saloon; stumbling, as he did so, over a
little boy crying on the step.

Inside, the air was reeking with rank smoke and the fumes of stale beer.
The floor was strewn with sawdust, streaked and circled by shuffling
feet; the mirror backing the bar was covered with soiled gauze dotted
with tawdry roses, and an indescribable dinginess seemed to have laid
its sordid fingers on all the fittings.

The room was crowded, nevertheless--crowded not only with the men
themselves, but, to the stifling point, with their voices and their
gestures and the spirit of their unrest and discontent. Cavendish,
leaning against the end of the bar, looked wearily down the line of
flushed faces and backward at the disputing groups which rocked and
swayed, as the men argued and swore, grasping the lapels of each others'
coats, and spilling the liquor from their glasses as they gesticulated.
He was wholly sober now. It was the stage of dissipation which
experience had taught him to dread the most--the emergence from dulled
sensibility into a nervous tension upon which stimulant had no apparent
effect. He was trembling again, too, and his face, as he saw it in the
mirror through the clouding gauze, was as that of a stranger, a stranger
of whom he was afraid. He swallowed the whiskey he had ordered, and,
supporting himself by the bar, swung back and gave his attention to what
the men about him were saying. It did not need his sharpened perception
to appreciate the fact that he was in the thick of the worst element of
the Rathbawne strikers, or that the situation was a crisis. What little
restraint had characterized the earlier stages of the strike was now,
most evidently, at an end. Starvation was no longer a mere possibility,
or violence a mere threat. The men raved like wild creatures against
Rathbawne and John Barclay, recounting maudlinly the destitution of
their families, and, anon, flaming forth into cries for vengeance. How
long the babel lasted Cavendish could not have said. Long since, the
doors had been closed, and the lights half lowered, in mock deference to
a supposedly vigilant police, when suddenly a hush fell upon the
assemblage. A side door had opened, and Michael McGrath stood in the
midst of his followers, with his arms folded and a thin smile upon his
lips. There was not a whisper as he began to speak. The men leaned
toward him breathlessly, their mouths open, their eyes starting glassily
out of their sodden faces.

"And how l