He crawled after them, keeping back out of hearing, watching in the darkness to discover what they were up to. Strikers, he decided, since his over sensitive nose brought him no evidence that they were common, unwashed hoboes. They smelled clean--like tobacco and soap. A bit greasy, but without offense. Henry wriggled through the dry grass on their trail. They were making for a tool chest, set beside the track, he noted, and one of them presently stood boldly upright, walked to the chest, lifted something out of it, walked casually toward a group working about a flare, while the other waited, hidden. In a few minutes the first marauder came sliding back, prone, and Henry lifted his head to see what it was they had pilfered. From the gingerly way they handled it, the caution with which they wormed back to the road, he knew--dynamite! Forgetting his own errand, avid with childish curiosity, he followed the pair, keeping always out of sight, trailing them back to Elsie--back to his own street, back to his own house! [Illustration] And here an amazing melodrama was enacted before his staring eyes, almost before he could think. He saw the sinister two slink through his garden, saw them hurl themselves upon the young guard, beheld a waving chaos of arms and legs, heard a thrown pistol clink upon the cinders--heard with his tense nerves and his straining faculties, though his sealed ears denied him tidings of the fight. Then he saw that one of the strikers held the guard prone, and that the other was burrowing swiftly under the yellow tower. It was at that moment that Henry saw another sight which turned him cold and numb and made him forget every grievance he had ever known against the B. & A. He saw a glint of red hair at the upper window of that block tower. He saw Mary Hill standing there--her body poised in terror. In one hand she held the pistol he had given her. In the other she clutched a frightened yellow kitten.