He was expecting death now, expecting absolute extinction; but he faced it with a serenity that mildly surprised him. This was not the mad courage, too sudden to be fine, which had hurled him into the crater of the riot to rescue Betty. It was a courage that weighed results. He thought of the dusty, open road. He was rather sorry to have to miss that, but no doubt he would never have got it anyhow. "Well," he said with a faint touch of impatience, "why don’t you answer my question? What do you want?" The barrel of the revolver wavered ever so slightly. The intruder’s voice came again out of the darkness; it was as if the darkness itself made answer: "I want them letters." Luke’s teeth came together with a snap. He had been carrying the letters in a money-belt about his middle, next his body. It was hours since he had thought of them. He had just now been feeling that perhaps he ought to be shot, but this feeling had no origin in the affair of the letters. They were a different matter. For the letters he had fought so much and so fairly that he was ready and willing to fight for them once more. He tried to gain time. "What letters?" he asked. "I dunno," said the darkness. "But you do. Come on, now; don’t try to flimflam me: them letters you got in your coat." Luke glanced at the alpaca coat that he had put on when he last left the factory. "If you want anything that was in my coat, you’ll have to look in the street for it: I left it there." The intruder did not at once reply. Luke saw the revolver advance toward him in the light. It was followed by a thick, short arm, and the arm was followed by a short thick man. He wore a velours Alpine hat. It was pushed to one side of his head, and Luke saw that the hair below it was red. That was almost the last thing he did see before the shot was fired. Luke made a flying leap at the red-headed man and tried to knock the revolver into the air. As he did so, the revolver spat at him. A loud report. A darting arrow of flame. Luke lay on the office floor. The red-headed man’s skilled fingers ran deftly through his clothes. Then the killer raised the shattered window and dropped into the street. §5. One of Breil’s strike-breakers, making his round of the factory, heard the shot and came running toward the noise. He ran to the upper office and burst into the room. A curling cloud of lazy smoke was weaving graceful figures in the shaft of light from the street-lamp outside; it embraced an overturned chair, and circled the top of the center table. Above it the strike-breaker saw the upper half of a disheveled figure, the figure of Luke Huber, leaning out of the window and shaking its fist at all the city round about. In a high, cracked voice, Luke was yelling curses at the world. "God damn your system and your politics!" yelled he. "God damn your law and your government! God damn your god!"