion beneath it. When she answered her voice was as of old. "Been? Where haven't I been? To the jail the last place."

"To the jail?" He was again surprised. "Then … you know all?"

"Know all?" She laughed harshly, a tremolo beneath the harshness. "How could I help knowing all? The newsboys yelling down in the street! The neighbors coming in with their sympathy!" She did not tell him how to these visitors she had hotly defended his innocence.

"I didn't know you were at the police station," he said weakly, still at a loss.

"Of course not. When I got there they told me you'd been let out." Her breath was coming rapidly, deeply. "What a time I had! I didn't know how to get to the jail! Dragging myself all over town! Those awful papers everywhere! Everybody looking at me and guessing who I was! Oh, the disgrace! The disgrace!"

"But, Maggie, I didn't do this!"

"The world don't know that!" The rage and despair that had been held in check all afternoon by her concern for him now completely mastered her. "We're disgraced! You've been in jail! You're now only out on bail! Fifteen thousand dollars bail! Why that boss, Mr. Driscoll, went on it, heaven only knows! You're going to be tried. Even if you get off we'll never hear the last of it. Hadn't we had trouble enough? Now it's disgrace! And why's this come on us? You tell me that!"

She was shaking all over, and for her to speak was a struggle with her sobs. She supported herself with arms on the table, and looked at him fiercely, wildly, through the dim light.

Tom took her arm. "Sit down, Maggie," he said, and tried to push her into a chair.

She repulsed him. "Answer me. Why has this trouble come on us?"

He was silent.

"Oh, you know! Because you wouldn't take a little advice from your wife! Other men got along with Foley and held their jobs. But you wanted to be different; you wanted to fight Foley. Well, you've had your way; you've fought him. And what of it? We're ruined! Disgraced! You're working for less than half what you used to get. We're ashamed to show our faces in the street. All because you wouldn't pay any attention to me. And me – how I've got to suffer for it! Oh, my God! My God!"

Tom recognized the justice, from her point of view, in her wild phrases and did not try to dispute her. He again tried to push her into a chair.

She threw off his hand, and went hysterically on, now beating her knuckles upon the table. "Leave me alone! I've made up my mind about one thing. You won't listen to reason. I've given you good advice. I've been right every time. You've paid no attention to me and we're ruined! Well, I've made up my mind. If you do this sort of thing again, I'll lock you out of the house! D'you hear? I'll lock you out of the house!"

She fell of her own accord into a chair, and with her head in her hands abandoned herself to sobbing. Tom looked at her silently. In a narrow way, she was right. In a broad way, he knew he was right. But he could not make her understand, so there was nothing he could say. Presently he noticed that her hair had loosened and her hat had fallen over one cheek. With unaccustomed hands he took out the pins and laid the hat upon the table. She gave no sign that she had noted the act… Her sobs became fewer and less violent.

Tom quietly lit the gas. "Where's Ferdinand?" he asked, in his ordinary voice.

"I left him with Mrs. Jones," she answered through her hands.

When Tom came back with the boy she was in the kitchen, a big apron over her street dress, beginning the dinner. Tom looked in upon her, then obeying an impulse long unstirred he began to set the table. She glanced furtively at this unusual service, but said nothing. She sat through the meal with hard face, but did not again refer to the day's happenings; and, since the day was Wednesday, as soon as he had eaten Tom hurried away to Potomac Hall.

Tom was surrounded by friends the minute he entered the hall. The ten o'clock edition of the evening papers, out before seven, had acquainted them with his release. The accounts in this edition played up the anomaly of this labor ruffian, shown by his act to be the arch-enemy of the employers, being bailed out by one of the very contractors with whom the union was at war. Two of the papers printed interviews with Mr. Driscoll upon the question, why had he done it? One interview was, "I don't know"; the other, "None of your business."

Tom's friends had the curiosity of the papers, and put to him the question the news sheets had put to Mr. Driscoll. "If Mr. Driscoll don't know, how can I?" was all the answer he could give them. Their curiosity, however, was weak measured by their indignation over the turn events had taken in the court-room. They would stand by him at his trial, they declared, and show what his relations had been with Jake, Bill and Arkansas.

Before the meeting was opened there was talk among the Foleyites against Tom being allowed to preside, but he ended their muttering by marching to his table and pounding the union to order. He immediately took the floor and in a speech filled with charges against Foley gave to the union his side of the facts that had already been presented them from a different viewpoint in the papers. When he ended Foley's followers looked to their chief to make reply, but Foley kept his seat. Connelly, seeing it his duty to defend his leader, was rising to his feet when a glance from Foley made him sink back into his chair. The talk from Tom's side went hotly on for a time, but, meeting with no resistance, and having no immediate purpose, it dwindled away.

The union then turned to matters pertaining to the management of the strike. As the discussion went on followers of Foley slipped quietly about the hall whispering in the ears of their brethren. The talk became tedious. Tom's friends, wearied and uninterested, sat in silence. Foleyites spoke at great length upon unimportant details. Foley himself made a long speech, the like of which had never before come from him, it was that dull and purposeless. At half-past ten, by which time the men usually were restless to be out of the hall and bound toward their beds, adjournment seemed as far off as at eight. Sleepy and bored by the stupid discussion, members began to go out, and most of those that left were followers of Tom. The pointless talk went on; men kept slipping out. At twelve o'clock not above two hundred were in the hall, and of these not two dozen were Tom's friends.

Tom saw Foley cast his eyes over the thinned crowd, and then give a short nod at Connelly. The secretary stood up and claimed Tom's recognition.

"Mr. President, I move we suspend the constitution."

The motion was instantly seconded. Tom promptly ruled it out of order, on the ground that it was unconstitutional to suspend the constitution. But he was over-ruled, only a score siding with him. The motion was put and was carried by the same big majority that had voted against his decision.

Connelly rose a second time. "I make a motion that we remove the president from office on the charge that he is the instigator of an outrage that has blackened the fair name of our union before all the world."

A hundred voices cried a second to the motion. Tom rose and looked with impotent wrath into the faces of the crowd from which Foley's cunning had removed his followers. Then he tossed the gavel upon the table.

"I refuse to put the motion!" he shouted; and picking up his hat he strode down the middle aisle. Half-way to the door he heard Connelly, in the absence of the vice-president, put the motion; and turning as he passed out he glimpsed the whole crowd on its feet.

The next morning Tom saw by his newspaper that Connelly was the union's new president; also that he had been dropped from the strike committee, Hogan now being in his place. The reports in the papers intimated that the union had partially exonerated itself by its prompt discardure of the principal in the Avon explosion. The editorial pages expressed surprise that the notorious Foley bore no relation to an outrage that seemed a legitimate offspring of his character.

Tom had not been at work more than an hour when a boy brought him word that the superintendent of the shipping department desired to see him. He hurried to his superior's office.

"You were not at work yesterday?" the superintendent said.

"No," Tom admitted.

The head of the department drew a morning paper from a pigeon-hole and pointed at a face on its first page. "Your likeness, I believe."

"It was intended for me."

He touched a button, and a clerk appeared. "Phillips, make out Keating's time check." He turned sharply back upon Tom. "That's all. We've got no use for anarchists in our business."

Chapter XXI
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

When Ruth carried a handful of letters she had just finished into Mr. Driscoll's office – this while he sat talking to Tom in the latter's cell – she saw staring luridly at her from the desk the newspaper that had sent her employer to the jail on his errand of gruff mercy. There was a great drawing of Tom's face, brutalized, yet easily recognizable, and over it the heavy crimson heading:

The stare of that brutal face and of those red words sent her sinking into Mr. Driscoll's chair, and the letters fluttered to the floor. After a moment she reached in eager revulsion for the paper, and her eyes reeled through the high-colored account of the court scene. What was printed there was the newest of news to her; she had lunched early, and the paper she had bought to learn the latest developments in the Avon case had carried her only to the beginning of the trial. As she read, a dizzy sickness ran through all her body. The case against Tom, as the papers made it out, was certainly strong; and the fact that he, the instigator of the outrage, had attempted to escape blame by seeking to help convict his own tools was emphasized as the most blackening phase of the whole black affair. But strong as the case appeared, within her sickened, bewildered self there was something that protested the story could not possibly be true.

During the weeks that had passed since she had last seen Tom she had wondered much that he had not come again, guessing every reason but the right one. When ten days had passed without a visit from him she had concluded that he must be too busy in the management of the strike to spare an evening; she did not know how completely Tom had been crowded off the stage by Foley. When more days had passed, and still no call from him, her subtle woman's nature had supplied another reason, and one that was a sufficient explanation to her even to the present. She knew what Tom's feelings were toward her; a woman needs precious little insight to discover when a man loves her. For all her instinctive democracy, she was perfectly conscious of the social difference between herself and him, and with not unnatural egotism she endowed Tom with the same consciousness. He loved her, but felt their social inequality, and felt it with such keenness that he deemed it hopeless to try to win her, and so had decided to see her no more.

Such was her explanation of his absence. She pitied him with a warm romantic pity for his renunciation. Held away by such a reason, she knew that if ever he came it must be at her bidding. At times she had been impelled to send for him to come. To her this was not an impulse of prohibitive unmaidenliness; she could bend to a man who thought himself beneath her as she never could to a man on her own level. But she had not sent. To do so without being prepared to give him what he desired would be to do him a great wrong, and to give him this she was neither able nor ready. She admired all that was good in him; but she could not blind her eyes to his shortcomings, and to go into his world, with its easily imagined coarseness, with its ignorance of books and music and painting, and all the little refinements that were dear to her, she could not. And yet her heart had ached that he had not come.

But now as she read the story of his disgrace, and as the reflux of wits and strength began, all her heart was one protest of his innocence, and she forgot all the little differences that had before halted her desire to see him; and this desire, freed of its checks, suddenly expanded till it filled the uttermost recesses of her soul.

Her first impulse, when she had reached the story's end, was to go straight to him, and she went so far as to put on her hat. But reason stopped her at the door. She could do him no good, and her call would be but an embarrassment to them both. She removed her hat, and sat down to surging thoughts.

She was sitting at her desk, white and weak, reading anew the lurid story in the paper, when Mr. Driscoll passed through her room into his office with hat drawn over his eyes. She looked through his open door for several minutes – and then, obeying the desire for the relief of speech, she went in.

"Did you see this article about Mr. Keating?" she asked, trying to keep her personal interest in Tom from showing in her voice.

Mr. Driscoll's hat brim was still over his eyes. He did not look up. "Yes," he said gruffly.

"You remember him, don't you? – one of the foremen?"

The hat brim moved affirmatively.

She had to summon all her strength to put her next question with calmness. "What will be done with him?"

"I don't know. Blowing up buildings isn't a very innocent amusement."

"But he didn't do it!"

"He didn't? Hum!"

Ruth burned to make a hot defense. But instead she asked: "Do you think he's the sort of a man to do a thing of that sort? He says he didn't."

"What d'you suppose he'd say?"

She checked her rising wrath. "But what do you think will be done with him?"

"Hung," growled Mr. Driscoll.

She glared at him, but his hat brim shielded off her resentment; and without another word she swept indignantly out of the room.

Ruth went home in that weakening anxiety which is most felt by the helpless. On the way she bought an evening paper, but there was nothing new in it. After a dinner hardly touched she went into the street and got a ten o'clock edition. It had the story of Tom's release on bail.

"Why, the dear old bear!" she gasped, as she discovered that Mr. Driscoll had gone Tom's bond. She hurried to her room and in utter abandonment to her emotion wrote Tom a note asking him to call the following evening.

The next morning Tom, discharged but half an hour before, walked into Ruth's office. He had stood several minutes in front of the building before he had gained sufficient control to carry him through the certain meeting with her. She went red at sight of him, and rose in a throbbing confusion, but subdued herself to greet him with a friendly cordiality.

"It's been a long time since I've seen you," she said, giving him her hand. It was barely touched, then dropped.

"Yes. I've been – very – busy," Tom mumbled, his big chest heaving. It seemed that his mind, his will, were slipping away from him. He seized his only safety. "Is Mr. Driscoll in?"

"Yes." Suddenly chilled, she went into Mr. Driscoll's room. "He says he's too busy to see you," she said on her return; and then a little of her greeting smile came back: "But I think you'd better go in, anyhow."

As Tom entered Mr. Driscoll looked up with something that was meant to be a scowl. He had had one uncomfortable scene already that morning. "Didn't I say I was busy?" he asked sharply.

"I was told you were. But you didn't think I'd go away without thanking you?"

"It's a pity a man can't make a fool of himself without being slobbered over. Well, if you've got to, out with it! But cut it short."

Tom expressed his thanks warmly, and obediently made them brief. "But I don't know what you did it for?" he ended.

"About fifty reporters have been asking that same thing."

The telephone in Ruth's office began to ring. He waited expectantly.

"Mr. Bobbs wants to speak to you," said Ruth, appearing at the door.

"Tell him I'm out – or dead," he ordered, and went on to Tom: "And he's about the seventeenth contractor that's asked the same question, and tried to walk on my face. Maybe because I don't love Foley. I don't know myself. A man goes out of his head now and then, I suppose." His eyes snapped crossly.

"If you're sorry this morning, withdraw the bail and I'll – "

"Don't you try to be a fool, too! All I ask of you is, don't skip town, and don't blow up any more buildings."

Tom gave his word, smiling into the cross face; and was withdrawing, when Mr. Driscoll stood up. "When this strike you started is over come around to see me." He held out his hand; his grasp was warm and tight. "Good-by."

Tom, having none of that control and power of simulation which are given by social training, knew of but one way to pass safely by the danger beyond Mr. Driscoll's door. He hurried across Ruth's office straight for the door opening into the hallway. He had his hand on the knob, when he felt how brutal was his discourtesy. He turned his head. Ruth sat before the typewriter, her white face on him.

"Good-by," he said.

She did not answer, and he went dazedly out.

Ruth sat in frozen stillness for long after he had gone. This new bearing of Tom toward her fitted her explanation for his long absence – and did not fit it. If he had renounced her, though loving her, he probably would have borne himself in the abrupt way he had just done. And he might have acted in just this same way had he come to be indifferent to her. This last was the chilling thought. If he had received her letter then his abrupt manner could mean only that this last thought struck the truth. When she had written him she had been certain of his feeling for her; that certainty now changed to uncertainty, she would have given half her life to have called the letter back with unbroken seal.

She told herself that he would not come, – told herself this as she automatically did her work, as she rode home in the car, as she made weak pretense of eating dinner. And yet, after dinner, she put on the white dress that his eyes had told her he liked so well. And later, when Mr. Berman's card was brought her, she sent down word that she was ill.

Presently … he came. He did not speak when she opened the door to him, nor did she. There was an unmastering fever burning in his throat and through all his body; and all her inner self was the prisoner of a climacteric paralysis. They held hands for a time, laxly, till one loosed, and then both swung limply back to their places.

"I just got your letter to-night – when I got home," he said, driving out the words. But he said nothing of his struggle: how he had fought back his longing and determined not to come; and how, the victory won, he had madly thrown wisdom aside and rushed to her.

They found seats, somehow, she in a chair, he on the green couch, and sat in a silence their heart-beats seemed to make sonant. She was the first to recover somewhat, and being society bred and so knowing the necessity of speech, she questioned him about his arrest.

He started out on the story haltingly. But little by little his fever lost its invalidating control, and little by little the madness in his blood, the madness that had forced him hither, possessed his brain and tongue, and the words came rapidly, with spirit. Finishing the story of his yesterday he harked back to the time he had last seen her, and told her what had happened in the second part of that evening in the hall over the Third Avenue saloon; told her how Foley had stolen the strike; how he had declined to his present insignificance. And as he talked he eagerly drank in her sympathy, and loosed himself more and more to the enjoyment of the mad pleasure of being with her. To her his words were not the account of the more or less sordid experiences of a workingman; they were the story of the reverses of the hero who, undaunted, has given battle to one whom all others have dared not, or cared not, fight.

"What will you do now?" she asked when he had ended.

"I don't know. Foley says he has me down and out – if you know what that means."

She nodded.

"I guess he's about right. Not many people want to hire men who blow up buildings. I had thought I'd work at whatever I could till October – our next election's then – and run against Foley again. But if he wins the strike he may be too strong to beat."

"But do you think he'll win the strike?"

"He'll be certain to win, though this explosion will injure us a lot. He's in for the strike for all he's worth, and when he fights his best he's hard to beat. The bosses can't get enough iron-men to keep their jobs going. That's already been proved. And in a little while all the other trades will catch up to where we left off; they'll have to stop then, for they can't do anything till our work's been done. That'll be equivalent to a general strike in all the building trades. We'll be losing money, of course, but so'll the bosses. The side'll win that can hold out longest, and we're fixed to hold out."

"According to all the talk I hear the victory is bound to go the opposite way."

"Well, you know some people then who'll be mighty disappointed!" Tom returned.

She did not take him up, and silence fell between them. Thus far their talk had been of the facts of their daily lives, and though it had been unnatural in that it was far from the matter in both their hearts, yet by help of its moderate distraction they had managed to keep their feelings under control. But now, that distraction ended, Tom's fever began to burn back upon him. He sat rigidly upright, his eyes avoiding her face, and the fever flamed higher and higher. Ruth gazed whitely at him, hands gripped in her lap, her faculties slipping from her, waiting she hardly knew what. Minutes passed, and the silence between them grew intenser and more intense.

Amid her throbbing dizziness Ruth's mind held steadily to just two thoughts: she was again certain of Tom's love, and certain that his pride would never allow him to speak. These two thoughts pointed her the one thing there was for her to do; the one thing that must be done for both their sakes – and finally she forced herself to say: "It has been a long time since you have been to see me. I had thought you had quite forgotten me."

"I have thought of you often?" he managed to return, eyes still fixed above her, his self-control tottering.

"But in a friendly way? – No. – Or you would not have been silent through two months."

His eyes came down and fastened upon that noble face, and the words escaped by the guard he tried to keep at his lips: "I have never had a friend like you."

She waited.

"You are my best friend," the words continued.

She waited again, but he said nothing more.

She drove herself on. "And yet you could – stay away two months? – till I sent for you?"