“Where’s this man Glidden?” demanded Kurt.  “I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”

“I reckon he’s hangin’ round the farm—­out of sight somewhere.”

“All right, Jerry.  Now you go back to work.  You’ll never lose anything by sticking to us, I promise you that.  Keep your eyes and ears open.”

Kurt strode back to the house, and his entrance to the kitchen evidently interrupted a colloquy of some kind.  The hired men were still at table.  They looked down at their plates and said nothing.  Kurt left the sitting-room door open, and, turning, he asked Martha if his father had been to dinner.

“No, an’ what’s more, when I called he takes to roarin’ like a mad bull,” replied the woman.

Kurt crossed the sitting-room to knock upon his father’s door.  The reply forthcoming did justify the old woman’s comparison.  It certainly caused the hired men to evacuate the kitchen with alacrity.  Old Chris Dorn’s roar at his son was a German roar, which did not soothe the young man’s rising temper.  Of late the father had taken altogether to speaking German.  He had never spoken English well.  And Kurt was rapidly approaching the point where he would not speak German.  A deadlock was in sight, and Kurt grimly prepared to meet it.  He pounded on the locked door.

“The men are going to lay off,” he called.

“Who runs this farm?” was the thundered reply.

“The I.W.W. is going to run it if you sulk indoors as you have done lately,” yelled Kurt.  He thought that would fetch his father stamping out, but he had reckoned falsely.  There was no further sound.  Leaving the room in high dudgeon, Kurt hurried out to catch the hired men near at hand and to order them back to work.  They trudged off surlily toward the barn.

Then Kurt went on to search for the I.W.W. men, and after looking up and down the road, and all around, he at length found them behind an old strawstack.  They were comfortably sitting down, backs to the straw, eating a substantial lunch.  Kurt was angry and did not care.  His appearance, however, did not faze the strangers.  One of them, an American, was a man of about thirty years, clean-shaven, square-jawed, with light, steely, secretive gray eyes, and a look of intelligence and assurance that did not harmonize with his motley garb.  His companion was a foreigner, small of stature, with eyes like a ferret and deep pits in his sallow face.

“Do you know you’re trespassing?” demanded Kurt.

“You grudge us a little shade, eh, even to eat a bite?” said the American.  He wrapped a paper round his lunch and leisurely rose, to fasten penetrating eyes upon the young man.  “That’s what I heard about you rich farmers of the Bend.”

“What business have you coming here?” queried Kurt, with sharp heat.  “You sneak out of sight of the farmers.  You trespass to get at our men and with a lot of lies and guff you make them discontented with their jobs.  I’ll fire these men just for listening to you.”