SARTWELL prided himself on being a man who made few mistakes. He was able to trace an event from cause to effect with reasonable certainty, and this slight merit made him perhaps a trifle impatient with others who could not be credited with similar foresight, as his own wife would not have hesitated to bear witness. It would probably have filled that just woman with subdued, if pardonable, gratification had she known how wide of the mark her husband was in his estimate of the result on the strikers of the news he had committed to the care of Marsten. Sart-well imagined that the men, in their fury at being outwitted, would turn on Gibbons and rend him. He believed that Gibbons would not dare tell his dupes, as Sartwell persisted in calling them, how the Union had been befooled into supporting for weeks the bogus workmen whom the manager had flung into its credulous lap. After wreaking their vengeance on Gibbons and deposing him, they must return to the works, reasoned the manager. Their money was gone, interest in the strike had all but died out, fresher events had compressed it into a two-line item in the papers, subscriptions had practically ceased; what then was there left but a return or starvation, that powerful ally of masters all the world over?

But Sartwell forgot that the Englishman knows how to starve. No Indian ever tightens his belt another notch with grimmer determination to compress hunger than an Englishman sets his teeth and starves, if need be. He has starved on the ice near the Pole, and under the burning sun in the desert.

He has met famine face to face in beleaguered fort with no thought of surrender, and has doled with scrupulous exactitude the insufficient portions of food on a raft in mid-ocean. The poet has starved in his garret, making no outcry, and the world has said, “If we had only known.” In the forests and on the plains, in the jungle and on the mountains, and—perhaps worst of all—in the great cities, amidst plenty, the Englishman has shown he knows how to starve, saying with the poet:

“I have not winced nor cried aloud.”

When Gibbons heard what Marsten had to tell, he promptly said, “It is a lie”; but the committee looked one at the other with apprehension in their faces, fearing it was the truth.

“The question is,” said Marsten, “are you going to let the men know this?”

“Certainly, if I find it is true; but I don’t believe a word of it. Perhaps you want the pleasure of being the bearer of bad news to the men.”

“I intend to tell them, if you do not.”

“Of course. I’m sorry we can’t gratify you.”

The committee dismissed Marsten, and went into secret session; shortly afterwards separating, to meet again in the evening just before the large gathering in the Salvation Hall. In the interval, Gibbons and his fellow-members made active search for the alleged fraudulent workmen, but they found none; the birds had flown. It was evident the word had been passed, and that, fearing the vengeance of the legitimate claimants to the Union funds, the former “blacklegs” had taken themselves off, out of the reach of possible harm.

When the committee met for the second time that day, the members were divided among themselves as to the advisability of taking the men fully into their confidence. Some thought it best to break the doleful news gradually; others, that the worst should be known at once. Gibbons, however, said there was in reality no choice; the men must be told the whole truth, for if the committee tried any half measures, Marsten would undoubtedly rise in his place and relate what Sartwell had told him. So the whole truth and nothing but the truth was resolved upon.

When Gibbons faced his audience that night in the large hall, he saw he had to deal with a body of men whose mood was totally different from that of the crowd which light-heartedly voted, with a hurrah, to go on strike. There was now little jocularity among the men; they sat in their places in sullen silence. A feeling that something ominous was in the air seemed to pervade the hall, and, as Gibbons stepped to the front of the platform, he felt that the atmosphere of the place was against him; that he had to proceed with great caution, or his hold on the men was lost. He knew he was a good speaker, but he knew also that the men were just a trifle impatient with much talk and such small result from it all.

“Combination,” he began, “is the natural consequence of the modern conditions of labour. A workingman of to-day may be likened to a single pipe in a large organ. He can sound but one note. He spends his life doing part of something. He does not begin any article of commerce, go on with it, and finish it, as did the workmen of former days; he merely takes it from a fellow-workman who has put a touch on it, puts his own touch on it, and passes it on to another; and thus the article travels from hand to hand until it reaches the finisher. The workman of to-day is merely a small cog on a very large wheel, and so, if he does not combine with his fellows, he is helpless. The workman of former times was much more independent. He began his work and completed it. If he was a cooper, he made the whole barrel, hooping it and heading it. If one of us may be compared to a single pipe in an organ, the workman of yesterday might be likeened to a flute, on which a whole tune could be played. He——”

“Ah, chuck it!” cried a disgusted man in front. “We don’t want no philosophy; we wants strike pay or master’s pay.”

“’Ear, ’ear!” rang through the hall; the interrupter quite evidently voicing the sentiment of the meeting. Gibbons stood for a second or two looking at them.

“Yes,” he cried, his voice like a trumpet call, “I will chuck it. This is not the time for philosophy, as our friend said; it is the time to act. When a man strips to fight, what does he expect?”

“A d——d good thrashing,” was the unlooked-for reply.

It is never safe for an orator to depend on his audience for answers to his questions; but the laugh that went up showed Gibbons that the crowd was getting into better humour, which was what he most desired.

“When an Englishman takes off his coat to fight, he asks no favour from his opponent; but he does expect fair play, and if Englishmen are the onlookers he gets it, whether they like him or whether they don’t. He doesn’t expect to be struck below the belt; he doesn’t expect to be strangled on the ropes; he doesn’t expect to be hit when he is down. We stripped for a square and fair fight with Manager Sartwell, and we have fought as men should. We have broken no law; we have raised no disturbance. The police, always eager enough to arrest a striker, have laid hands on none of us. It has been a square, stand-up, honourable fight. It has been a fair fight on our side, and I am proud to have been connected with it. But in this struggle I have made one mistake. I made the mistake of thinking we were fighting an honourable opponent—with a man who would not break the rules of the ring. I was not on the outlook for foul play—for trickery. Knowing what I do to-night, I say—and I am ready to take the consequences of my words—that Sartwell is a thief, and a cowardly thief in the estimation of any honest man. He knew that the life of our fight was our money. He knew that starvation for the helpless wives and families of our men was his most powerful ally. He did not dare to break in and steal our money, because he was afraid of the law, but he took a meaner and more cowardly way of accomplishing the robbery. He appealed to the cupidity of men out of work—poor devils! I don’t blame them; they were doubtless starving—and he told them that if they masqueraded as employees of his, the Union would take them in, and pay them wages, as long as there was no suspicion aroused—that is, if these men kept their mouths shut they could draw strike pay. Much as I have always despised Sartwell, I did not think he would stoop to a trick like this. A man who robs a bank has some courage, but a man who tempts poverty-stricken wretches to commit the crime, while he stands safely aside and reaps the benefit—there is no decent word in the language to characterize him. Now, men, you know what has been done, and the result is that our treasury is as empty as if Sartwell had broken into it with a jimmy. The manager is waiting expectantly for the reward of his burglary. He will throw the gates of the works open to-morrow for you to enter and complete his triumph. The question before the meeting to-night is—Are you going in?”

A universal shout of, “Never! We’ll starve first!” rose to the rafters of the building.

When he first confronted the meeting that night, Gibbons feared he could not rouse the men from their evident coldness toward him; as the speech went on, increasing murmurs among the men and at length savage outbursts of rage showed him that he held them in the hollow of his hand; at the end, a word from him, and all the police in that part of London could not have saved the works from wreck and flames.

“To the works!” was the cry, and there was a general movement in response to it.

“No, men!” shouted Gibbons, his stentorian voice dominating the uproar. “Not to the works. Everyman home to-night, but be on the ground in the morning. We must not play into the enemy’s hands by any attempt at violence. To-morrow we will intercept Monkton and Hope, and demand our rights from them in person. Let them refuse at their peril. We’ll have no more dealings with Sartwell.”

There was a cheer at this, and the meeting disbanded quietly.

Next morning the men were out in force at the still closed gates, and there were angry threats against the manager. It was all right enough, they said, for Gibbons to counsel moderation, but the time for moderation was past. There was an increased body of police, who kept the crowd moving as much as was possible, having for the first time during the strike a most difficult task to perform. The strikers were in ugly temper, and did not obey orders or take pushes with the equanimity they had formerly displayed; but the police showed great forbearance, and evidently had instructions not to use their truncheons except as a last resort.

Sartwell, knowing a crisis was at hand, had slept in his office, and the ever-increasing mob hooted when he did not appear at his usual time.

Gibbons, by word and action, moving about everywhere, tried to keep his men in hand and prevent a conflict. They cheered him, but paid little attention to what he said.

Shortly after ten o’clock, a hansom drove to the outskirts of the mob, and was received with a chorus of groans. Gibbons quickly stepped in front of it and addressed the occupant.

“Mr. Hope——” he began.

“Stand back there!” cried the officer in charge.

“Mr. Hope,” cried Gibbons, “I want ten words with you.”

Little Mr. Hope shrank into a corner of the hansom, speechless, his face as white as a sheet of paper.

“Stand back, I say!” The officer pushed Gibbons, striking him with some force on the breast.

“Let him answer. Will you speak for one minute with your men—the men who have made you rich?”

“Stand back!” reiterated the officer, pushing him a step further.

The hansom moved inch by inch nearer the gates. The crowd seethed like an uneasy sea, but every man held his breath.

“Listen to me, Mr. Hope. Your men are starving. They ask only——”

The officer pushed the speaker back once more. Gibbons’s heel caught on a cobble-stone, and he went down backwards.

The crowd broke like a wave, submerging the police for a moment, flooding the street as if a dam had given way. The cabby on his lofty seat, trying to control his frightened horse, looked like a castaway perched on a buoy in an angry ocean. He made the tactical mistake of lashing around him with his whip. In an instant the hansom was over and down, with a crash of splintering glass. The police, edging together, struck right and left with a fury that quite matched the less disciplined rage of the mob. The officers fought their way until there was a ring around the prostrate cab; two of them picked up Mr. Hope, who was helpless with fear and horror, and these two, with the little man between them, surrounded by a squad that stood shoulder to shoulder, simply clove their way through the dense mass to the gates, where the small door in the large gate was quickly opened and shut, with Mr. Hope and one supporting policeman inside.

Gibbons, his hat gone, his coat in rags and his face smeared with blood, a wild unkempt figure, rose above the struggling mob, and stood on the top of the fallen cab.

“For God’s sake, men,” he screamed, “don’t resist the police! Fallback! Fallback!”

He might as well have shouted to the winds. The police laid about them like demons, and the crowd was rapidly falling back, but not because Gibbons ordered them to. In an incredibly short space of time the police in a body marched down the street, and there was none to oppose them. The remnants of what a few minutes before seemed an irresistible force, lay on the pavement and groaned, or leaned against the walls, the more seriously wounded to be taken to the hospitals, the others to the police station.

In spite of their defeat in the morning, the men gathered once more about the works in the afternoon, and the threatening crowd was even greater than before, because the evening papers had spread over London startling accounts of the riot, as they called it, and the news had attracted idlers from all parts of the metropolis. The wildest rumours were afloat: the men were going to wreck the works; they were going to loot the bread-shops in Light Street; they had armed themselves and were about to march on Trafalgar Square. With a resolute and desperate leader, there is no saying what they might have attempted; but Gibbons, who had put another coat on his back, and much sticking-plaster on his face, moved about counselling moderation and respect for the law. They would forfeit public sympathy, he said, by resorting to violence; although some of his hearers growled that “a bleedin’ lot o’ good” public sympathy had done for them. “What we want, and what we mean to have,” said Gibbons, “is a word with the owners. They are bound to come out soon.”

They did come out ultimately together, and two more frightened men than Monkton and Hope it would have been hard to find in all the land that day. They were surrounded by a dozen policemen, whose resolute demeanour showed they were not to be trifled with. The gates immediately closed behind this formidable procession, and it quickly made its way up the street, the crowd jeering and groaning as it passed through.

“We’ve got nothing against them,” shouted one. “Bring out Sartwell, and we’ll show you wot for.”

Hatred for the manager rather than the owners was plainly the dominant sentiment of the gathering. They cheered the remark, and gave three groans for the unpopular manager.

When the protected men disappeared, the vigilance of the force relaxed, and the crowd surged into the gap the police had cleared. With the masters safe and out of reach, the critical moment of the day seemed to have passed. The police could not be expected to know that the real resentment of the mob was not directed against the man whose cab had been overturned that morning.

“I hope Sartwell won’t venture out to-night,” said Marsten to Braunt. “It will take more than twelve policemen to guard him if he does.”

“He has some sense,” replied Braunt, “and will stay where he is.”

Neither Braimt nor Marsten had been present during the morning’s battle; but they, like many others with nothing to do, had come in the afternoon.

As Braunt spoke the small door in the gate opened, and Sartwell, entirely alone, stepped out. He had no more formidable weapon in his hand than his customary slim and trim umbrella. His silk hat was as glossy and his clothes as spick and span as if he were a tailor’s model. He seemed to have aged a trifle since the strike began, but his wiry well-knit body was as erect as ever, and in his eye was that stern look of command before which, at one time or another, every man in his employ had quailed.

An instantaneous hush fell upon the crowd. The cry of a hawker in a distant street was heard. Every man knew that the flinging of a missile or the upraising of an arm even, would be as a spark in a powder-mill. Let but a stroke fall, and all the police in London could not have saved the life of the man walking across the cleared space from the gates towards the crowd. The mass of silent humanity had but to move forward, and Sartwells life would be crushed out on the paving-stones.

Sartwell, without pause and without hurry, walked across the intervening space with evident confidence that the men would make way for him. There was no sign of fear in his manner, nor on the other hand was there any trace of swaggering authority about him; but there was in the glance of his steely eye and the poise of his head that indefinable something which stamps a man master,—which commands obedience, instant and unquestioned.

The crowd parted before him, and he cast no look over his shoulder. Habit being strong, one or two raised hand to forelock as he passed, getting in return the same curt nod that had always acknowledged such salutation. The human ocean parted before him as did the Red Sea before the Hebrew leader, and the manager passed through as unscathed.

“God!” cried Braunt, towering above his fellows and shaking his fist at the unoffending sky, “I have seen in my life one brave man.”