The defence of the Chateau was undertaken by the entire English-speaking colony of Aramon. The wives and children of the overseers and foremen were lodged in the rooms looking on the inner quadrangle, but took their meals in the great hall floored with many-coloured marbles. Their husbands and the younger unmarried men looked in occasionally when they could get off, ate what snacks stood handy on the sideboard and disappeared. It was their duty to keep a watch over the workshops of the Company, and on the roof of the stables were half a dozen mitrailleuses ready to sweep the open square which lay out flat as a billiard-board beneath the windows of the Chateau Schneider, surrounded by workshops and storehouses on every side. But a far more dangerous task was the raid through the ateliers themselves, which Dennis Deventer ordered to be made at irregular intervals. "The divils would be breaking up the Company's machinery if I did not keep all their little plans in the back of my head. And that's none so easy, young Cawdor, for mark me this, 'tis easy to keep track of what a clever man will imagine to do. You have only to think what you would do yourself in his place. But you never know where ignorant stupid fools will break out, and that's the danger of it, Angus me lad!" "But," I said, "they cannot all be such fools, for with my own eyes I saw them send the regular soldiers to the rightabout." "The regular soldiers--raw levies mostly, I tell you," burst out old Dennis fiercely. "I should know, for I armed them man by man out of my own gun-sheds and rifle-racks. And I tell ye that beyond a few instruction sergeants from the artillery, there was divil a man among them who could point a chassepot or lay a piece. Our noisy revolutionaries simply frightened them out of the town, and if it had not been for our little stock company here, the biggest manufacturing arsenal in France would have been in their hands. Even as it is they have found enough rifles to arm themselves, but so far we have saved the mitrailleuses and the field artillery. The deputation which came from Marseilles did not go away very much the richer." "But what is it that they want, sir?" I asked. Dennis Deventer looked at me straight between the eyes. "They want what they ought to have, Angus me boy, and what they should have, if I were not a servant of the Small Arms Company." I was taken aback at his answer, though I had heard something like it from my father. But in his case I had taken it for mere poetry or philosophy, and so thought no more about it. But a man like Dennis Deventer, who was fighting these very insurgents--why, I tell you it was a curious thing to listen to, and made me wonder if I had heard aright. The old man continued, his bold blue eyes looking straight over my shoulder as if he saw something beyond me.