The stockyards (ghetto, plant, and everything) were smouldering ruins.  Far off to the right a wide smoke haze dimmed the sky,—­the town of Pullman, the soldier chauffeur told us, or what had been the town of Pullman, for it was utterly destroyed.  He had driven the machine out there, with despatches, on the afternoon of the third day.  Some of the heaviest fighting had occurred there, he said, many of the streets being rendered impassable by the heaps of the dead.

Swinging around the shattered walls of a building, in the stockyards district, the automobile was stopped by a wave of dead.  It was for all the world like a wave tossed up by the sea.  It was patent to us what had happened.  As the mob charged past the corner, it had been swept, at right angles and point-blank range, by the machine-guns drawn up on the cross street.  But disaster had come to the soldiers.  A chance bomb must have exploded among them, for the mob, checked until its dead and dying formed the wave, had white-capped and flung forward its foam of living, fighting slaves.  Soldiers and slaves lay together, torn and mangled, around and over the wreckage of the automobiles and guns.

Ernest sprang out.  A familiar pair of shoulders in a cotton shirt and a familiar fringe of white hair had caught his eye.  I did not watch him, and it was not until he was back beside me and we were speeding on that he said: 

“It was Bishop Morehouse.”

Soon we were in the green country, and I took one last glance back at the smoke-filled sky.  Faint and far came the low thud of an explosion.  Then I turned my face against Ernest’s breast and wept softly for the Cause that was lost.  Ernest’s arm about me was eloquent with love.

“For this time lost, dear heart,” he said, “but not forever.  We have learned.  To-morrow the Cause will rise again, strong with wisdom and discipline.”

The automobile drew up at a railroad station.  Here we would catch a train to New York.  As we waited on the platform, three trains thundered past, bound west to Chicago.  They were crowded with ragged, unskilled laborers, people of the abyss.

“Slave-levies for the rebuilding of Chicago,” Ernest said.  “You see, the Chicago slaves are all killed.”

CHAPTER XXV

THE TERRORISTS

It was not until Ernest and I were back in New York, and after weeks had elapsed, that we were able to comprehend thoroughly the full sweep of the disaster that had befallen the Cause.  The situation was bitter and bloody.  In many places, scattered over the country, slave revolts and massacres had occurred.  The roll of the martyrs increased mightily.  Countless executions took place everywhere.  The mountains and waste regions were filled with outlaws and refugees who were being hunted down mercilessly.  Our own refuges were packed with comrades who had prices on their heads.  Through information furnished by its spies, scores of our refuges were raided by the soldiers of the Iron Heel.