Chapter 3

"You don't care for 'The Headless Horseman'?" said Robert to little
Elsie Barlow, who was sitting on his knee in Emily's parlor. "Which of
the stories do you like best of all?"

Elsie shut up her book of fairy tales, trying to think.

"You ask mamma which she likes best, Bessie or me?"

"Oh, Elsie, that's dodging," laughed Robert.

"No, 'tisn't dodging," protested Elsie. "'Cause mamma don't like either
of us best; and I like 'The House of Clocks' and 'The Ball of Gold' just
the same as each other."

"'The Ball of Gold'--what a charming title! Tell me that. It can't help
being pretty."

"Well, you see there was a great, tall giant," began Elsie, hunting
diligently for his picture in the wonder-book, "and this giant had a
ball of gold that rested on a saucer in his castle, just like an egg in
its cup. It was round-shaped like a crystal and weighed, oh, ever so
many tons. See, there he is."

"Ugh!" Robert shuddered realistically. "What a monster!"

"And oh, so cruel! Every knight that rode by he would challenge him to
battle, and the giant would cut off his head and hang them around his
belt, and the bodies he would throw to three great, savage dogs. That
was all they had to eat."

"What cannibals!"

"Here comes Emily," said Mrs. Barlow, who had been rocking in her chair.
The young lady wore a water lily at her bosom and was reading from the
Sunday Beacon.

"Six lives lost, Robert," she cried, "and the Beacon has started a
subscription for their families."

"But I haven't finished my story," pouted forgotten little Elsie.

"Put it away, dear," said her mother, riding roughshod over the child's
wishes, as the best of mothers do. Perhaps these crosses are
educational.

The following list printed in heavy capitals was the first paragraph
Emily read:

KILLED.

MARY LACY, salesgirl.
FLORENCE F. LACY, bookkeeper.
ALEXANDER WHITLOVE, elevator boy (colored).
OSCAR SCHUBERT, ladder man.
An unknown girl.

"At midnight," she continued, reading aloud, "Rosanna Moxom, a
lace-worker, was reported dying, and the injuries of nearly a dozen
others are serious enough to excite alarm."

"Did you say the Beacon has started a relief fund for their families?"
asked Robert.

"Yes, and headed it with $1,000."

Robert inwardly resolved to make the total $1,025.

"Most of those dead or likely to die," continued Emily, while Robert
held Elsie and Mrs. Barlow rocked in her easy-chair, "belonged to the
hapless group that had been penned in the top story of the Harmon
building. They were employes of the firm of Carter & Hallowell, lace
dealers. Shut off by a solid wall from the Cazenove street side of the
building, they had not heard the shouts of fire until too late. A broad
sheet of flame barred their exit to the stairs, which were midway along
the corridor. Over fifteen of the girls, however, had come down safely
in the elevator, and Alexander, the colored elevator boy, had promised
to make a return trip for the others. He was true to his word and was
seen remounting as high as the fifth story. But here the heated iron
cables refused to work, and the poor fellow, stuck fast between two
floors, unable to escape from his wooden box, must have suffered a
martyr's death."

"Poor boy!" murmured Mrs. Barlow. Perhaps she was thinking of her own
17-year-old son, whose death within a twelvemonth had deprived her home
of its only masculine presence.

"Heroism!" cried Robert. "It is all around us in homespun, and yet we
run back to search for it under togas or coats of mail."

"Oscar Schubert's death was equally mysterious," continued Emily,
turning the Beacon inside out. "He was a hook-and-ladder man, attached
to company 3, a German, and in every way a valuable servant. The poor
fellow left a wife and two flaxen-haired children, whose lamentations at
the hospital when the body proved to be that of their father brought
tears to the eyes even of the stoical attendants, accustomed as they are
to the surroundings of death."

Here Emily was interrupted by a glee of laughter from a romping group
downstairs. It was the children coming home from Sunday school. A tiptoe
peep at the visitor magically hushed their merriment, but Robert
persuaded the youngest to intrust herself to his unoccupied knee, where
he held her as a counterpoise to Elsie, inwardly resolving to increase
his subscription to $50 for the sake of Oscar Schubert's two little
ones.

"But the tenderest sympathy," read Emily, "is reserved for the Lacy
girls, sole supports of a large family, the cares of which, however, did
not seem to weigh upon their amiable dispositions. They had embraced
each other on the ledge before jumping, and leaped together, arm in arm,
missing the extended net by taking too strong a horizontal impulse,
which threw them almost to the curbstone. In the case of Mary, the elder
sister, death was instantaneous, but the features were not marred in the
least. The face of Florence, the younger, had been crushed in beyond
recognition, yet she lingered on and it was nearly two hours before her
heart finally ceased to beat. A feeble mother, an irresponsible brother
and several small sisters are left to mourn these truly estimable young
women."

During this paragraph Robert's promissory subscription had silently
risen to $100. If it continued mounting he would soon have little ready
cash to meet his current expenses with. Little Elsie and Bessie, the
midget of all, listened wonderingly on his knee; and it is not
surprising if during the paragraph that followed, all about money losses
and insurance policies and proprietors' histories, his thoughts,
startled by a casual mention of Prof. Arnold's name in the reading,
roamed away to his own teens, when he used to sit on his Uncle
Benjamin's knee, as the little girls were sitting on his.

He called up a picture of the Yorkshire youth who had been brought over
to the new world, with a younger brother and sister, by parents richer
in virtue than in coin of the world. Both the sons had won wealth and
Benjamin fame. Beginning as a gardener, he soon wrung recognition for
his botanical learning from a world which he affronted from beginning to
end by an independence passing far over the line into the region of
eccentricity. He belonged to the rare class of self-made scholars, and a
popular herb-balsam of his compounding had laid the corner-stone of a
fortune which sixty years of prudent addition had reared even higher
than that of his brother Henry, the banker. An Englishman by birth, he
had refused to change his allegiance. "Salute the flag you're born
under," was the motto he preached; and, consistently inconsistent in
this regard, he applauded the equally strong American loyalty of his
sister's son, Robert Floyd.

How upright, how unimpeachable, he had been, thought Robert, in his
old-school fixity of principle! Overbearing to those he distrusted,
irritable among shams, he was charity itself to real merit and to the
poor. His pet aversions made a long and amusing list--lawyers, electric
lights, theaters, agnostics, cats; but each was only the reverse side of
a medal whose obverse was passionate love. If, for instance, he was
known to have stoned stray kittens from his garden, he made up for his
cruelty by treating dogs almost as human beings.

"You and I have the canine temperament," he would say to Robert, a touch
of self-sufficiency mingling with his character, as is not unusual in
really benevolent men. "You and I have the canine temperament. Thank the
heaven that blessed us, and beware of cats. Two-foot and four-foot, it's
all the same. Feline! Catty!" The last word was pronounced with all the
explosive scorn which features as incapable of sneering as a hound's
could manage to express. Robert saw the great smooth face rise before
him now, tinged by time and weather to a pure cherry-wood red, and
crowned with luxuriant silver hair fringing out from under the
skull-cap. Sometimes, indeed, in the drawn corners of the mouth and the
limpid brown eyes, he had read a true affinity to the noble St. Bernard
who used to lie stretched upon the mat between them.

"Three o'clock, latest. Here's something special." Emily's rise of tone
recalled the young man out of his dream. Elsie was once more deep in her
wonder-book and Bessie had slipped down from his knee and run to the
window.

"At 2:49 Rosanna Moxom passed away at the hospital, making the sixth
victim of the fire. An employe of John Kalinovitch, the furrier, who
occupied rooms on the same floor with Carter & Hallowell, has identified
the unknown girl as Katie Galuby, a young Polish maiden----"

"Katie Galuby?" cried Mrs. Barlow. "Can that be the girl we know?"

"What about Katie Galuby, mamma?" asked Elsie, looking up.

"She's dead," said mamma, and Elsie's lip quivered at the awful word.

"A young Polish maiden, who stitched pelts in their musky establishment.
She had probably run the wrong way," Emily read, "as children will--for
Katie was no more than a child, though a workwoman these two years--and
so, finding herself with the Carter & Hallowell group, had followed them
in their random flight and shared their unhappy fate. This was the girl
Patrolman Chandler caught in his arms, who laughed and then fainted
away. The smile was still on her lips in death, and her face looked
sweet in its expression of happy innocence, though old, prematurely old
and wan."

"Perhaps the poor girl is more blessed out of this world," said Mrs.
Barlow, whose eyes showed that she herself had not had a fair-weather
voyage through life. The Galubys lived in the next block, where there
was a colony of poor Poles, and she had often spoken to Katie.

"Listen," cried Emily, reading another paragraph: "Up to 2:30 o'clock no
news has been received of Ellen Greeley, the cook in Prof. Arnold's
house. Inquiries made at her sister's failed to throw any light on the
question of her whereabouts. Dark rumors afloat, however, at a late
hour, emanating from an authoritative source and rapidly taking shape,
seemed to put her disappearance in close connection with other
mysterious facts, to the detriment of a well-known young man's
reputation."

"I wonder who that can be?" asked Mrs. Barlow, but before any one could
answer a loud murmur in the street interrupted the quiet party.

"Look, mamma, see all the people coming!" cried Bessie, pulling Mrs.
Barlow nearer to the window. Oaths and imprecations in some unknown
tongue thrilled the little group of listeners.

"It's a riot among the Poles," said Mrs. Barlow. Emily and Robert at
once joined the group in the bay window.

"There he is!" shouted some one in the crowd, pointing, and immediately
the covered heads became a sea of upturned faces--for the parlor was one
flight up--foreign faces, inflamed with passion. A hatless father,
brandishing a hatchet, led them on. But whither?

"They are breaking in our door!" shrieked Mrs. Barlow. "And Mr. Galuby
at their head."

Almost instantly a volley of stones crashed against the side of the
house and the windows were riddled. Emily and her mother drew back, with
the whimpering little ones, but Robert stood his ground, watching old
Galuby hacking at the door like a madman.

"What are you doing?" he called down, raising the sash.

There was a furious ring at the bell, followed by a snap, as if the
cord were pulled out. A small pebble sailed through the open window and
struck Robert in the cheek. At sight of the blood, though it was no more
than a strawberry splash, Emily seized his arm.

"I must go down and stop this, Emily."

"No, Robert; they are savages when they get excited."

"What do they want?"

"Heaven knows! We have never quarreled with them!"

By this time the mob was augmented by swarms of gamins and roughs of the
neighborhood, but a change of tone in the uproar indicated that there
was some opposition to their mischief-making.

"It is the police who have come," said Mrs. Barlow, but Emily clung to
Robert, so that he could neither approach the window nor go downstairs
to the door without violence to the fragile girl he loved. For many
minutes she held him there, till the murmurs below were mingled with
shrieks of pain, and their dispersion and diminution told of the
scattering of the crowd. Mrs. Barlow cautiously peeped out.

"They are arresting Mr. Galuby. He is covered with blood," she cried.
Just then came a loud knocking at the front door. Robert tore himself
free and ran down to open it. A police sergeant stepped inside.

"What is it all about?" asked Floyd.

"We'll give you safe escort to the cars. Hurry up!"

"Why should I be escorted?"

"Galuby's girl was killed in the fire and the Poles learned you were
here."

"What of that?"

"Why, it's all over town that you set it."