“I have very little myself. I am poor, and therefore need none,” said the organist, as if that were a logical reason. “The poor should help the poor. If they don’t, who else will? The poor have always been kind to me.” He thought of his many landladies, and how they had robbed themselves to sustain him, as they had often admitted, little thinking he would desert them one by one. “Aye, and the rich too,” he added, remembering the hydraulic motor in the church, and of the continued endurance of the authorities with their organist. “Well, lad,” said Braunt, with a sigh, “come in when you can, and if nowt else, you’ll be sure of a hearty northern welcome.” CHAPTER XIII. SARTWELL prided himself on being a man who made few mistakes. He was able to trace an event from cause to effect with reasonable certainty, and this slight merit made him perhaps a trifle impatient with others who could not be credited with similar foresight, as his own wife would not have hesitated to bear witness. It would probably have filled that just woman with subdued, if pardonable, gratification had she known how wide of the mark her husband was in his estimate of the result on the strikers of the news he had committed to the care of Marsten. Sart-well imagined that the men, in their fury at being outwitted, would turn on Gibbons and rend him. He believed that Gibbons would not dare tell his dupes, as Sartwell persisted in calling them, how the Union had been befooled into supporting for weeks the bogus workmen whom the manager had flung into its credulous lap. After wreaking their vengeance on Gibbons and deposing him, they must return to the works, reasoned the manager. Their money was gone, interest in the strike had all but died out, fresher events had compressed it into a two-line item in the papers, subscriptions had practically ceased; what then was there left but a return or starvation, that powerful ally of masters all the world over? But Sartwell forgot that the Englishman knows how to starve. No Indian ever tightens his belt another notch with grimmer determination to compress hunger than an Englishman sets his teeth and starves, if need be. He has starved on the ice near the Pole, and under the burning sun in the desert. He has met famine face to face in beleaguered fort with no thought of surrender, and has doled with scrupulous exactitude the insufficient portions of food on a raft in mid-ocean. The poet has starved in his garret, making no outcry, and the world has said, “If we had only known.” In the forests and on the plains, in the jungle and on the mountains, and--perhaps worst of all--in the great cities, amidst plenty, the Englishman has shown he knows how to starve, saying with the poet: “I have not winced nor cried aloud.” When Gibbons heard what Marsten had to tell, he promptly said, “It is a lie”; but the committee looked one at the other with apprehension in their faces, fearing it was the truth.