Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/356

 among their ruins—immensely cast down, immensely sore and irritable. Everything oppressed, the ashes, the debris, the ghostly marching columns of thick gray smoke from the smoldering embers. A certain stillness also oppressed.

This stillness was among the strange new things. The mills were accustomed to hum, the trolley cars to screech and clamor; but the mills were embers this morning and the trolley cars also, while the power lines were broken. So there spread a vast and mournful stillness over all. This reacted on the people. They spoke in hushed, funereal tones.

The very crying of the babies for milk had grown plaintive and hopeless and subdued; when in upon this gencral stillness there broke a rumbling sound. It was the trundle of heavy wheels and the roar of motor exhausts—a lot of wheels, a lot of motors, eight or ten of them at least—huge white-painted trucks, with a man in somewhat bedraggled business garments sitting beside the driver of the first, pointing here and there to pepperings of refugees amid the ashes, and then standing up and motioning with his arms to the convoy behind him—a truck down this street, a truck down that street and so on till the white trucks were scattering themselves through the chaos.

"Milk!" shouted somebody. "They're bringing milk."

"A quart to every family!" megaphoned drivers, through their hands. "Bring something to put it in—if you've got it."

Yes—milk. Somebody had gone fifty miles to a highway leading toward a great city and cut off and commandeered by sheer power of personal persuasion