Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not only were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might possibly be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many true and many exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant irony of the uses of the agent provocateur was never better exemplified, but it wasn’t for Needham’s trusty informer to chew upon that, but, whatever his difficulties, to get on with his incitements. And he soon decided that Hepplestall’s people, in the mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would listen to him and they would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but their vehemence was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use to Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope of any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being influenced to violent action. Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie Bradshaw died. She had been almost luxuriously careful about the birth of her first child: she had left the factory three days before his birth and had not returned, with the child at her breast, for a full week afterwards; but second babies were said to come more easily, wages were needed and she had lifted heavy beams before. The child was born on the factory floor, it lived and Annie died. There was no extraordinary pother made about her death, because women were continually defying steam in this way and most of them survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That was all. “Don’t fret for me, lad,” she gasped to John. “I’m going through the Golden Gates. Tak’ care o’ the childer.” The engine did not stop--guns do not cease fire because a soldier falls on the battlefield--and to John Bradshaw, nineteen, widower with two infant sons, it beat a devil’s tattoo of stunning triumph. There were women gathered around her body, somewhere a woman was washing his son, but he was seeing nothing of them, nothing of the life that had come through death. Annie was gone from him, his glorious Annie of the winds and the moors, lying white and silent on the oily floor of a stinking factory, and already the women were leaving her, already they were returning to their several places. If they gave him sympathy, they took bread out of their mouths and sympathy must be so brief as to appear callosity. It was not callosity, and he knew it; knew, too, that he did not want long-winded condolences or any condolences at all, yet their going so quickly from that white body seemed to him a stark indecency adding to the monstrous debt Steam owed him.