“What?” said Graham, sharply.

“Years ago.  Died.  Years ago.”

“You don’t say so!” said Graham.

“I do.  I do say so.  He died.  This Sleeper who’s woke up—­they changed in the night.  A poor, drugged insensible creature.  But I mustn’t tell all I know.  I mustn’t tell all I know.”

For a little while he muttered inaudibly.  His secret was too much for him.  “I don’t know the ones that put him to sleep—­that was before my time—­but I know the man who injected the stimulants and woke him again.  It was ten to one—­wake or kill.  Wake or kill.  Ostrog’s way.”

Graham was so astonished at these things that he had to interrupt, to make the old man repeat his words, to re-question vaguely, before he was sure of the meaning and folly of what he heard.  And his awakening had not been natural!  Was that an old man’s senile superstition, too, or had it any truth in it?  Feeling in the dark corners of his memory, he presently came on something that might conceivably be an impression of some such stimulating effect.  It dawned upon him that he had happened upon a lucky encounter, that at last he might learn something of the new age.  The old man wheezed awhile and spat, and then the piping, reminiscent voice resumed: 

“The first time they rejected him.  I’ve followed it all.”

“Rejected whom?” said Graham.  “The Sleeper?”

“Sleeper? No.  Ostrog.  He was terrible—­terrible!  And he was promised then, promised certainly the next time.  Fools they were—­not to be more afraid of him.  Now all the city’s his millstone, and such as we dust ground upon it.  Dust ground upon it.  Until he set to work—­the workers cut each other’s throats, and murdered a Chinaman or a Labour policeman at times, and left the rest of us in peace.  Dead bodies!  Robbing!  Darkness!  Such a thing hasn’t been this gross of years.  Eh!—­but ’tis ill on small folks when the great fall out!  It’s ill.”

“Did you say—­there had not been—­what?—­for a gross of years?”

“Eh?” said the old man.

The old man said something about clipping his words, and made him repeat this a third time.  “Fighting and slaying, and weapons in hand, and fools bawling freedom and the like,” said the old man.  “Not in all my life has there been that.  These are like the old days—­for sure—­when the Paris people broke out—­three gross of years ago.  That’s what I mean hasn’t been.  But it’s the world’s way.  It had to come back.  I know.  I know.  This five years Ostrog has been working, and there has been trouble and trouble, and hunger and threats and high talk and arms.  Blue canvas and murmurs.  No one safe.  Everything sliding and slipping.  And now here we are!  Revolt and fighting, and the Council come to its end.”

“You are rather well-informed on these things,” said Graham.

“I know what I hear.  It isn’t all Babble Machine with me.”

“No,” said Graham, wondering what Babble Machine might be.  “And you are certain this Ostrog—­you are certain Ostrog organised this rebellion and arranged for the waking of the Sleeper?  Just to assert himself—­because he was not elected to the Council?”