"In other words, Mr. Bradford, you've got your orders from the men higher up, have you?" rasped Griswold, who was by this time lost to all sense of expediency.
"I don't have to reply to any such charge as that," said the chief peace officer, turning back to his desk; and so the brittle little conference ended.
"All of which means that we shall lose the plant guard of deputies that Bradford has been maintaining," commented Raymer, as they were descending the Court House stairs; and again his prediction came true. Later in the day the guard was withdrawn; and Griswold, savagely reluctant, was forced to make a concession repeatedly urged and argued for by the older men among the strikers, namely, that the guarding of the company's property be entrusted to a picked squad of the ex-employees themselves.
During these days of turmoil and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars and planes of projection became more and more distorted. Fairness was gone, and in its place stood angry resentment, ready to rend and tear. Pity and ruth were going: the daily report from Margery told of the lessening chance of life for Andrew Galbraith, and the stirrings evoked were neither regretful nor compassionate. On the contrary, he knew very well that the news of Galbraith's death would be a relief for which, in his heart of hearts, he was secretly thirsting.
It was at the close of the week of tumult that the dreadful beckoning came. One of the two trained nurses installed at Mereside had been called away to the bedside of a sick father. Another had been wired for immediately, but between the going and the coming a night would intervene. So much Griswold got from Margery over the Iron Works telephone late in the afternoon of a day thickly besprinkled with the sidewalk waylayings and riotings. When he reached his Shawnee Street lodgings at nine o'clock that night he found Miss Grierson's phaeton standing at the curb.