For just a moment, sitting on the edge of her bed, Edith Boyd saw what love might be, and might do.  She held out both hands in the darkness, but no strong and friendly clasp caught them close.  If she could only have him to cling to, to steady her wavering feet along the gray path that stretched ahead, years and years of it.  Youth.  Middle age.  Old age.

“I’d only drag him down,” she muttered bitterly.

Willy Cameron, meanwhile, had gone to Mr. Hendricks with Edith’s story, and together late that evening they saw the Chief of Police at his house.  Both Willy Cameron and Mr. Hendricks advocated putting a watch on the offices of the Myers Housecleaning Company and thus ultimately getting the heads of the organization.  But the Chief was unwilling to delay.

“Every day means more of their infernal propaganda,” he said, “and if this girl’s telling a straight story, the thing to do is to get the outfit now.  Those clerks, for instance—­we’ll get some information out of them.  That sort always squeals.  They’re a cheap lot.”

“Going to ball it up, of course,” Mr. Hendricks said disgustedly, on the way home.  “Won’t wait, because if Akers gets in he’s out, and he wants to make a big strike first.  I’ll drop in to-morrow evening and tell you what’s happened.”

He came into the pharmacy the next evening, with a bundle of red-bound pamphlets under his arm, and a look of disgust on his face.

“What did I tell you, Cameron?” he demanded, breathing heavily.  “Yes, they got them all right.  Got a safe full of stuff so inflammable that, since I’ve read some of it, I’m ready to blow up myself.  It’s worse than that first lot I showed you.  They got the two clerks, and a half-dozen foreigners, too.  And that’s all they got.”

“They won’t talk?”

“Talk?  Sure they’ll talk.  They say they’re employed by the Myers Housecleaning Company, that they never saw the inside of the vault, and they’re squealing louder than two pigs under a gate about false arrest.  They’ll have to let them go, son.  Here.  You can do most everything.  Can you read Croatian?  No?  Well, here’s something in English to cut your wisdom teeth on.  Overthrowing the government is where these fellows start.”

It was intelligent, that propaganda.  Willy Cameron thought he saw behind it Jim Doyle and other men like Doyle, men who knew the discontents of the world, and would fatten by them; men who, secretly envious of the upper classes and unable to attain to them, would pull all men to their own level, or lower.  Men who cloaked their own jealousies with the garb of idealism.  Intelligent it was, dangerous, and imminent.

The pamphlets spoke of “the day.”  It was a Prussian phrase.  The revolution was Prussian.  And like the Germans, they offered loot as a reward.  They appealed to the ugliest passions in the world, to lust and greed and idleness.