Presently Fred caught a
distinct ticking sound, and he knew that Storch had set in motion the
clock upon which depended the bomb's explosion at the appointed hour.
But withal he remained curiously unmoved.

The cry of a belated newsboy floated through the open front door.
Storch went out and bought a paper, flinging a section of it at Fred.
A thickly headlined account of the launching at the Hilmer yards
occupied chief place on the first page of the local news section.
There was a picture of the hull that had been put through on schedule
time in spite of strikes and lockouts, and another one of Hilmer, and
a second photograph of a woman. Fred looked twice before he realized
that the face of his wife was staring up at him from the printed
sheet. Helen Starratt was to be the ship's sponsor and there was a
pretty and touching story in this connection. It had always been Mrs.
Hilmer's ambition to christen a seagoing giant, and she had been
chosen to act as godmother to a huge oil-tanker only a year before,
but a serious accident had laid her low. Now, though she was unable to
perform the rite herself, she had intrusted her part to her faithful
friend, Mrs. Starratt. It was to be done by proxy, as it were, with
Mrs. Hilmer carried to the grand stand, where she was to repeat the
mystic formula, giving the ship a name at the moment when Helen
Starratt brought the foaming bottle of champagne crashing against the
vessel's side. The whole article, even down to this obvious dash of
"sob stuff," was at once Hilmer's challenge to the strikers and his
appeal to the gallery. There was a certain irony in realizing that all
these carefully planned effects had been seized upon for Hilmer's own
undoing. He was working in the dark, very much as Fred Starratt had
worked during those heartbreaking months when he had battled for place
in the business world. Then Hilmer had held him in the palm of his
hand. Now the situation was reversed--he held Axel Hilmer's fate in
his own keeping, and it was his finger that would spin the wheel of
destiny. Any fool could demand an eye for an eye; so much for so much
was the cut-and-dried morality of the market place. It took a poet to
bestow a wage out of all proportion to the workday, to turn the cheek
of humility to the blows of arrogance, to commend the extravagant gift
of the magdalene. And it was the poetry of life, after all, which
counted. Fred Starratt knew that now. A year ago he had thought of
p