three
followers watched from a distance.

"Nap--or was it Wellington--at Waterloo or somewhere!" jeered Werner in
a low voice. "The mutt thinks the whole world is watching . . . and I
ain't sure it ain't."

Koppy waved his hand, and they rejoined him.

Patches of darkness already filled the forest, but a late sun filtered
through the tree tops in the thinner spaces and wove a pattern of
colour on the brown leaves and dead green moss, the slender spruce
needles and straight-standing trunks. Nature was in a gentle glow; the
pure clear air of falling evening draped the earth in sweetness. Yet
through it wound long lines of ghoulish men who felt it not, held to
fiendish things by mistaken ambitions, by an unjustified bitterness
that fed on its own helplessness. For, after all, the varying moods of
nature are but constituents of a formula of which each man provides for
himself the other half--else would the Eskimo be a paragon, the hunter
a saint.

Koppy had explained it to Tressa in fiery words; the Independent
Workers of the World had found tilled soil in the breasts of these
unthinking men. By feeding their smouldering bitterness against
conditions due largely to themselves it had won their unreasoning
fidelity; like dogs they crept to heel. Here at last was a medium in
which to express their wrath. That it could profit them nothing
mattered not. All they read was that, under-dogs as they were doomed
to be, they might make their masters suffer.

Werner, more sensitive to the silences, grumbled at his leader's back.

"Cheerful sport, this. A real hi-larious way to end a dull day."

Morani's lip curled.

"It's all right for you, Chico," muttered Werner. "All you got to do
to get your blood running fresh is to slip that stiletto into
somebody's ribs. They don't expect any better of a Dago. Me? They'd
fasten a rope under my ears and wish me pleasant voyage."

The Italian expectorated noisily.

"I suppose," continued Werner, "you might's well do that as spit
macaroni talk at me. You get me roused and I'll tear off chunks of
German and throw them--"

Koppy's hand went up for silence. The men plodded on.

At the place of meeting not a man was in sight; a great silence seemed
to have stifled life itself. But as Koppy raised himself on a slight
eminence in the centre of the clearing and made a gesture with his
expressive hands, throngs of his followers crowded about him with no
sound but shuffling f