But there were many positions in the Province for a man of Gilkan’s ability, there were few workmen of his sensitive skill with the charge and blast.  Not only Howat’s father, but Abner Forsythe as well, would search to the end all cause for the founderman’s leaving.  And, in consequence of that, any detestable misunderstanding must increase.  He determined, with an effort unaccustomed and arduous, to ignore the other; after all Gilkan was but an insignificant mouthpiece for the familiar ineptitude of the world at large.  Thomas Gilkan might continue at the Furnace without interference from him; Fanny marry her stupid labourer.  Howat had seen symptoms of that last night.  He would no longer complicate her existence with avenues of escape from a monotony which she patently elected.

“Very well, Gilkan,” he agreed shortly, choking on his wrath.  He turned and tramped shortly from the interior.  A sudden, lengthening sunlight bathed the open and a sullen group of charcoal burners about Dan Hesa.  Their faces seemed ebonized by the grinding in of particles of blackened wood.  Some women, even, in gay, primitive clothes, stood back of the men.  As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose.  He halted, and met them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the murmur died in a shuffling of feet in the dry grass.  He turned again, and walked slowly away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled by his head.  In an overpowering rage he whirled about, throwing his rifle to his shoulder.  A man detached from the group was lowering his arm; and, holding the sights hard on the other’s metal-buttoned, twill jacket, Howat pulled the trigger.  There was only an answering dull, ineffectual click.

The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man he had attempted to kill.  The charcoal burners were stationary before the momentary abandon of Howat Penny’s temper.  “Right at me,” the man articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. “—­saw the hammer fall.”  A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up.  He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities of the ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken silence, stumbled away.

He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush.  He was aghast at the unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute self-betrayal.  Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society to which his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that, as his peer, would have judged, condemned, him.  Hundreds of faces—­faces mean, insignificant, or pock-marked—­merged into one huge, dominant countenance; hundreds of bodies, unwashed or foul with disease, or meticulously clean, joined in one body, clothed in the black robe of delegated authority, and loomed above him, gigantic and absurd and powerful, and brought him to death.  Deeper than his horror, than any fear of physical consequences, lay the instinctive shrinking from the obliteration of his individual being, the loss of personal freedom.