ch is this one?"

"One hundred dollars."

He almost dropped it. A hundred dollars! Then he remembered Anna's
story.

"Have you any gold-filled ones that look like this?"

"We do not handle gold-filled cases."

He put it down, and turned to go. Then he stopped.

"Don't sell on the installment plan, either, I suppose?" The sneer in
his voice was clearer than his anxiety. In his mind, he already knew the
answer.

"Sorry. No."

He went out. So he had been right. That young skunk had paid a hundred
dollars for a watch for Anna. To Rudolph it meant but one thing.

That had been early in January. For some days he kept his own counsel,
thinking, planning, watching. He was jealous of Graham, but with a
calculating jealousy that set him wondering how to turn his knowledge to
his own advantage. And Anna's lack of liberty comforted him somewhat. He
couldn't meet her outside the mill, at least not without his knowing it.

He established a system of espionage over her that drove her almost to
madness.

"What're you hanging round for?" she would demand when he stepped
forward at the mill gate. "D'you suppose I never want to be by myself?"

Or:

"You just go away, Rudolph Klein. I'm going up with some of the girls."

But she never lost him. He was beside her or at her heels, his small
crafty eyes on her. When he walked behind her there was a sensuous gleam
in them.

After a few weeks she became terrified. There was a coldness of deviltry
in him, she knew. And he had the whip-hand. She was certain he knew
about the watch, and her impertinence masked an agony of fear. Suppose
he went to her father? Why, if he knew, didn't he go to her father?

She suspected him, but she did not know of what. She knew he was
an enemy of all government, save that of the mob, that he was an
incendiary, a firebrand who set on fire the brutish passions of a
certain type of malcontents. She knew, for all he pretended to be the
voice of labor, he no more represented the honest labor of the country
than he represented law and order.

She watched him sometimes, at the table, when on Sundays he ate the
mid-day meal with them; his thin hatchet face, his prominent epiglottis.
He wore a fresh cotton shirt then, with a flaming necktie, but he did
not clean his fingernails. And his talk was always of tearing down,
never of building up.

"Just give us time, and we'll show them," he often said. And "them" was
always the men higher up.

He hated