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.”

Police were running for the spot.  Also, another patrol machine had halted.  As for myself, I was in a daze.  The suddenness of it was stunning.  How had it happened?  I knew not how, and yet I had been looking directly at it.  So dazed was I for the moment that I was scarcely aware of the fact that we were being held up by the police.  I abruptly saw that a policeman was in the act of shooting Hartman.  But Hartman was cool and was giving the proper passwords.  I saw the levelled revolver hesitate, then sink down, and heard the disgusted grunt of the policeman.  He was very angry, and was cursing the whole secret service.  It was always in the way, he was averring, while Hartman was talking back to him and with fitting secret-service pride explaining to him the clumsiness of the police.