For a long time after the girl had departed, Gabriel sat there in his
cell, motionless and sunk in deepest thought. His emotions passed
recording. That this woman, his ideal, his best-beloved, the cherished,
inmost treasure of his heart and soul--she whom he had rescued, she who
had lain in his arms and shared with him that unforgettable hour in the
old sugar-house--should now prove to be the daughter of his bitterest
enemy, surpassed belief and stunned all clear understanding.
Flint! The very name connoted, for Gabriel, all that was cruel and
rapacious, hateful, vicious and greedy; all that meant pain and woe and
death to him and his class. Visions of West Virginia and Colorado rose
before his mind. He heard again the whistle of the "Bull Moose Death
Special" as it sped on its swift errand of barbarism up Cabin Creek,
hurling its sprays of leaden death among the slaves of this man and his
vulturine associates.
Flint! He whispered the name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents
at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs
and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the
charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay
in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and
west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; and his thoughts,
projected into the future, dwelt bitterly on the Air Trust now already
under way--the terrible, coming slavery which he, Gabriel, had struggled
to checkmate, only to find himself locked like a rat in a steel trap!
"And this woman," he groaned in agony of soul, "this woman, all in all
to me, is--is _his_ daughter!"
Flinging himself upon his hard and narrow bunk, he buried his head in
his powerful arms, and tried to blot out thought from his fevered brain;
but still the current ran on and on and on, endlessly, maddeningly. And
to the problem, no answer seemed to come.
"She must know who I am," he pondered. "Even if her father has not told
her, the papers have. True, she doesn't believe the infamous charge
against me; but what then? Can she, on the other hand, believe the
truth, that her father has conspired with Slade and those Cosmos thugs,
and with the press and courts and the whole damnable prostituted system,
to suppress and kill me?
"Can she believe her father guilty of all that? And of all the horrors
of this capitalist Hell, that I have told her about? No! Human nature is
incapable of such vast turnings from all the habits and environments of
a lifetime. In her veins flows the blood of that arch-criminal, Flint.
Her thoughts must be, to some extent, his thoughts. She must share his
viewpoint, and be loyal to him. After this first flush of reaction
against her father, she will go back to him. It is inevitable. Betwixt
her and me is fixed a boundless space, wider than Heaven and earth. She
is one pole, and I the other. If I have any strength or resolution or
philosophy, now is the hour for its trial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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