The town of Avon, two hours from New York, lay along Avon creek, from which its first manufacturing industries derived their motive power. Years before, when it was little more than a barren stretch of sand, some enterprising soul had built a cotton mill there, with only a few primitive looms. As the years passed, and kindly Congresses reared about the industry a high protective wall, the business prospered marvelously. But shortly after the death of the senior Ames the company became involved, through mismanagement, with the result that, to protect itself, the house of Ames and Company, the largest creditor, was obliged to take over its mills.

At first, J. Wilton Ames was disposed to sell the assets of the defunct company, despite the loss to his bank. But then, after a visit of inspection, and hours of meditation on certain ideas which had occurred to him, he decided to keep the property. The banging of the looms, the whirr of the pickers, the sharp little shrieks of the spinning machines, fascinated him, as he stood before them. They seemed to typify the ceaseless throbbing of his own great brain. They seemed, too, to afford another outlet for that mighty flood of materialistic thought and energy which flowed incessantly through it.

And so he set about reorganizing the business. He studied the process of cloth manufacture. He studied the growth and handling of cotton. He familiarized himself with every detail of the cotton market. He was already well versed in the intricacies of the tariff. And soon the idle machinery was roaring 148 again. Soon the capacity of the mills was doubled. And soon, very soon, the great Ames mills at Avon had become a corporate part of our stupendous mechanical development of the century just closed.

When Carmen stepped from the train that morning she stood for a moment looking uncertainly about her. Everywhere on one side as far as she could see were low, ramshackle frame houses; a few brick store buildings stood far up the main street; and over at her right the enormous brick mills loomed high above the frozen stream. The dull roar of the machinery drifted through the cold air to her ears. Up the track, along which she had just come, some ragged, illy clad children were picking up bits of coal. The sight seemed to fix her decision. She went directly to them, and asked their names.

“Anton Spivak,” answered one of the children dully, when she laid a hand on his shoulder.

“And where do you live?”

“Over dere,” pointing off to the jungle of decrepit sheds. “Me an’ him, we worked in de mills; but dere ain’t no work fer us now. Dey’s on half time.”

“Take me to your home,” she said firmly.

The boy looked his astonishment. “Dere ain’t nobody to home,” he replied. “De ol’ man an’ woman works in de mills daytimes.”

“Come-a home wi’ me,” spoke up the boy’s companion, a bright-faced little urchin of some ten years who had given his name as Tony Tolesi. “We lives in de tenements.”

Carmen looked at him for a moment. “Come,” she said.

Up the main street of the town they went for a short distance, then turned and wended their course, through narrow streets and byways, down toward the mills. In a few minutes they were in the district where stood the great frame structures built by the Ames company to house its hands. Block after block of these they passed, massive, horrible, decrepit things, and at last stopped at a grease-stained, broken door, which the little fellow pushed open. The hall beyond was dark and cold. Carmen followed shivering, close after the boy, while he trotted along, proud of the responsibility of conducting a visitor to his home. At the far end of the hall the lad plunged into a narrow staircase, so narrow that a stout man could not have mounted it. Up four of these broken flights Carmen toiled after him, and then down a long, desolate corridor, which sent a chill into the very marrow of her bones.

“Dis is where we lives, Missy,” announced the little fellow. “Miss-a Marcus, she live in dere,” pointing to the door directly opposite. “She ain’t got only one arm.”

He pushed open the door before which they had halted. A rush of foul air and odors of cooking swept out. They enveloped the girl and seemed to hurl her back. A black-haired woman, holding a crying baby in her arms, rose hastily from an unmade bed at one side of the room. Two little girls, six or eight years of age, and a boy still younger, ranged about their mother and stared in wide-eyed wonder.

“Dis-a lady, she come to visit,” announced Carmen’s guide abruptly, pointing a dirty finger at her.

The woman’s face darkened, and she spoke harshly in a foreign tongue to the little fellow.

“She say,” the boy interpreted, as a crestfallen look spread over his face, “she say she don’t spik Inglese.”

“But I speak your language,” said the girl, going quickly to her and extending a hand. Then, in that soft tongue which is music celestial to these Neapolitan strangers upon our inhospitable shores, she added, “I want to know you; I want to talk to you.”

She glanced quickly about the room. A littered, greasy cook stove stood in one corner. Close to it at either end were wooden couches, upon which were strewn a few tattered spreads and blankets, stained and grimy. A broken table, a decrepit chest of drawers, and a few rickety chairs completed the complement of furniture. The walls were unadorned, except for a stained chromo of the Virgin, and the plaster had fallen away in many places. There was only one window in the room. Several of its panes were broken and stuffed with rags and papers.

At the sound of her own language the woman’s expression changed. A light came into her dull eyes, and she awkwardly took the proffered hand.

“You are––from Italy?” she said in her native tongue. Then, sweeping the girl’s warm attire with a quick glance, “You are rich! Why do you come here?”

“Your little boy brought me. And I am glad he did. No, I am not from Italy. I am rich, yes, but not in money.”

The woman turned to her children and sent the little brood scattering. At another sharp command little Tony set out a soiled, broken chair for Carmen. But before the girl could take it the woman’s voice again rose sharply.

“Wait!” she commanded, turning fiercely upon Carmen. “You are––what do you say? slumming. You come with your gay party to look us over and go away laughing! No! You can not stay!”

Carmen did not smile. But reaching out, she gently lifted the heavy baby from the woman’s arms and sat down with it. For a moment she patted its cheeks and bent tenderly over it. Then she looked up at the bewildered mother.

“I have come here,” she said softly, “because I love you.”

The woman’s lips parted in astonishment. She turned dully and sat down on one of the begrimed beds. Her little ones gathered about her, their soiled fingers in their mouths, or clutching their tattered gowns, as they gazed at the beautiful creature who had suddenly come into their midst.

Then the woman found her voice again. “Eh! You are from the mission? You come to talk of heaven? But I am busy.”

“I am not from the mission,” replied the girl gently. “I have come to talk, not of heaven, but of earth, and of you, and of Tony,” smiling down into the eager face of the little boy as he stood before her.

“You can’t have Tony!” cried the mother, starting up. “You can’t take any of my children! The judge took Pietro Corrello’s boy last week––but you can’t have mine! Go away from here!”

“I don’t want your children,” said Carmen, smiling up at the frightened, suspicious mother. “I want you. I want you to help me to help all of these people here who need us. The mills are running only half time, aren’t they? The people do not have enough to eat. But we, you and I, are going to make things better for them, for everybody here, aren’t we?

“But first,” she went on hastily, to further allay the poor woman’s fears and to check additional protest, “suppose we plan our dinner. Let’s see, Tony, what would you like?”

The boy’s lips instantly parted. His eyes began to glisten. He glanced inquiringly at his mother; but no sign came from her. Then he could no longer contain himself:

“Spaghetti!” he blurted. “Soup! Buns!”

Carmen drew out her purse and turned to the woman. “Come with me,” she said. “While we are gone, Tony and the children will wash the dishes and set the table. Come.”

For a moment the woman looked uncomprehendingly at the girl, then at her children, and then about the miserable room in which they were huddled. Amazement and confusion sat upon her heavy features. Then these gave way to another dark look of suspicion. She opened her mouth––

But before she could voice her resentment, Carmen rose and threw an arm about her. Then the girl quickly drew the startled woman to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Come,” she whispered, “get your shawl. We’ll be back soon.”

God’s universal language is the language of love. All nations, all tribes understand it. The flood-gates, long barred, swiftly opened, and the tired, miserable woman sank sobbing upon the bed. She could not comprehend what it was that 151 had come so unannounced into her dreary existence that cold winter morning. People were not wont to treat her so. Her life had been an endless, meaningless struggle against misery, want, grinding oppression. People did not put their arms around her and kiss her thus. They scoffed at her, they abused her, they fought with her! She hated them, and the world in which she lived!

“I know, I know,” whispered Carmen, as she drew the sobbing woman’s head upon her shoulder. “But things will be better now. Love has found you.”

The woman suddenly raised up. “You––you are––from heaven? An angel?” She drew back, and a frightened, superstitious look came into her face.

“Yes,” said Carmen softly, taking the cue, “I am an angel, right from heaven. Now you are no longer afraid of me, are you? Come.”

The woman rose mechanically and took up her thin shawl. Carmen gave a few directions to the gaping children. And as she went out into the bleak hall with the woman she heard one of them whisper in tones of awe:

“Tony, she said she––she was––an angel! Quick! Get down on your knees and cross yourself!”

Upward to the blue vault of heaven, like the streaming mists that rise through the tropic moonlight from the hot llanos, goes the ceaseless cry of humanity. Oh, if the god of the preachers were real, his heart must have long since broken! Upward it streams, this soul-piercing cry; up from the sodden, dull-brained toiler at the crashing loom; up from the wretched outcast woman, selling herself to low passions to escape the slavery of human exploitation; up from the muttering, ill-fed wreck, whose life has been cashed into dividends, whose dry, worthless hulk now totters to the scrap heap; up from the white-haired, flat-chested mother, whose stunted babes lie under little mounds with rude, wooden crosses in the dreary textile burial grounds; up from the weak, the wicked, the ignorant, the hopeless martyrs of the satanic social system that makes possible the activities of such human vultures as the colossus whose great mills now hurled their defiant roar at this girl, this girl whose life-motif was love.

Close about her, at the wretched little table, sat the wondering group of children, greedily gorging themselves on the only full meal that they could remember. And with them sat the still bewildered mother, straining her dark eyes at the girl, and striving to see in her a human being, a woman like herself. At her right sat the widow Marcus, who lived just across the hall. 152 Her husband had been crushed to death in one of the pickers two years before. The company had paid her a hundred dollars, but had kept back five for alleged legal fees. She herself had lost an arm in one of these same pickers, long ago, because the great owner of the mills would not equip his plant with safety devices.

“Come, Tony!” said the mother at length, as a sense of the reality of life suddenly returned to her. “The lunch for your father!”

Tony hurriedly swept the contents of his plate into his mouth, and went for the battered dinner pail.

“My man goes to work at six-thirty in the morning,” she explained to Carmen, when the little fellow had started to the mills with the pail unwontedly full. “And he does not leave until five-thirty. He was a weaver, and he earned sometimes ten dollars a week. But he didn’t last. He wore out. And so he had to take a job as carder. He earns about eight dollars a week now. But sometimes only six or seven.”

“But you can’t live on that, with your children!” exclaimed Carmen.

“Yes, we could,” replied the woman, “if the work was steady. But it isn’t. You see, if I could work steady, and the children too, we could live. I am a good spinner. And I am not nearly so worn out as he is. I have several years left in me yet.”

The widow Marcus, who spoke the language from an association with Italian immigrants since childhood, added her comments from time to time. She was a gray-haired, kindly soul, bearing no enmity toward the man to whom she had yielded her husband’s life and her own.

“A man’s no good in the mills after he’s fifty,” she said. “You see, Miss, it’s all piece-work, and a man has to be most terribly spry and active. The strain is something awful, day after day, in the noise and bad air, and having to keep your eyes fixed on your work for ten hours at a stretch; and he wears out fast. Then he has to take a job where he can’t make so much. And when he’s about fifty he’s no good for the mills any more.”

“And then what?” asked Carmen.

“Well, if he hasn’t any children, he goes to the poor-house. But, if he has, then they take care of him.”

“Then mill workers must have large families?”

“Yes, they’ve got to, Miss. The little ones must work in the mills, too. These mills here take them on when they are only twelve, or even younger. Tony has worked there, and he is only ten. It’s against the law; but Mr. Ames gets around the law some way.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Marcus, how do you live?” the girl asked.

“I? Oh, I manage. The company paid me some money two years ago, and I haven’t spent all of it yet. Besides, I work round a bit. I’m pretty spry with one arm.”

“But––you do not pay rent for your home?”

“Oh, yes. I have only one room. It’s small. There’s no window in it. It’s an inside room.”

“And you pay rent––to Mr. Ames––the man whose machines killed your husband and took off your arm––you still pay rent to him, for one little room?”

“Yes, Miss. He owns these tenements. Why, his company gave me almost a hundred dollars, you know! I was lucky, for when Lizzie Sidel’s man lost his hand in the cog wheels he went to law to sue the company, and three years afterward the case was thrown out of court and he had to pay the costs himself. But he was a picker-boss, and got nine dollars a week.”

A little hand stole up along Carmen’s arm. She looked down into the wondering face of the child. “I––I just wanted to see, Signorina, if you were real.”

“I have been wondering that myself, dear,” replied the girl, as her thought dwelt upon what she had been hearing.

“I must go now, Miss,” said the widow Marcus, rising. “I promised to drop in and look after Katie Hoolan’s children this afternoon. She’s up at the mills.”

“Then I will go with you,” Carmen announced. “But I will come back here,” she added, as some little hands seized hers. “If not to-day, then soon––perhaps to-morrow.”

She crossed the cold hall with Mrs. Marcus, and entered the doorway which led to the little inner room where dwelt the widow. There were a dozen such rooms in the building, the latter informed her. This one in particular had been shunned for many years, for it had a bad reputation as a breeder of tuberculosis. But the rent was low, and so the widow had taken it after her man was killed. It contained a broken stove, a dirty bed, and a couple of unsteady chairs. The odor was fetid. The walls were damp, and the paper which had once covered them was molding and rotting off.

“It won’t stay on,” the widow explained, as she saw the girl looking at it. “The walls are wet all the time. Comes up from the cellar. The creek overflows and runs into the basement. They call this the ‘death-room.’”

Death! Carmen shuddered when she looked about this fearful human habitation. Yet, “The only death to be feared,” said Paracelsus, “is unconsciousness of God.” Was this impoverished woman, then, any less truly alive than the rich owner of the mills which had robbed her of the means of existence? 154 And can a civilization be alive to the Christ when it breeds these antipodal types?

“And yet, who permits them?” Haynerd had once exclaimed. “Ames’s methods are the epitome of hell! But he is ours, and the worthy offspring of our ghastly, inhuman social system. We alone are to blame that he debauches courts, that he blinds executives, and that he buys legislatures! We let him make the laws, and fatten upon the prey he takes within their limits. Aye, he is the crafty, vicious, gold-imbruted manifestation of a whole nation’s greed!” Nay, more, he is the externalization of a people’s ignorance of God.

Carmen’s throat filled as she watched the old woman bustling about the wretched room and making a feeble attempt at order.

“You see,” the widow went on, happy in the possession of an auditor, “there is no use making apologies for the looks of my room; I couldn’t make it look much better if I tried. There’s no running water. We have to get water from the hydrant down back of the house. It is pumped there from the creek, and it’s a long climb up these stairs when you’ve got only one arm to hold the bucket. And I have to bring my coal up, too. The coal dealer charges extra for bringing it up so far.”

Carmen sat down on an empty box and watched her. The woman’s lot seemed to have touched the depths of human wretchedness, and yet there burned within her soul a something that the oppression of human avarice could not extinguish.

“It’s the children, Miss, that I think about,” she continued. “It’s not so bad as when I was a little one and worked in the cloth mills in England. I was only six when I went into the mills there. I worked from seven in the morning until after six at night. And the air was so bad and we got so tired that we children used to fall asleep, and the boss used to carry a stick to whip us to keep us awake. My parents died when I was only eight. They worked in the Hollow-ware works, and died of lead poisoning. People only last four or five years at that work.”

Carmen rose. “How many children are employed in these mills here?” she asked.

“I can’t say, Miss. But hundreds of them.”

“I want to see them,” said the girl, and there was a hitch in her voice as she spoke.

“You can go down and watch them come out about six this evening. It’s a sight to a stranger. But now I must hurry to look after the Hoolan babes.”

When she again reached the street Carmen turned and 155 looked up at the hideous structure from which she had emerged; then she drew a long breath. The foul air of the “death-room” seemed to fill her lungs as with leaden weights. The dim light that lay over the wretched hovel hung like a veil before her eyes.

“Katie lives a block down the street,” said the widow, pointing in the direction. “She was burned out last winter. These tenements don’t have fire-escapes, and the one she lived in burned to the ground in an hour. She lived on the second floor, and got out. But––six were burned to death.”

It seemed to Carmen as she listened to the woman that the carnal mind’s chamber of horrors was externalized there in the little town of Avon, existing with the dull consent of a people too ignorant, too imbruted, too mesmerized by the false values of life to rise and destroy it.

All that cold winter afternoon the girl went from door to door. There was no thought of fear when she met dull welcomes, scowls, and menacing glances. In humble homes and wretched hovels; to Magyar, Pole, Italian alike; to French Canadian, Irish and Portuguese; and to the angry, the defiant, the sodden, the crushed, she unfolded her simple banner of love, the boundless love that discriminates not, the love that sees not things, but the thoughts and intents of the heart that lie behind them. And dark looks faded, and tears came; withered hearts opened, and lifeless souls stirred anew. She knew their languages; and that knowledge unlocked their mental portals to her. She knew their thoughts, and the blight under which they molded; and that knowledge fell like the sun’s bright rays upon them. She knew God, their God and hers; and that knowledge began, even on that dull, gray afternoon, to cut into the chains of human rapacity which enslaved them.

At six that evening she stood at the tall iron gate of the mill yard. Little Tony was at her side, clutching her hand. A single electric lamp across the street threw a flickering, yellow light upon the snow. The great, roaring mills were ablaze with thousands of glittering eyes. Suddenly their monster sirens shrieked, a blood-curdling yell. Then their huge mouths opened, and a human flood belched forth.

Carmen gazed with riveted sight. They were not the image and likeness of God, these creatures, despite the doctrinal platitudes of the Reverend Darius Borwell and the placid Doctor Jurges. They were not alive, these stooping, shuffling things, despite the fact that the religiously contented Patterson Moore would argue that God had breathed the spirit of life into the thing of dust which He created. And these children, drifting past in a great, surging throng! Fathers and mothers of a 156 generation to come! Carmen knew that many of them, despite their worn looks, were scarcely more than ten years old. These were the flesh and blood upon which Ames, the jungle-beast, waxed gross! Upon their thin life-currents floated the magnificent Cossack!

She turned away in silence. Yes, she was right, evil can not be really known. There is no principle by which to explain the hideous things of the human mind. And then she wondered what the Reverend Darius Borwell did to earn that comfortable salary of ten thousand a year in his rich New York church.

“It’s quite a sight, ain’t it, Miss?” said a voice close by.

Carmen turned and confronted a priest. He was a man of medium height, young, and of Irish descent.

“It’s a great sight,” he continued, with a touch of brogue in his tones. “Hey, Fagin!” he cried, catching a passing workman’s arm. “Where’s Ross?”

“He ain’t worked to-day, Father,” replied the man, stopping and touching his cap.

The young priest uttered an exclamation of displeasure. Then, as the workman started away:

“You’ll be at the Hall to-night, Fagin? And bring everybody you can.”

The man addressed nodded and gave an affirmative grunt, then passed on into the darkness.

“It’s trying to reach a few of ’em I am,” remarked the priest. “But it’s slow work. When a man’s stomach’s empty he hasn’t much respect for morality. And I can’t feed the lot of ’em!”

Carmen gazed into the kindly blue eyes of the priest and wondered. “How are you reaching them?” she asked. “I am very much interested.”

The priest returned the girl’s searching look. “In settlement work?” he queried.

“No––but I am interested in my fellow-beings.”

“Ah, then you’ll understand. I’ve some rooms, some on Main street, which I call the Hall, and some down in the––well, the bad district, which I call the Mission. They’re reading rooms, places for men to meet, and get acquainted, and rest, and talk. The Hall’s for the fellows who work, like this Fagin. The Mission’s for the down-and-outs.”

“But––are your rooms only for––for men of your faith?”

“Nary a bit!” exclaimed the priest with a little laugh. “Race or religion don’t figure. It’s to give help to every man that needs it.”

“And you are giving your life to help these people?” the girl went on. “I want to see your Hall and Mission. Take me to them,” she abruptly demanded.

The priest gave a start of surprise. He looked down at little Tony, and then up at Carmen again.

“Come,” she said. “We will leave the boy at his door, and then go to your Mission and Hall. Now tell me, you are a Roman Catholic priest?”

“Yes,” he said mechanically, following her as she started away.

“How did you happen to get into this sort of work?” she pursued.

“Oh, I’ve been at it these ten years!” he returned, now recovered from his surprise, and pleased to talk about his work. “I’d had some experience in New York in the Bowery district. I came to the conclusion that there were mighty few down-and-outs who couldn’t be set upon their pins again, given half a chance by any one sufficiently interested. There’s the point. You see, Miss, I believe in my fellow-men. The results have justified my labors. Oh, it’s only temporary, I know. It ain’t going to change the whole social system. It’s a makeshift. But it helps a bit––and I like it.

“But,” he continued more seriously, “there’s going to be trouble here. A strike is coming. And it’s going to be a bad one. I wish I could convince Mr. Ames.”

“Have you tried?” she asked.

“I’ve written him several times of late. It doesn’t do any good. His secretary writes back that Mr. Ames is doing all he can. But it’s not much I see he’s doing, except to go on sucking the blood from these poor devils down here!”

They soon reached the tenement where Tony lived, and Carmen asked the priest to go up with her. He raised a hand and smiled.

“No,” he said, “the good woman doesn’t like priests. And my labors don’t reach the women anyway, except through the men. They constitute my field. Some one else must work among the women. I’ll wait for you here.”

It was only by making many promises that Carmen could at last get away from the little group on the fourth floor. But she slipped a bill into Tony’s hands as she went out, and then hurriedly crossed the hall and opened the unlocked door of the widow Marcus’s room. The place was empty. Carmen pinned a five-dollar bill upon the pillow and hastened out.

“Now,” said the priest, when the girl had joined him in the street below, “it ain’t right to take you to the Mission––”

“We’ll go there first,” the girl calmly announced. “And then to the Hall. By the way, there’s a telephone in your place? I want to call up the health officer. I want to report the condition of these tenements.”

The priest laughed. “It won’t do any good, Miss. I’ve camped on his heels for months. And he can’t do anything, anyway. I see that. If he gets too troublesome to those higher up, why, he gets fired. They don’t want his reports. He isn’t here to report on conditions, but to overlook ’em. It’s politics.”

“You mean to say that nothing can be done in regard to those awful buildings which Mr. Ames owns and rents to his mill hands?” she said.

“That’s it,” he replied. “It’s criminal to let such buildings stand. But Ames owns ’em. That’s enough.”

They went on in silence for some minutes. Meanwhile, the priest was studying his fair companion, and wondering who she might be. At length he inquired if she had ever been in Avon before.

“No,” replied the girl. “I wish I had!”

“Haven’t seen Pillette’s house then? He’s resident manager of the Ames mills. We can go a little out of our way and have a look at it.”

A few minutes later they stood at the iron gate of the manager’s residence, a massive, brown stone dwelling, set in among ancient trees in an estate of several acres, and surrounded by shrubs and bushes.

“Fine place, eh?” remarked the priest.

“Beautiful,” replied Carmen. “Does he know all about those tenements down there?”

“Ah, that he does; and cares less. And he knows all about the terrible hot air in his mills, and the flying lint that clogs the lungs of the babies working there. He sees them leave the place, dripping with perspiration, and go out into the zero temperature half naked. And when they go off with pneumonia, well he knows why; and cares less. He knows that the poor, tired workers in that great prison lose their senses in the awful noise and roar, and sometimes get bewildered and fall afoul of belts and cogs, and lose their limbs or lives. He knows; and doesn’t care. So does Mr. Ames. And he wouldn’t put safety devices over his machines, because he doesn’t care. I’ve written to him a dozen times about it. But––

“And then Pillette,” he continued; “I’ve asked him to furnish his hands with decent drinking water. They work ten and twelve hours in that inferno, and when they want to drink, why, all they have is a barrel of warm water, so covered with lint that it has to be pushed aside in order to get at the water. Why, Pillette don’t even give ’em change rooms! He won’t give ’em decent toilet rooms! Says Mr. Ames can’t afford it. Seems to me that when a man can give a ball and send out invitations on cards of solid gold, he can afford to give a thought to the 159 thousands who have toiled and suffered in order to enable him to give such a ball, don’t you?”

Carmen did. She had attended that reception. The memory came back now in hot, searing thoughts.

“Oh, he catches ’em coming and going!” the priest went on. “You see, he manipulates Congress so that a high tariff law is passed, protecting him from imported goods. Then he runs up the prices of his output. That hits his mill hands, for they have to pay the higher prices that the tariff causes. Oh, no, it doesn’t result in increased wages to them. Ha! ha! Not a bit! They’re squeezed both ways. He is the only one who profits by high tariff on cotton goods. See how it works?”

Yes, Carmen saw. She might not know that Ames periodically appeared before Congress and begged its protection––nay, threatened, and then demanded. She might not know that Senator Gossitch ate meekly from the great man’s hand, and speciously represented to his dignified colleagues that the benefits of high protective duties were for “the people” of the United States. She might not know how Hood, employed to evade the laws enacted to hedge and restrain his master, bribed and bought, schemed and contrived, lobbied, traded, and manipulated, that his owner might batten on his blood-stained profits, while he kept his face turned away from the scenes of carnage, and his ears stopped against the piteous cries of his driven slaves. But she did know how needless it all was, and how easy, oh! how pitiably easy, it would be to remedy every such condition, would the master but yield but a modicum of his colossal, mesmeric selfishness. She did not know, she could not, that the master, Ames, made a yearly profit from his mills of more than two hundred per cent. But she did know that, were he less stupidly greedy, even to the extent of taking but a hundred per cent profit, he would turn a flood of sunshine into hundreds of sick, despairing, dying souls.

“This is the place,” she heard the priest say, his voice seeming to come from a long distance. “This is the Mission.”

She stopped and looked about her. They were in front of an old, two-story building, decrepit and forbidding, but well lighted. While she gazed, the priest opened the door and bade her enter.

“This down here is the reading room,” he explained. “The door is never locked. Upstairs is my office, and sleeping rooms for men. Also a stock of old clothes I keep on hand for ’em when I send ’em out to look for work. I’ve clothed an average of four men a day during the past year, and sent ’em out to look for jobs. I board ’em, and keep ’em going until they land something. Sometimes I have to lend ’em money. I just help 160 ’em to help themselves. No, I never bother about a man’s religion. Come up to my office.”

Carmen climbed the rough steps to the floor above and entered the small but well-kept office of the priest.

“Now here,” he said, with a touch of pride, “is my card-index. I keep tab on all who come here. When they get straightened up and go out to hunt work, I give ’em identification cards. Just as soon as I can get funds I’m going to put a billiard table back there and fit up a little chapel, so’s the Catholic men who drift in here can attend service. You know, a lot of ’em don’t have the nerve to go to a church. Too proud. But they’d attend Mass here.”

Carmen looked at the man in admiration. Then a thought came to her. “We haven’t either of us asked the other’s name,” she said.

The priest’s eyes twinkled. “I’ve been dying to know yours,” he replied. “I’m Father Magee, Daniel Magee. But the boys generally call me Danny. What shall I call you? Oh, give any name; it doesn’t matter, just so’s I’ll know how to address you.”

“I am Carmen Ariza. And I am from South America,” said the girl simply. “Now sit down here. I want to talk to you. I have a lot to ask.”

An hour later the girl rose from her chair. “I shall have to wait and visit the Hall another time,” she said. “I must catch the eight-thirty back to the city. But––”

“I’ll never see you go down this tough street to the depot alone!” averred the priest, reaching for his hat.

Carmen laughed. But she gratefully accepted the proffered escort. Two of Father Magee’s assistants had come in meanwhile, and were caring for the few applicants below.

“You’re right, Miss Carmen,” the priest said, as they started for the train. “Mr. Ames must be reached. Perhaps you can do it. I can’t. But I’ll give you every assistance possible. It eats my heart out to see the suffering of these poor people!”

At eleven o’clock that night Carmen entered the office of the city editor of the Express. “Ned,” she said, “I’ve been with Dante––no, Danny––in Inferno. Now I’m going to Washington. I want expense money––a good lot––so that I can leave to-morrow night.”

Haynerd’s eyes dilated as he stared at the girl. “Washington!” he ejaculated. “Well––! But what did you find down in Avon?”

“I’ll write you a detailed report of my trip to-morrow. I’m going home now,” she replied.