Three girls fainted on the fifth floor and two on the sixth next morning.  They were not carried to the cool and shaded rest-rooms to revive, but lay on the floor with their heads huddled on a pile of waste, and had a little warmish water from the rusty “cooler” in the back stairway poured upon them as they lay.  No white-clad nurse with palm leaf and cooling drinks attended their unconscious state, although there was one in attendance in the rest-room whose duty it was to look after the comfort of any chance visitors.  When any stooped to succor here, she fanned her neighbor with her apron, casting an anxious eye on her own silent machine and knowing she was losing “time.”

Susie fainted three times that morning, and Katie lost an hour in all, bringing water and making a fan out of a newspaper.  Also she had an angry altercation with the foreman.  He said if Susie “played up” this way she’d have to quit; there were plenty of girls waiting to take her place, and he hadn’t time to fool with kids that wanted to lie around and be fanned.  It was his last few words as she was reviving that stung Susie to life again and put her back at her machine for the last time in nervous panic, with the thought of what would happen at home if she lost her job.  Up above her the great heavy machines thrashed on and the floor trembled with their movement.  Black and thick and hot was the air around Susie and she scarcely could see, for dizziness, the machinery which she worked from habit, as she stood swaying in her place, and wondering if she could hold out till the noon whistle blew.

Down in the basement, near one of the elevator shafts, a pile of waste lay smoldering, out of sight.  One of the boys from the lumber-yard down the next block had stopped to light his cigarette as he passed out into the street after bringing a bill to the head manager.  He tossed his match away, not seeing where it fell.  The big factory thundered on in full swing of a busy, driving morning, and the little match lay nursing its flame and smoldering.

How long it crept and smoldered no one knew.  It seemed to come from every floor at once, that smell of smoke and cry of fire!  More smoke in volumes pouring up suddenly through cracks and bursting from the elevator shaft; a lick of flame darting out like a serpent ready to strike, menacing against the heat of the big rooms.

Panic and smoke and fire!  Cries and clashing of machinery thundering on like a storm above an angry sea!

The girls rushed together in fear, or, screaming, ran desperately to windows which they knew they could not raise!  They pounded at the locked doors and crowded in the narrow passages, frantically surging this way and that.  There was no one to quiet them or tell them what to do.  If some one would only stop that awful machinery!  Was the engineer dead?

Mockingly the little cool vines crept in about the window-sills and over the imprisoning panes, as if to taunt the victims who were caught in the death-trap.