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The weather-beaten buildings that comprised the plant of the Varr and
Bolt tannery occupied a scant five acres of ground a short half-mile
from the eastern edge of the village of Hambleton. They were of
old-type brick construction, dingy without and gloomy within, and no
one unacquainted with the facts could have guessed from their
dilapidated and defected exteriors that they represented a sound and
thriving business. It was typical of Simon Varr, that outward air of
shabbiness and neglect; it was said of him that he knew how to exact
the last ounce of efficiency from men and material without the
expenditure of a single superfluous penny.

An eight-foot board fence surrounded the property on three sides, the
fourth being bounded by a sluggish, disreputable creek whose fetid
waters seemed to crawl onward even more slowly after receiving the
noisome waste liquor from the tan-pits. At only one point, that
nearest the village, did any of the buildings touch the encircling
fence. There its sweep was broken by the facade of a squat two-story
structure of yellow brick which contained the offices of the concern
and the big bare room in which a few decrepit clerks pursued their
uninspiring labors. Admission to this building, and through it to the
yard, was by way of a stout oaken door on which the word _Private_ was
stencilled in white paint. Just above the lettering, at the height of
a man's eyes, a small Judas had been cut--a comparatively recent
innovation to judge from the freshness of its chiselled edges.

On the afternoon of a warm, late-summer day a number of
men--twenty-five or thirty--were loitering outside this door in various
attitudes of leisure and repose. They were a sorry, unkempt lot,
poorly clothed and unshaven, sullen of face and weary-eyed. When they
moved it was languidly, when they spoke it was with brevity, in tired,
toneless voices. All of them looked hungry and many of them were, for
it was the end of the third week of their strike.

The faintest flicker of animation stirred them as they were presently
joined by a roughly-dressed man who sauntered up from the direction of
the village, though it is safe to suppose that some of them were moved
to interest less by the newcomer himself than by the fact that he was
carrying a huge ripe tomato in one hand. He nodded a greeting that was
returned by them in kind, and it was some moments before the most
energetic of their number crystallized thei