“Why in hell weren’t those gates bolted tight?” he demanded.  “That’s what I want to know!  There was plenty of time after they turned the corner of East Street.  You might have guessed what they would do.  But instead of that you let ’em into the mill to shut off the power and intimidate our own people.”  He called the strikers an unprintable name, and though Janet stood, with her back turned, directly before him, he gave no sign of being aware of her presence.

“It wasn’t the gatekeeper’s fault,” she heard Orcutt reply in a tone quivering with excitement and apprehension.  “They really didn’t give us a chance—­that’s the truth.  They were down Canal Street and over the bridge before we knew it.”

“It’s just as I’ve said a hundred times,” Ditmar retorted.  “I can’t afford to leave this mill a minute, I can’t trust anybody—­” and he broke out in another tirade against the intruders.  “By God, I’ll fix ’em for this—­I’ll crush ’em.  And if any operatives try to walkout here I’ll see that they starve before they get back—­after all I’ve done for ’em, kept the mill going in slack times just to give ’em work.  If they desert me now, when I’ve got this Bradlaugh order on my hands—­” Speech became an inadequate expression of his feelings, and suddenly his eye fell on Janet.  She had turned, but her look made no impression on him.  “Call up the Chief of Police,” he said.

Automatically she obeyed, getting the connection and handing him the receiver, standing by while he denounced the incompetence of the department for permitting the mob to gather in East Street and demanded deputies.  The veins of his forehead were swollen as he cut short the explanations of the official and asked for the City Hall.  In making an appointment with the Mayor he reflected on the management of the city government.  And when Janet by his command obtained the Boston office, he gave the mill treasurer a heated account of the afternoon’s occurrences, explaining circumstantially how, in his absence at a conference in the Patuxent Mill, the mob had gathered in East Street and attacked the Chippering; and he urged the treasurer to waste no time in obtaining a force of detectives, in securing in Boston and New York all the operatives that could be hired, in order to break the impending strike.  Save for this untimely and unreasonable revolt he was bent on stamping out, for Ditmar the world to-day was precisely the same world it had been the day before.  It seemed incredible to Janet that he could so regard it, could still be blind to the fact that these workers whom he was determined to starve and crush if they dared to upset his plans and oppose his will were human beings with wills and passions and grievances of their own.  Until to-day her eyes had been sealed.  In agony they had been opened to the panorama of sorrow and suffering, of passion and evil; and what she beheld now as life was a vast and terrible cruelty.  She had needed only this final proof to be convinced that