acre would not advance them. He saw no way of earning
them. His brains were fairly good, but brains of that quality were a
drug in the market. He only excelled in his strength, and where was he
to find a customer for that? But the ways of Fate are strange, and his
customer was at hand.

"Look y'ere!" said a voice at the door. Montgomery looked up, for the
voice was a loud and rasping one. A young man stood at the entrance--
a stocky, bull-necked young miner, in tweed Sunday clothes and an
aggressive neck-tie. He was a sinister-looking figure, with dark,
insolent eyes, and the jaw and throat of a bulldog.

"Look y'ere!" said he again. "Why hast thou not sent t' medicine oop as
thy master ordered?"

Montgomery had become accustomed to the brutal frankness of the northern
worker. At first it had enraged him, but after a time he had grown
callous to it, and accepted it as it was meant. But this was something
different. It was insolence--brutal, overbearing insolence, with
physical menace behind it.

"What name?" he asked coldly.

"Barton. Happen I may give thee cause to mind that name, yoong man.
Mak' oop t' wife's medicine this very moment, look ye, or it will be the
worse for thee."

Montgomery smiled. A pleasant sense of relief thrilled softly through
him. What blessed safety-valve was this through which his jangled
nerves might find some outlet. The provocation was so gross, the insult
so unprovoked, that he could have none of those qualms which take the
edge off a man's mettle. He finished sealing the bottle upon which he
was occupied, and he addressed it and placed it carefully in the rack.
"Look here!" said he, turning round to the miner, "your medicine will be
made up in its turn and sent down to you. I don't allow folk in the
surgery. Wait outside in the waiting-room if you wish to wait at all."

"Yoong man," said the miner, "thou's got to mak' t' wife's medicine
here, and now, and quick, while I wait and watch thee, or else happen
thou might need some medicine thysel' before all is over."

"I shouldn't advise you to fasten a quarrel upon me." Montgomery was
speaking in the hard, staccato voice of a man who is holding himself in
with difficulty. "You'll save trouble if you'll go quietly. If you
don't you'll be hurt. Ah, you would? Take it, then!"

The blows were almost simultaneous--a savage swing which whistled past
Montgomery's ear, and a straight drive which took the workman on th