The local post of the American Legion stood
ready for instant service, and a few national guard troops still
remained in the vicinity. "What they expect," she said, looking
up from her pillows with tragic eyes, "is that the police and the
troops will join them. You don't think they will, do you?"
They reassured her, and after a time she slept again. When she
wakened, at midnight, the room was empty save for a nurse reading
under a night lamp behind a screen. Elinor was not in pain. She
lay there, listening to the night sounds of the hospital, the
watchman shuffling along the corridor in slippers, the closing of
a window, the wail of a newborn infant far away.
There was a shuffling of feet in the street below, the sound of
many men, not marching but grimly walking, bent on some unknown
errand. The nurse opened the window and looked out.
"That's queer!" she said. "About thirty men, and not saying a word.
They walk like soldiers, but they're not in uniform."
Elinor pondered that, but it was not for some days that she knew
that Pink Denslow and a picked number of volunteers from the
American Legion had that night, quite silently and unemotionally,
broken into the printing office where Doyle and Akers had met
Cusick, and had, not so silently but still unemotionally, destroyed
the presses and about a ton of inflammatory pamphlets.
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