CHAPTER VI

ON THE OLD ROAD


When Bobby and Maggie Whaley fled from the immediate vicinity of Adam
Ward's estate, they were beside themselves with fear--blind,
unreasoning, instinctive fear.

There is a fear that is reasonable--that is born of an intelligent
comprehension of the danger that menaces, and there is a fear that is
born of ignorance--of inability to understand the nature of the danger.
These children of the Flats had nothing in their little lives by which
they might know the owner of the Mill, or visualize the world in which
the man for whom their father worked lived. To Bobby and Maggie the
home of Adam Ward was a place of mystery, as far removed from the world
of their actualities as any fabled castle in fairyland could possibly
be.

Sam Whaley's distorted views of all employers in the industrial world,
and his fanatical ideas of class loyalty, were impressed with weird
exaggeration upon the fertile minds of his children. From their
father's conversation with his workmen neighbors, and from the
suggestive expressions and epithets which Sam had gleaned from the
literature upon which he fed his mind and which he used with such
gusto, Bobby and Maggie had gathered the material out of which they had
created an imaginary monster, capable of destroying them with fiendish