ORA came up through the woods from the tents. A light breeze was blowing and the pine needles far above her were beating the air softly, making their usual whispered moan.
Down in the tents she knew people were whispering together, “Bonnie is dead.” She had quieted them as much as she knew how to do, for it had been decided that everyone must go to bed except the guards, and that the lights must be put out. Those who had been wounded in the picket line were tended. She had seen that Bonnie’s four young ones were put to bed and had left Sally with them. They were so accustomed to having Bonnie away, at the mill, and then in the strike work, they were satisfied to sleep without her.
She was going back to stay with Bonnie. The doctor had already come and said he could do nothing except send the people who were necessary.
In the office the two boys, Henry Sanders and Tom Bachley, were standing near the table on which Bonnie lay. The blood was on her dress, a heavy black stain now, a blotting of ink like that she had sometimes made and worried over on the pages of her account book, only much larger than those. The hair lay back from her high forehead, and spread over the end of the table. The mouth that had opened to speak not long before was closed in a sort of smile. Her brown eyes that Ora remembered well because they were like Emma’s, were closed.
“Where’s Tom?” Ora asked.
“Gone up the road.”
“He wanted to meet John if he happened to come now.”
They spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid of waking Bonnie.
“You boys go on out. I’ll stay now.”
They filed out of the door. She heard them moving on the ground outside and talking in low tones. There was the clear sound of a match being struck out there. In the office there was no sound. Ora sat in the chair near the table and rested her head on the back. Thoughts of Emma came into her mind, and of Bonnie as a child in the mountains, and then a young woman when she was so bashful at the Christmas party—the time when the preacher had spoken of brotherly love, and the spirit of good will toward men. There was Bonnie’s marriage and her happiness at that time, and Emma’s death. She saw Bonnie taking part in the union, speaking, singing to her people who were heartened by her speeches and songs. Now she lay on the table, without life. And she had not wanted to die. There was no one who had wished more for life. And she had wanted enjoyment not only for herself but for others. For that she had been killed. But what she had begun was not ended with her: and never would be until what she had dreamed about had become a fact.
Tom Moore came into the hall. “I don’t see anything of John,” he whispered.
“Pore John,” Ora said. “I left Zinie down there a-crying. This may make a woman of her.”
Outside the hall the two boys stood near the wall of the building. They saw that Ora and Tom Moore had put something over the light inside to make it dim. The murmurings that had been going on in the tents below died out. Then the windows in the house next door became dark. The darkness pressed on them.
“Did you hear that?” Henry asked Tom, standing close by him against the side of the hall.
“It sounded like a car coming up the road.”
“I reckon it’s John.”
“Or maybe the undertaker coming.”
They peered into the dark.
“It hasn’t got any lights,” Henry said and took a step forward.
The car stopped just at the place where the Coxeys’ driveway met the road. A man stepped out of the car, and after him came three others. They stood together for a moment, then one of them came toward the union hall.
“Who’s there?” Henry called out.
The man in front was Sam McEachern. “It’s the Law,” he said.
“Where’s your warrant?” Henry asked.
“We don’t need no warrant,” Sam called out, and spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, men,” he said.
One of them ran past him and went up to Henry. “Put down that gun,’ he ordered. But Henry was not ready to give up. They struggled, each one trying to get possession of the gun.
“Let that man go,” Tom Bachley called out and went to the two who were struggling. Two guards from the tents came running out from the trees, and the two men from the car ran toward them a little way and stopped.
A shot sounded, then another and another. They came again. The bright powder spurted from the guns in flame, but no one saw them. And no one saw where the bullets came from nor where they went. Tom Bachley dropped his gun and held his arm, into which one of the bullets had gone. And Sam McEachern fell to the ground. When he fell, the shots stopped as if a command had been given. The men who were with him carried his limp body to the car and drove away.
It had taken perhaps five minutes for this to happen. The houses on each side of the union hall remained dark and quiet, but men and women came up from the tents and surrounded the hall, asking questions, speaking excitedly. They were there when the men the doctor had sent came for Bonnie: and stood quietly and sorrowfully in the dark while her body was carried out to the waiting hearse.
And they were still there when men with white arm bands came. Tom Moore, Ora, and about a hundred others were arrested and taken away in cars to the jail. But some of the white banded men stayed. They went down to the tents and drove the children and women out, so that they ran about under the trees, until they got into the open where they wandered all night hunting for a place to stay.
The tents were torn down and left flat on the ground, and the food was scattered everywhere so that it dammed up the spring and the stream that had given water to the strikers.
Coming back very late that night from Sandersville, John McClure walked into the unlighted hall, and found it deserted and wrecked. The table was still in the center of the room, but it lay on its side and one of the legs was broken.
He went down to the hollow and found the tents as they had been left, and no one there. In the union office he turned the table in the hall right side up, propped its leg on a bench, and slept there the rest of the night.
The next morning, waking early, he went down to the hollow again. The place looked as if a storm without human knowledge had passed across it. But he knew that the storm which had come had full knowledge of what it was doing.