the corners; a company of soldiers marched by, drawing the people in silence to the curb.  Janet scanned the faces of these idle operatives; they seemed for the most part either calm or sullen, wanting the fire and passion of the enthusiasts who had come out to picket in the early hours of the day; she sought vainly for the Italian girl with whom she had made friends.  Despondency grew in her, a sense of isolation, of lacking any one, now, to whom she might turn, and these feelings were intensified by the air of confidence prevailing here.  The strike was crushed, injustice and wrong had triumphed—­would always triumph.  In front of the Banner office she heard a man say to an acquaintance who had evidently just arrived in town:—­“The Chippering?  Sure, that’s running.  By to-morrow Ditmar’ll have a full force there.  Now that the militia has come, I guess we’ve got this thing scotched...”

Just how and when that order and confidence of Faber Street began to be permeated by disquietude and alarm, Janet could not have said.  Something was happening, somewhere—­or about to happen.  An obscure, apparently telepathic process was at work.  People began to hurry westward, a few had abandoned the sidewalk and were running; while other pedestrians, more timid, were equally concerned to turn and hasten in the opposite direction.  At the corner of West Street was gathering a crowd that each moment grew larger and larger, despite the efforts of the police to disperse it.  These were strikers, angry strikers.  They blocked the traffic, halted the clanging trolleys, surged into the mouth of West Street, booing and cursing at the soldiers whose threatening line of bayonets stretched across that thoroughfare half-way down toward the canal, guarding the detested Chippering Mill.  Bordering West Street, behind the company’s lodging-houses on the canal, were certain low buildings, warehouses, and on their roofs tense figures could be seen standing out against the sky.  The vanguard of the mob, thrust on by increasing pressure from behind, tumbled backward the thin cordon of police, drew nearer and nearer the bayonets, while the soldiers grimly held their ground.  A voice was heard on the roof, a woman in the front rank of the mob gave a warning shriek, and two swift streams of icy water burst forth from the warehouse parapet, tearing the snow from the cobbles, flying in heavy, stinging spray as it advanced and mowed the strikers down and drove them like flies toward Faber Street.  Screams of fright, curses of defiance and hate mingled with the hissing of the water and the noise of its impact with the ground—­like the tearing of heavy sail-cloth.  Then, from somewhere near the edge of the mob, came a single, sharp detonation, quickly followed by another—­below the watchmen on the roof a window crashed.  The nozzles on the roof were raised, their streams, sweeping around in a great semi-circle, bowled down the rioters below the tell-tale wisps of smoke, and no sooner had