The instant I put down my fork, Rollo was out of his seat like a shot. “Hat, gloves, and coat!” his uncle called after him. “It’s cool this morning. Autumn has definitely come to us.”

When I went up to my room to get my own hat, gloves, and coat, I folded my article into a narrow packet and tucked it into my left glove, against my palm. Now all I needed was to find someone to take it from me, for I feared I wouldn’t get out again.

Rollo practically danced with impatience in the foyer while he waited for me to button Olive’s coat. He tore down the front steps to the sidewalk, where he stopped and looked up and down the avenue. When Olive and I reached him, he complained, “There’s hardly anything to see.”

“That’s what your uncle said. It appears they made a lot of noise but did little damage.”

We walked down the sidewalk to the neighbor’s house. The front windows on the lower level had been boarded over, and servants were scrubbing a great red stain off the white marble façade. Other servants picked trash out of the front garden. I found these blots on the perfection of the block shocking, but Rollo kicked at the ground in disappointment. “That’s all?” he asked.

“One would think you sympathized with the rioters,” I teased.

The white picket fence at the next mansion was charred. Tears trickled down Olive’s cheeks. “That was such a pretty fence. I liked it. And the roses burned, too. They shouldn’t have burned the roses.”

“When people get that angry, they don’t think about things like that,” I said gently.

“Why were they angry?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“They won’t come back, will they?” Olive asked, her lip trembling.

“I don’t know that either.”

Rollo and Olive got into an argument over the best way to get rid of invading rioters, in case they came back, and I took advantage of their distraction to look around for a possible newspaper contact. The only people in sight were servants and workmen cleaning up the mess. Could it be one of them? None of them appeared to be wearing the Mechanics’ symbol, and none of them seemed to notice me.

At the end of the block, I led the children across the avenue to walk on the park side of the street back toward the house. They were now debating whether we should have thrown things at the rioters as they passed. “I bet they wouldn’t have expected that,” Rollo said.

“But then they’d have been mad at us, and they’d have hurt our house,” Olive countered.