“Why,” said Bolt, “you must be joking.  Those are the terms poor Wilde came back on, and you have hashed him for it.”

Old Whitbread looked the men in the face, and said, gravely, “You are too late.  You have shed that poor man’s blood; and you have sent an anonymous letter to my son’s wife.  That lady has gone on her knees to us to leave the trade, and we have consented.  Fifteen years ago, your Union wrote letters of this kind to my wife (she was pregnant at the time), and drove her into her grave, with fright and anxiety for her husband.  You shall not kill Tom’s wife as well.  The trade is a poor one at best, thanks to the way you have ground your employers down, and, when you add to that needling our clay, and burning our gear, and beating our servants to death’s door, and driving our wives into the grave, we bid you good-by.  Mr. Bolt, I’m the sixth brickmaster this Union has driven out of the trade by outrages during the last ten years.”

“Thou’s a wrong-headed old chap,” said the brickmakers’ spokesman; “but thou canst not run away with place.  Them as takes to it will have to take us on.”

“Not so.  We have sold our plant to the Barton Machine Brickmaking Company; and you maltreated them so at starting that now they won’t let a single Union man set his foot on their premises.”

The company in question made bricks better and cheaper than any other brickmaster; but, making them by machinery, were always at war with the Brickmakers’ Union, and, whenever a good chance occurred for destroying their property, it was done.  They, on their part, diminished those chances greatly by setting up their works five miles from the town, and by keeping armed watchmen and police.  Only these ran away with their profits.

Now, when this company came so near the town, and proceeded to work up Whitbread’s clay, in execution of the contract with which their purchase saddled them, the Brickmakers’ Union held a great meeting, in which full a hundred brickmakers took part, and passed extraordinary resolutions, and voted extraordinary sums of money, and recorded both in their books.  These books were subsequently destroyed, for a reason the reader can easily divine who has read this narrative with his understanding.

Soon after that meeting, one Kay, a brickmaker, who was never seen to make a brick—­for the best of all reasons, he lived by blood alone—­was observed reconnoitering the premises, and that very night a quantity of barrows, utensils, and tools were heaped together, naphtha poured over them, and the whole set on fire.

Another dark night, twenty thousand bricks were trampled so noiselessly that the perpetrators were neither seen nor heard.

But Bolt hired more men, put up a notice he would shoot any intruder dead, and so frightened them by his blustering that they kept away, being cowards at bottom, and the bricks were rapidly made, and burnt, and some were even delivered; these bricks were carted from the yard to the building site by one Harris, who had nothing to do with the quarrel; he was a carter by profession, and wheeled bricks for all the world.