l sense of wounded vanity prescribed a course of surpassing
vindictiveness. His personal resentment, reinforced by consummate
appreciation of the adversaries with whom he had to deal, dictated a
safe road to revenge, which enabled him to fling wide the floodgates of
his long-stored animosity, secure in his knowledge of having the upper
hand. Disorder, calumny, outrage, even open anarchy--he could venture
upon them unafraid. A corrupt Governor, whom he had created, stood
behind him, smiling tolerantly. An indifferent community would let him
have his will. Only he must proceed by degrees, and be ready at any
moment to take one backward step for the sake of being able presently
thereafter to take two in advance.

Here precisely lay the weak point in his plan of campaign. With the
fatuity incidental on occasions to even the shrewdest minds, he had not
counted upon independence in the host which he believed slave to him, in
thought and word and deed. He rated himself the dictator, the prompter
without whose suggestion no one of all the players in this gigantic
tragedy could speak his line. As a matter of fact, like all leaders of
his class, he could drive his followers forward at will, while totally
unable to hold them back. He was wholly master so long as he used the
spur. The peril lay in the fancied efficacy of the curb. In short, he
was discovering already that he had unwittingly created a monster beside
which Frankenstein's was the veriest doll.

Thus, shortly, the strain began to tell upon the four thousand
unemployed sets of nerves around the Rathbawne Mills. Meetings became
more frequent and more turbulent; drinking and disorder were observably
on the increase; and at the end of another four weeks one of the gates
of the mills was beaten down, and several hundred men and boys paraded
around shop after shop, breaking windows and singing ribald songs. It
was not a very serious demonstration in itself. Its ominous feature lay
in the fact that the police made no attempt to check it. There was
something else about it, to the thinking of McGrath. It was not so much
that events were moving too fast, but that they were moving without
intelligent control.

Two nights later, another building belonging to Peter Rathbawne, and
situated only a half-block from the mills, was burned in the same manner
as the first, watched by an enormous crowd of strikers, who applauded
each fresh burst of flame, as if the fire had been a circus