Sam Sleeny was by this time pretty well filled with beer and wrath.  He felt himself in a certain sense bound by the weighty secret which Offitt had imparted to him and flattered by his invitation.  A few touches more of adroit flattery, and the agitator’s victory was complete.  Sleeny felt sore and tired to the very heart.  He had behaved like a brute to the girl he loved; he had been put clearly in the wrong in his quarrel with her, and yet he was certain that all was not well with either of them.  The tormenting syllogism ran continually through his head:  “She is the prettiest woman in the world—­rich fellows like pretty women,—­therefore—­death and curses on him!” Or sometimes the form of it would change to this:  “He is rich and handsome—­girls like men who are rich and handsome,--therefore------,” the same rage and imprecations, and the same sense of powerless fury.  He knew and cared nothing about Offitt’s Labor Reform.  He could earn a good living by his trade no matter who went to Congress, and he hated these “chinny bummers,” as he called them, who talked about “State help and self-help” over their beer.  But to-night he was tormented and badgered to such a point that he was ready for anything which his tempter might suggest.  The words of Offitt, alternately wheedling and excoriating, had turned his foolish head.  His hatred of Farnham was easily extended to the class to which he belonged, and even to the money which made him formidable.

He walked away from the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—­called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook’s Ranch,—­to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt’s lodging.  They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, and then followed him sulkily up two flights of ill-smelling stairs to his room.  He turned away their wrath by soft answers, and hastily lighting a pair of coal-oil lamps, which gave forth odor more liberally than illumination, said briskly: 

“Gentlemen, I have brought you a recruit this evenin’ that you will all be glad to welcome to our brotherhood.”

The brothers, who had taken seats where they could find them, on a dirty bed, a wooden trunk, and two or three chairs of doubtful integrity, grunted a questionable welcome to the new-comer.  As he looked about him, he was not particularly proud of the company in which he found himself.  The faces he recognized were those of the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town—­men whose weekly wages were habitually docked for drunkenness, late hours, and botchy work.  As the room gradually filled, it seemed like a roll-call of shirks.  Among them came also a spiritual medium named Bott, as yet imperfectly developed, whose efforts at making a living by dark seances too frequently resulted in the laughter of skeptics and the confusion of his friends.  His forehead and cheek were even then purple with an aniline dye, which some cold-blooded investigator had squirted in his face a few nights before while he was gliding through a twilight room impersonating the troubled shade of Pocahontas.  This occurrence gave, for the moment, a peculiarly sanguinary and sinister character to his features, and filled his heart with a thirst for vengeance against an unbelieving world.