her about by the arms. The boys played ball and leap-frog
in the streets, shouting, and whistling through their fingers. In brief,
the great strike was on, but, for the time being, it was masquerading
in the guise of a public holiday.

At one o'clock the whistle blew again, and a thousand voices whooped a
derisive accompaniment, but no one of the throng in the streets made a
move toward the mills. Half an hour later, watchmen swung to and bolted
the gates, and, issuing presently from a small side entrance, in
company, were received with cheers, handshakes, and slaps upon the back.
Then the crowd gradually thinned,--many going to the already well-filled
hall where McGrath was delivering an address, and others to their
homes,--and a silence descended upon the neighborhood, broken only by
the voices of the men about the saloon doorways.

At two, Peter Rathbawne, attended by his private secretary, came out of
the side entrance and walked slowly away in the direction of his home.
He held his head high, and his eyes straight to the front, and paid no
attention to the respectful greetings of those of the strikers who
saluted him, touching their hats. There were many among them whose
hearts sank at this attitude in a man who had made it his boast that he
knew every hand in his mills by sight, and who, in the past, had had a
nod or a friendly word for each and all of them. For the first time a
premonition settled upon them of what this strike, which had been
welcomed principally for novelty's sake, might mean. It was the first
the Rathbawne Mills had ever known. Some of those who saw the face of
Peter Rathbawne that afternoon were already hoping that it might be the
last.

The Lieutenant-Governor returned to his apartment for lunch. Cavendish
was still sleeping as he had left him, with a stalwart negro porter,
summoned from the Capitol by telephone early that morning, watching in a
chair. Under Barclay's orders, a carpenter had already removed the
splintered door of the wine-closet, and an upholsterer had replaced it
by a slender brass rod from which swung a velvet curtain. With his own
hands the Lieutenant-Governor had taken away the fallen bottle, mopped
up the pool of absinthe, and put the room to rights. Now he dismissed
the negro, took from his pocket a little box of strychnine tablets,
obtained from his physician on his way from the Capitol, and, after a
brief survey of his surroundings to see that all was in order, went