Hartwell settled back in his chair. There was a look of satisfied cunning on his face. He had gained his point. He had attacked Firmstone in an unexpected quarter, and he had flinched. He had no further doubts. This, however, was not enough. He would press the brimming cup of evidence to his victim's lips and compel him to drink it to the last drop. "Who saw you put the bullion in the safe?" "No one." "Then, if the safe is never recovered, we have only your word that the bullion was put in there, as you stated?" Firmstone was slowly realising Hartwell's drift. Slowly, because the idea suggested appeared too monstrous to be tenable. The purple veins on his forehead were hard and swollen. "That is all," he said, from between compressed lips. "Under the circumstances, don't you think it is of the utmost importance that the safe be recovered?" "Under any circumstances. I have already taken all the steps possible in that direction." Firmstone breathed easier. He saw, as he thought, the error of his other half-formed suspicion. Hartwell was about to suggest that Zephyr should not be alone in guarding the river. Hartwell again leaned forward. He spoke meditatively, but his eyes were piercing in their intensity. "Yes. If in the event of the unexpected," he emphasised the word with a suggestive pause, "recovery of the safe, it should be found not to contain that amount, in fact, nothing at all, what would you have to say?" Every fibre of Firmstone's body crystallised into hard lines. Slowly he rose to his feet. Pale to the lips, he towered over the general manager. Slowly his words fell from set lips. "What have I to say?" he repeated. "This. That, if I stooped to answer such a question, I should put myself on the level of the brutal idiot who asked it." CHAPTER XIX _The Fly in the Ointment_ At last the union was organised at mill and mine. The men had been duly instructed as to the burden of their wrongs and the measures necessary for redress. They had been taught that all who were not for them were against them, and that scabs were traitors to their fellows, that heaven was not for them, hell too good for them, and that on earth they only crowded the deserving from their own. In warning his fellows against bending the knee to Baal, Morrison did not feel it incumbent upon him to state that there was a whole sky full of other heathen deities, and that, in turning from one deity to make obeisance to another, they might miss the one true God. He did not even take the trouble to state that there was a chance for wise selection--that it was better to worship Osiris than to fall into the hands of Moloch.