Maverick came around to the Darcys that evening. "I fancy I have found your man, Jack," he began. "Mrs. Stixon called me in towards night, saying Jem had been on a spree, and was dreadfully beaten. I found one side of his face scratched and bruised, and bits of gravel still adhering to the flesh. The right arm, on the same side, has one bone broken, and his shoulder is dislocated. He said he fell off of a stoop, and is dreadfully sullen. I asked him what stoop, but he would not tell. Do you remember which way the man fell?" Jack thought a moment. "On the right side, Maverick, away from me, or I should have seen his face. Just such a size man as Jem Stixon, too," with a satisfied nod. "What will you do about it?" Jack took two or three turns across the floor. "See here, Maverick, we will not do any thing. You cure the poor fellow, and I think he will never try to damage Hope Mills again. I can hardly forgive him Bruno, though." "If I were Sylvie Barry,"--he never called her Mrs. Lawrence when speaking of her,--"I should say, 'Jack, you are an angel.'" Jack flushed. "Masculine angels!" he laughed. "Well, wasn't there Gabriel and a host of them? Why, Jack, they were _all_ masculine!" There was no need for earthly justice to meddle with Jem Stixon. His arm inflamed: he had led a hard life late years, and his system was in bad order. He would not listen to amputation until it was too late, and in less than a month he was dead. It was better for his poor hard-working wife and family. One other death grew out of the summer riots, though this was at a distance. Dennis Connelly had been working with a railroad-gang, and the strikers there had a desperate struggle with the civil authority. They were worsted in the end, and Connelly was one of the victims, or perhaps more truly speaking, a victim to bad whiskey, for when sober he was very peaceable. Kit sent for his body, and had him decently buried. CHAPTER XXVII. THE strikers at the hat-factory did not carry the day. The employers were very indignant, and tabooed the union men altogether. At Garafield's the men were called in council, the points discussed, and a small advance in wages allowed. The co-operatives went their way quietly. Perhaps the most convincing argument was a very jubilant letter from Winston, part of which Darcy put up in the hall. He had just succeeded in making an important contract for two years, on very fair terms. That would see them through safely unless the whole world came to grief again! Jack wrote Miss McLeod a graphic account of the "labor troubles," and she replied with equally characteristic _verve_. "She could hardly decide," she declared, "whether to be glad, or sorry, that her young friend had grown so independent of her; but in any emergency she wished to be remembered."