“But I’ve done so many things,” she said, wistfully.  “You ought to hate me.”  And when he said nothing, for the simple reason that he could not speak:  “I’ve ruined us both, haven’t I?”

Suddenly he caught up her hand and, bending over it, held it to his lips.

“Always,” he said, huskily, “I love you, Lily.  I shall always love you.”

CHAPTER XLIX

Howard went back to the municipal building, driving furiously through the empty streets.  The news was ominous.  Small bodies of men, avoiding the highways, were focusing at different points in the open country.  The state police had been fired at from ambush, and two of them had been killed.  They had ridden into and dispersed various gatherings in the darkness, but only to have them re-form in other places.  The enemy was still shadowy, elusive; it was apparently saving its ammunition.  It did little shooting, but reports of the firing of farmhouses and of buildings in small, unprotected towns began to come in rapidly.

In a short time the messages began to be more significant, indicating that the groups were coalescing and that a revolutionary army, with the city its objective, was coming down the river, evidently making for the bridge at Chester Street.

“They’ve lighted a fire they can’t put out,” was Howard’s comment.  His mouth was very dry and his face twitching, for he saw, behind the frail barrier of the Chester Street bridge, the quiet houses of the city, the sleeping children.  He saw Grace and Lily, and Elinor.  He was among the first to reach the river front.

All through the dawn volunteers labored at the bridge head.  Members of the Vigilance Committee, policemen and firemen, doctors, lawyers, clerks, shop-keepers, they looted the river wharves with willing, unskillful hands.  They turned coal wagons on their sides, carried packing cases and boxes, and, under the direction of men who wore the Legion button, built skillfully and well.  Willy Cameron toiled with the others.  He lifted and pulled and struggled, and in the midst of his labor he had again that old dream of the city.  The city was a vast number of units, and those units were homes.  Behind each of those men there was, somewhere, in some quiet neighborhood, a home.  It was for their homes they were fighting, for the right of children to play in peaceful streets, for the right to go back at night to the rest they had earned by honest labor, for the right of the hearth, of lamp-light and sunlight, of love, of happiness.

Then, in the flare of a gasoline torch, he came face to face with Louis Akers.  The two men confronted each other, silently, with hostility.  Neither moved aside, but it was Akers who spoke first.

“Always busy, Cameron,” he said.  “What’d the world do without you, anyhow?”

“Aren’t you on the wrong side of this barricade?”

“Smart as ever,” Akers observed, watching him intently.  “As it happens, I’m here because I want to be, and because I can’t get where I ought to be.”