And that this same Willy Cameron had apparently a knowledge of certain plans, which was rather worse than pernicious.  Mr. Woslosky’s name for it was damnable.

For instance, there were the lists of the various city stores and their estimated contents, missing from Mr. Woslosky’s own inconspicuous trunk in a storage house.  On that had been based the plan for feeding the revolution, by the simple expedient of exchanging by organized pillage the contents of the city stores for food stuffs from the farmers in outlying districts.

Revolution, according to Mr. Woslosky, could only be starved out.  He had no anxiety as to troops which would be sent against them, because he had a cynical belief that a man’s country was less to him than various other things, including his stomach.  He believed that all armies were riddled with sedition and fundamentally opposed to law.

Copies of other important matters, too, were missing.  Lists of officials for the revolutionary city government and of deputies to take the places of the disbanded police, plans for manning, by the radicals, the city light, water and power plants; a schedule of public eating houses to take the place of the restaurants.

Woslosky began to find this drug clerk with the ridiculous given name getting on his nerves.  He considered him a dangerous enemy to progress, that particular form of progress which Mr. Woslosky advocated, and he suspected him of a lack of ethics regarding trunks in storage.  Mr. Woslosky had the old-world idea that the best government was a despotism tempered by assassination.  He thought considerably about Willy Cameron.

But the plan concerning the farm house was, in the end, devised by Louis Akers.  Woslosky was skeptical.  It was true that Cameron might stick his head into the lion’s jaws, but precautions had been known to be taken at such times to prevent their closing.  However, the Pole was desperate.

He took six picked men with him that afternoon to the farm, and made a strategic survey of the situation.  The house was closed and locked, but he was not concerned with the house.  Cusick had told Denslow the meetings were held late at night in the barn, and to the barn Woslosky repaired, sawed-off shotgun under his coat and cigarette in mouth, and inspected it with his evil smile.  Two men, young and reckless, might easily plan to conceal themselves under the hay in the loft, and—­

Woslosky put down his gun and went down into the cow barn below, whistling softly to himself.  He began to enjoy the prospect.  He gathered some eggs from the feed boxes, carrying them in his hat, and breaking the lock of the kitchen door he and his outfit looted the closet there and had an early supper, being careful to extinguish the fire afterwards.

Not until dusk was falling did he post his men, three outside among the outbuildings, one as a sentry near the woods, and two in the barn itself.  He himself took up his station inside the barn door, sitting on the floor with his gun across his knees.  Looking out from there, he saw the sharp flash of a hastily extinguished match, and snarled with anger.  He had forbidden smoking.