“Is it?”

Bull brushed his protest aside almost fiercely.  Then he turned as the door opened and a small man hurried in.  The fellow snatched his cap from his head and his eyes settled on Skert Lawton, the man he knew best.

“It ees a document,” he cried, in the broken English of a French Canadian.  “They sign him, oh, yes.  You no more are the boss.  They say the mill it ees for the ‘worker.’  All dis big mill, all dis big money.  Oh, yes.  Dey sign him.”

“Who’s this?” Bull demanded.

“One of my machine-minders.  He’s a good boy,” the engineer explained.

Bull nodded.

“That’s all right We want all we can get of his sort.”  He turned to Bat.  “Are there others?  I mean boys we can trust?”

“Quite a bunch.”

“Can we get them together?”

“Sure.”

“Right.  This is going to be the real thing.  The sort of thing I’d rather have it.”

He turned to Skert who stood by, watching the light of battle in his chief’s eyes.

“Here, shut down the dynamos.  Set them clean out of action.  Do you get me?  Leave the machines for the time being so they’re just so much scrap.  Then, if you got the bunch you can rely on, leave ’em guard.  We’ll get on down, an’ sign that damned document for ’em.”

* * * * *

The recreation room was crowded to suffocation.  Men of every degree in the work of the mill had foregathered.  A hubbub of talk was going on.  Voices were raised.  There was anger.  There was argument, harsh-voiced argument which mainly expressed feeling.  At the far end of the hall, on the raised platform designed for those who fancied their vocal attainments, a group of men were gathered about a table upon which was outspread the folios of an extensive document.  The men at the table were talking eagerly.

The gathering had listened to the furious oratory of a pale-faced man, with long black hair and a foreign accent.  It had listened, and agreed, and applauded.  For he had talked Communism, and the overthrow of the Capitalists, and the possession of the wealth creating mills for those who operated them.  It had listened to an appeal to the latent instinct in every human creature, freedom from everything that could be claimed as servitude, freedom, and possession, and independence for those who would once and for all rid themselves of the shackles which the pay-roll and time-sheet imposed upon them.

They had been called together to witness the iniquity of spending their lives in the degrading operation of filling the pockets of those who laboured not, by the toil in which their lives were spent.  They had been told every flowery fairy tale of the modern communistic doctrine, which possesses as much truth and sanity in it as is to be found in an asylum for the mentally deficient.  And they had swallowed the bait whole.  The talk had been by the tongue of a skilled fanatic, who was well paid for his work, and who kept in the forefront of his talk that alluring promise of ease, and affluence, and luxury, which never fails in its appeal to those who have never known it.