Stephen Trimble put his hand to his head in a dazed way. "You are fooling me," he said.
"Not we, but somebody is, if you don't know anything about it. Well, if you are not the bloated bondholder we took you for, perhaps you'll consider our little offer?"
"No, gentlemen, not to-night at least; give me time to think it over. One bad man may have wronged me, but I've no call to go against the law."
"Oh yes, take plenty of time"--and they opened the door. Some one was knocking at Stephen Trimble's own room. It was the flap-jack man, and he had a white, scared face.
"What is the matter?" asked the inventor.
Stephen Trimble gave one exclamation of horror--then asked, "What's he done?"
"Nothing but wheeling my cart; they'd have caught me, too, but I cut and run. This is a pretty country where one is arrested for trying to earn an honest living!"
This was the last straw. Stephen Trimble had said that he had no reason to resist the law, but he could not hold to that now. He staggered feebly down-stairs, knocked at the door of the dynamiters, and said. "I've come back sooner than I thought I would. Give me five dollars in advance, and I'll undertake that business of yours to-morrow, and maybe I'll get up a little infernal-machine for my own use at the same time, but just now I must find my boy."
The man handed him some greasy bills. "You look sick," he said. "You had better go down to the free-lunch counter at the saloon, and have a good square meal."
Stephen Trimble went and ate and drank to excess. He did not look for his little son, and he did not return to the dynamiters' the next morning, for he was drunk--and drunk for three days thereafter. Then he sobered down and applied himself to the task which they had set him--a task intended to bring ruin to the class which had wronged him. He knew the aims, now, of the men for whom he was working, and he believed that he sympathized with them. They told him how they had borne imprisonment and torture for no wrong in Russia, and had come to this country expecting to find it the land of justice and kindness, but had met only the same tyranny of the rich over the poor--the rich, who cared for nothing but their own pleasures, and ground the poor under their chariot wheels.