The brothers, who had taken seats where they could find them, on a dirty bed, a wooden trunk, and two or three chairs of doubtful integrity, grunted a questionable welcome to the new-comer. As he looked about him, he was not particularly proud of the company in which he found himself. The faces he recognized were those of the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town--men whose weekly wages were habitually docked for drunkenness, late hours, and botchy work. As the room gradually filled, it seemed like a roll-call of shirks. Among them came also a spiritual medium named Bott, as yet imperfectly developed, whose efforts at making a living by dark seances too frequently resulted in the laughter of skeptics and the confusion of his friends. His forehead and cheek were even then purple with an aniline dye, which some cold-blooded investigator had squirted in his face a few nights before while he was gliding through a twilight room impersonating the troubled shade of Pocahontas. This occurrence gave, for the moment, a peculiarly sanguinary and sinister character to his features, and filled his heart with a thirst for vengeance against an unbelieving world. After the meeting had been called to order, and Sam had taken an oath of a hot and lurid nature, in which he renounced a good many things he had never possessed, and promised to do a lot of things of which he had no idea, Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of his visage, and touched it to a ferocious purpose. But the brotherhood soon wearied of his oratory, in which the blasphemy of thought and phrase was strangely contrasted with the ecclesiastical whine which he had caught from the exhorters who were the terror of his youth. The brothers began to guy him without mercy. They requested him to "cheese it"; they assisted him with uncalled-for and inappropriate applause, and one of the party got behind him and went through the motion of turning a hurdy-gurdy. But he persevered. He had joined the club to practise public speaking, and he got a good half hour out of the brothers before they coughed him down. When he had brought his speech to a close, and sat down to wipe his streaming face, a brother rose and said, in a harsh, rasping voice, "I want to ask a question." "That's in order, Brother Bowersox," said Offitt. The man was a powerful fellow, six feet high. His head was not large, but it was as round as an apple, with heavy cheek-bones, little eyes, close-cut hair, and a mustache like the bristles of a blacking-brush. He had been a driver on a streetcar, but had recently been dismissed for insolence to passengers and brutality to his horses.