The clerk read the note aloud, after the morgue had been phoned, and the body covered.
"This act is my punishment, for living on the earth your presence scars; a just God will punish you in another world.
"This act will bring home to your conscience your responsibility for murder:
"Murder of twenty-three miners in the mine explosion;
"Murder of John Dawson, and fifty innocent strikers, by the guns of your gunmen;
"Murder of the bodies, hearts and souls of starving strikers. Murder of good in all people. Murder of justice in your courts.
"Murder of me, as a warning of what you deserve.
"Can you beat it?" the clerk whistled. "A plain nut."
"I seen how crazy he looked," said the information clerk. "Good thing he didn't miss an' hit you, Courtney."
A little stenographer fainted. One of the telephone operators discussed it with a chummy runner. "I wouldn't work here now, not if you paid me! It's awful bad luck."
"Gee, if I was afraid of stiffs!" he said, pityingly.
The scrubwomen grumbled at having to clean up the floor again. "Ought to be extra pay for this.... Bad enough to clean them floors once."
Paul Judson, returning from Jackson on the morning train, did not learn about the grim protest until he reached the office.
Stella Cole loitered, fascinated by the glisten of the new Judson kitchen. She addressed the cook, with that shade of superiority family servants invariably feel to newcomers.
"Could you ask Miss' Mary to step heah a secon', Mahaly?"
The girl departed, sniffing superciliously at the old mountain woman who still had the monopoly of the Judson laundry.
The gaunt-cheeked negress faced her mistress with an elemental dignity. "Miss' Mary, kin you ask Mr. Judson a favor fo' me?"
She traced the linoleum pattern slowly with the frowsy toe of a black slipper. "Hit's dis way, Miss' Mary. Ah'se movin'."
"It isn't----" she hesitated a moment. "It isn't--the strike?"
Mary Judson shivered as she spoke the word. The overtones to that word jangled horribly, summoning with their ghastly discord troops of disordered pictures, fragments of sorrows, jagged moments of agony. Around that word she grouped mentally Pelham's distressing breach with his father, the son's growth away from her, the dead-fingered protest of Duckworth's suicide, glimpses of red death staining the kindly mountain, the wilful burning of the house that had stored memories which, next to the Jackson childhood, were the most poignantly joyful life had given her. That word summoned the defacing of the mountain's beauty and harmony, and her present exile from it; as well as a spiritual exile, the cold-visioned knowledge of the chasm between her and Paul that had widened irrevocably in the hushed storms that were their quarrels born out of the strike.
