Picture-Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

22 PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY the beasts that perish. They want to live. They have the right to live !" His jaw was set more sternly than ever. Janet laid her hand gently on his arm. "But I don't understand," she went on, her eyes filled with womanly pity, "how, if they can't live on that small sum a day, they can live without it? I mean, now that they've gone on strike, and aren't earning anything, how are they going to even exist?" Stoddard shrugged. "The strike may be over soon." "But suppose it isn't? Then what ?" "Why, then, a good many of them — and their families — will starve to death, that's all," he answered quietly. "There isn't any other outcome of it all, is there, than that? They've got to suffer — unless your father, and his like, give in." "It's their families — the wives and children of the workingmen, I'm thinking of!" Janet cried. "The workingmen ought to think of them themselves. They oughtn't to let them starve by going on a strike and depriving themselves of any earnings whatsoever. Why don't some of them think of that side of it? And why don't those that do think of it go back to work?" Stoddard turned to her gravely "Come and walk with me through these woods up yonder," said he, "and I will try to explain that to you as we go along. My father was an engineer," he went on, as they strolled into the woods together, went out on a strike when the men of his union did. I was and said she had to have medicine. And my father hadn't a cent to buy so much as a drop of it with. "She got worse. The doctor said she'd die unless she had medicine. So my father gave in. He went back to work — became a 'scab,' which is the name the strikers have for those who quit their ranks. That is to say, he tried to take his engine out again to earn the money to buy the medicine my mother had to have. He didn't succeed. The strikers pulled him and the fireman out of the cab just as they were start Laying the note on the library table where her father could find it, she turned and left the house — her home. "who other only a little boy then, but I remember the time as though it was yesterday — and with good reason ! "The strike was only going to last for a week at the most. That was what the delegates who had started it said, at first. Then it was only going to hang on for a month. And after that six weeks. But it got to be six months, and the strike hadn't ended then. We were in debt, head over heels, to the butcher, the grocer, the landlord — every one. And then my mother, what with the worry and all, took sick. The doctor came ing. They beat them up so badly that my father, for one, was in the hospital for the next five weeks. My mother died." Stoddard stopped both his story and his walk. Janet was crying. "That's why some of the strikers don't go back to work for the sake of their families," he told her gently. "If they tried to, the other strikers would stop them. Miss Van Nest," he went on, in a suddenly hoarsened voice, after a moment, "I've got to say it. It's been in my heart, ever since the other day when I looked at you for the first time. You know, don't you?" Janet lifted her head and looked at him, a deep flush slowly mantling her neck and cheeks. "Could you care for a man like me?' John asked her. "A worker, born of workers?" "Could you," Janet whispered, her faltering eyes held by his. "care for a woman like me, who has never done anything all her life but live on the work of others?" His answer was to crush her in his arms with a glad cry. And so, locked in each other's embrace, they stood there in the glade in the woods while moment after moment passed in silence. At length, freeing herself, Janet looked down at the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. "I am going," she announced quickly, "straight to Kenneth to give this back to him !" Turning in the direction of her hotel, Janet left Stoddard standing in the path, and hurried off. The construction engineer gazed after her until she disappeared around a bend in the beaten way through woods, and then, with a slow step, slackened by his thoughts of the brightness of their future, he walked toward the half-dilapidated building at the foot of the great bridge that served as his home. Stoddard entered the shack and seated himself in a chair by the table. Never before in his life had so much happened to him in a single day — at least anything that meant so much to him, and he could hardly come to a realization of things. Not even the occurrence of the had such an effect upon him. for that was business, and anything that was business could be handled by John Stoddard ; but in matters of love and women he was lost. He knew that he had taken a girl away from Kenneth Stuyvesant, and he was glad of it — not for the latter's sake, but for his own. What Janet Van Nest meant to him stood out above everything else in the world, it seemed at that moment. Stoddard, as he sat in the chair, began to think — think and plan — for he was living in the future. Hardly had he had time to glean the facts from the vague mass of emotion that his conversation with Janet had strike