s here. I'll----"

Christopher put up his hand. "You are utterly mistaken," he said, "I
have no more to do with the late Peter Masters' works or his money
than the men in the yards out there."

The black ignorance, the fierce words interlarded with unwritable
terms, the mad personal attack, filled him with a shame and pity that
drowned all indignation. There had been injustice and wrong somewhere
that had whipped this poor mind to frenzy, to an incoherent claim to
rights he could not define.

"Why do you come to me?"

The man gave almost a scream of rage.

"Come to you? Ain't you his son? Don't it all belong to you, whether
you takes it or whether you don't? Are you going to skulk behind them
heads in Birmingham and leave us at their mercy, let 'em grind us to
powder for their own profit and no one to say them yea or nay? There
was a rumour of that got about, how you was going to shunt us on to
them, you skulking blackguard. I wouldn't believe it. I told 'em as
how Masters' son, if he had one, wouldn't be a damned scoundrel like
that. He'd see to his own rights."

What was that in the shaking hands beneath the cap? Christopher's
eyes, still on the tragically foul face, never dropped to catch the
metallic gleam; his whole mind lay in dragging out the truth entangled
in the wild words. The voice quivered more and more as if under spur
of some mental effort that urged the speaker to a climax he could not
reach but on the current of the crazy syllables.

"So it ain't no concern of yours if we lives or dies, if we work or be
turned off without so much as a word to carry us on again? 'Tain't
nothing to you we've got fifty masters instead of one, so long as you
gets your money. I tell you I won't serve fifty of 'em. One as we
could reckon on was bad enough, but fifty of 'em to battle flesh and
blood and make their own food out of us, and no one what we can call
to account as it were, I tell 'ee we won't have it. I won't serve
'em." The poor wretch had forgotten he was already dismissed from such
service. "If you won't be their master, then by God, you shan't be
master anywhere else."

His hand with the revolver he had clutched under cover of his cap flew
up. The report was followed by a splitting of glass and a cry
without.

For a brief second that was like a day of eternity, Christopher and
the man continued to face each other; the swaying blue-grey barrel of
the smoking weapon acted like a magnetic point on which