I. Little more I saw of the Chicago Commune. After

watching the balloon attack, Ernest took me down into the heart of the building, where I slept the after- noon out and the night. The third day we spent in the building, and on the fourth, Ernest having got per mission and an automobile from the authorities, we left Chicago.
My headache was gone, but, body and soul, I was very tired. I lay back against Ernest in the automobile, and with apathetic eyes watched the soldiers trying to get the machine out of the city. Fighting was still going on, but only in isolated localities. Here and
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there whole districts were still in possession of the com- rades, but such districts were surrounded and guarded by heavy bodies of troops. In a hundred segregated traps were the comrades thus held while the work of subjugating them went on. Subjugation meant death, for no quarter was given, and they fought heroically to the last man.”
Whenever we approached such localities, the guards turned us back and sent us around. Once, the only way past two strong positions of the comrades was through a burnt section that lay between. From either side we could hear the rattle and roar of war, while the automobile picked its way through smoking ruins and tottering walls. Often the streets were blocked by mountains of débris that compelled us to go around. We were in a labyrinth of ruin, and our progress was slow.
The stockyards (ghetto, plant, and everything) were smouldering ruins. Far off to the right a wide smoke haze dimmed the sky, — the town of Pullman, the sol- dier chauffeur told us, or what had been the town of Pullman, for it was utterly destroyed. He had driven
1 Numbers of the buildings held out over a week, while one held out eleven days. Each building had to be stormed like a fort, and the Mercenaries fought their way upward floor by floor. It was deadly fighting. Quarter was neither given nor taken, and in the fighting the revolutionists had the advantage of being above. While the revo- lutionists were wiped out, the loss was not one-sided. The proud
Chicago proletariat lived up to its ancient boast. For as many of itself as were killed, it killed that many of the enemy.
350 THE IRON HEEL
the machine out there, with despatches, on the after- noon of the third day. Some of the heaviest fighting had occurred there, he said, many of the streets being rendered impassable by the heaps of the dead.
Swinging around the shattered walls of a building, in the stockyards district, the automobile was stopped by a wave of dead. It was for all the world like a wave tossed up by the sea. It was patent to us what had happened. As the mob charged past the corner, it had been swept, at right angles and point-blank range, by the machine-guns drawn up on the cross street. But disaster had come to the soldiers. A chance bomb must have exploded among them, for the mob, checked until its dead and dying formed the wave, had white-capped and flung forward its foam of living, fighting slaves. Soldiers and slaves lay to- gether, torn and mangled, around and over the wreck- age of the automobiles and guns.
Ernest sprang out. A familiar pair of shoulders in a cotton shirt and a familiar fringe of white hair had caught his eye. I did not watch him, and it was not until he was back beside me and we were speeding on that he said:
“It was Bishop Morehouse.”
Soon we were in the green country, and I took one Jast glance back at the smoke-filled sky. Faint and far came the low thud of an explosion. Then I turned my face against Ernest’s breast and wept softly for
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the Cause that was lost. Ernest’s arm about me was eloquent with love.
‘For this time lost, dear heart,” he said, ‘but not forever. We have learned. To-morrow the Cause will rise again, strong with wisdom and discipline.”
The automobile drew up at a railroad station. Here we would catch a train to New York. As we waited on the platform, three trains thundered past, bound west to Chicago. They were crowded with ragged, unskilled laborers, people of the abyss.
“‘Slave-levies for the rebuilding of Chicago,” Ernest said. ‘‘You see, the Chicago slaves are all killed.”