“Jim!” she said.  And then:  “You must go away, Jim.  I warn you.  I am going to tell all I know.”

But the figure turned, and it was Howard Cardew, a tense and strained Howard Cardew, who loomed amazingly tall and angry, but not with her.

“I’m sorry, Nellie dear,” he said, bending over her.  “If we’d only known—­can you talk now?”

Her mind was suddenly very clear.

“I must.  There is very little time.”

“I want to tell you something first, Nellie.  I think we have located the Russian woman, but we haven’t got Doyle.”

Howard was not very subtle, but Willy Cameron saw her face and understood.  It was strange beyond belief, he felt, this loyalty of women to their men, even after love had gone; this feeling that, having once lain in a man’s arms, they have taken a vow of protection over that man.  It was not so much that they were his as that he was theirs.  Jim Doyle had made her a prisoner, had treated her brutally, was a traitor to her and to his country, but—­he had been hers.  She was glad that he had got away.

CHAPTER XLVII

It was dark when Howard Cardew and Willy Cameron left the hospital.  Elinor’s information had been detailed and exact.  Under cover of the general strike the radical element intended to take over the city.  On the evening of the first day of the strike, armed groups from the revolutionary party would proceed first to the municipal light plant, and, having driven out any employees who remained at their posts, or such volunteers as had replaced them, would plunge the city into darkness.

Elinor was convinced that following this would come various bomb outrages, perhaps a great number of them, but of this she had no detailed information.  What she did know, however, was the dependence that Doyle and the other leaders were placing in the foreign element in the nearby mill towns and from one or two mining districts in the county.

Around the city, in the mill towns, there were more than forty thousand foreign laborers.  Subtract from that the loyal aliens, but add a certain percentage of the native-born element, members of seditious societies and followers of the red flag, and the Reds had a potential army of dangerous size.

As an actual fighting force they were much less impressive.  Only a small percentage, she knew and told them, were adequately armed.  There were a few machine guns, and some long-range rifles, but by far the greater number had only revolvers.  The remainder had extemporized weapons, bars of iron, pieces of pipe, farm implements, lances of wood tipped with iron and beaten out on home forges.

They were a rabble, not an army, without organization and with few leaders.  Their fighting was certain to be as individualistic as their doctrines.  They had two elements in their favor only, numbers and surprise.