“Where is Mr. Carpenter?” I asked. “He's in the private office, praying.” “Well,” said I, “there's a sick woman who needs help very badly. I wonder if we'd better disturb him.” “I don't know,” said Hamby. “I've been here an hour, and haven't heard a sound. Maybe he's asleep.” I was uncertain what I should do, and I elaborately explained my uncertainty. Of course, praying was an important and useful occupation, and I knew that the prophet laid great stress upon it, and all of us who loved him so dearly must respect his wishes. “Yes, of course,” said Hamby. Yet at the same time, I continued, this woman was very ill, a case of ptomaine poisoning-- “Do you think he can cure that?” asked Hamby guilelessly; and at that moment Old Joe and Lynch came from the big room. Hamby started to turn, but he was too late. Old Joe's arms went around him, and Hamby's two elbows were clamped to his sides, in a grip which more than one professional wrestler in our part of the world has found it impossible to break. At the same time I stooped on my knees and grasped the man's two wrists; because we were taking no chances of his gun. Lynch, the ex-soldier, had a cloth, taken from the big table, and he flung this over the head of the “pacifist” and stifled his cries. I took a revolver from his hip-pocket, but Joe was not satisfied. “Search him carefully,” said he, and so I discovered another weapon in a side-pocket. Then I made hasty search in a big closet of the room, and found a lot of bundles of books and magazines tied with stout cords. I took the cords, and we bound the “pacifist's” wrists and ankles, and put a gag in his mouth, and then we felt sure he was really a pacifist. We carried him to the closet and laid him on the floor, where a humorous idea came to us. These bundles of magazines and books were no doubt the ones which the mob had confiscated from Comrade Abell. Since they were no longer saleable, they might as well be put to some use, so I gathered armfuls of them and distributed them over the form of Hamby, until there was no longer a trace of him visible. And while I was doing this, I noticed in one corner of the closet, under the bundles, a wooden box about a foot square. Upon trying to lift it, I discovered that it weighed several times as much as it should have weighed if it had contained printed matter. “Here's our infernal machine,” I whispered, and I picked it up gingerly, and tiptoed out of the room, and back to the kitchen, and down a rear stairway of the building. I unlocked the door and opened it--and there, crouching in the shadows alongside the door, just as I expected, I saw a man. “Hello!” I whispered. “Hello!” said he, badly startled.