It was a wicked summer for those who were doomed to the mills and the tenement-houses.  The heat puffed and throbbed over the lashing machinery.  The slashers seemed to spit caloric.  The spinning-frames tossed it off their spindles.  The looms fairly wove it into the warp.  The thick, sweet, greasy air seemed to distil cotton-oil upon the faces of the workers.  The nights proved to be no better than the days.  The stuffy tenements gulped in the hot air of midday and held it as a person holds his breath.  All the folks came out upon the little platforms that were ranged, story after story, above each other.  They gasped for air in the narrow spaces between the high buildings.  The stars above those narrow spaces did not sparkle and suggest coolness; they seemed to float above the hot earth like red cinders.

Every day the undertakers’ wagons came “boombling” down the narrow canyons of streets between the “Blocks,” for the people were dying.  The little white hearse was a more frequent visitor than the rusty black one; the ranks of the children were paying the greatest toll to death.

“But we shall not worry about our Rosemarie,” old Etienne told Farr.  “Under the shade on the green grass she shall stay where outdoors can paint her cheeks the very fine color.”

But when the old man called for her at the good woman’s house one morning something else than the sun had painted the little girl’s cheeks—­they were flushed with fever.  He told the good woman to send straight for the doctor, and went to his work much disturbed.

Later in the day the yard overseer, passing the rack, saw that the man was working with furious energy.  He was even reaching out his rake to capture floating stuff before it touched the bars.

“This seems to be your busy day, Pickaroon,” suggested the overseer.

“I make believe this old rack to be a good friend of mine and that the float stuff be sickness come at him—­so I work hard to keep it away.”

The overseer went along about his business, commenting mentally on a Frenchman’s imagination.

When the big mill bells clanged the noon hour Etienne hurried to the good woman’s house.  The city physician had been there and had left medicine—­two tumblers of it.  He had hurried in and had hurried away and had been curt and brusk and had not told her what was the trouble, so the woman reported.  But the child had been sleeping.

She was drowsy all that evening while Farr held her in his arms and Etienne sat near by with Zelie Dionne, ministering solicitously.

“Her cheeks are not so hot,” said the young man many times.  He talked hopefully to reassure himself as well as the others, for he had been dreadfully frightened when he had come from his work.  Fright had trodden close on the heels of much joy—­for the superintendent of the Consolidated had taken him out of the hot trench that day and had appointed him boss of twoscore Italian diggers, doubling his pay.