another, he found himself for his salvation caught in
the great human net he himself had helped to spin. It was not only
the country people who held him. Gradually, as he passed to and from
on his way among them, and became acquainted with their children,
there had sprung up a most curious sort of understanding between the
Butterfly Man on the one side, and the half-articulate foreigners in
the factory and the sly secretive mill-workers on the other.

People I had never been able to get at humanly, people who resisted
even Madame, not only chose to open their doors but their mouths, to
Meester Fleent. Uncouth fumbling men, slip-shod women, dirty-faced
children, were never dumb and suspicious or wholly untruthful and
evasive, where the Butterfly Man was concerned. He was one to whom
might be told, without shame, fear, or compunction, the plain, blunt,
terrible truth. _He understood._

"I wish you'd look up Petronovich's boy, father," he might tell me,
or, "Madame, have a woman-talk with Lovena Smith's girl at the mills,
will you? Lovena's a fool, and that girl's up against things." And we
went, and wondered, afterwards, what particularly tender guardian
angels kept close company with our Butterfly Man.

Then occurred the great event which put Meester Fleent in a place
apart in the estimation of all Appleboro, forever settled his status
among the mill-hands and the "hickeys," and incidentally settled a
tormenting doubt of himself in his own mind. I mean the settling of
the score against Big Jan.

Half-Russian Jan was to the Poles what a padrone too often is to the
Italian laborers, a creature who herded them together and mercilessly
worked them for the profit of others, and incidentally his own, an
exacting tyrant against whose will it was useless to rebel. He had a
little timid wife with red eyes--perhaps because she cried so much
over the annual baby which just as annually died. He made a good deal
of money, but the dark Slav passion for whisky forced him to spend
what he earned, and this increased a naturally sullen temper. He was
the thorn in the Parish side; that we could do so little for the Poles
was due in a large measure to Jan's stubborn hindering.

His people lived in terror of him. When they displeased him he beat
them. It was not a light beating, and once or twice we had in the
Guest Rooms nursed its victims back into some semblance of humanity.
But what could we do? Jan was so efficient a foreman that I