He paused, as though for comment from his audience, but no one spoke and he went on again.
“While you have been—resting, I have been working, and I have managed to arrange for enough capital to carry on the work to the end, on one condition. When things are not to your liking, you are to use the good American way of talking things over and settling them peaceably, not the method you brought with you from over the sea, of rioting and burning and stirring up hatred between one man and another. On that basis we can go on. In a crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one man, and you have chosen to blame me. What you have been saying about me I neither know nor care, but if you had used your own wits instead of Thorvik’s, you would have seen how things really stood. And I will tell you this. Through all this time of waiting, I have kept in my safe a sufficient sum in cash for immediate use, so that when the time came to begin again, we could go forward without a day’s, without an hour’s delay. It is there, as I said, ready for you to earn it. And now have you had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolutions? Do you want to go back to work?”
“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from the crowd.
It was an American voice, but its refrain was taken up in a dozen foreign tongues. Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their leader and that they wished to work again.
“Then go home and get some sleep and we will start work in the morning,” John Herrick said. “The money will be there to pay your next week’s wages and there will be enough for one thing besides. It will buy your precious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country and we will all see that he makes use of it.”
“But—see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous voice rose above the murmur of approval, “I’ve be telling them——”
Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest surprise of all her life. She suddenly found herself standing on the step beside John Herrick, telling what had happened, making plain to that strange, listening group, what was the source of Dabney’s story. With her hand holding to her uncle’s, she spoke out bravely and told the whole truth—just what had really occurred and just how the reporter had spied and listened and questioned and put together his so-called facts. She even found herself at the end, telling of Dabney’s inglorious encounter with the bear.