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If Sam Sleeny had few happy hours to enjoy, he could at least boast himself that one was beginning now. The lovely face bore to his heart not only the blessing of its own beauty, but also a new and infinitely consoling thought.
She had come one evening with Sleeny to a spiritualist conference frequented by Offitt, and he had at once inferred that Sleeny and she were either engaged to be married or on the straight road toward it. It would be a profanation of the word to say that he loved her at first sight. But his scoundrel heart was completely captivated so far as was possible to a man of his sort.
"I will not ask you to wait long," he said, and turned the conversation upon the weather and social prospects for the season. In a few minutes the door opened, and Sleeny was brought into the room by an officer. "Was this the man you saw, Mrs. Belding?" asked Dalton. "Not the slightest resemblance. This one is much taller, and entirely different in color."
Sleeny walked moodily down the street, engaged in that self-torture which is the chief recreation of unhappy lovers. He steeped his heart in gall by imagining Maud in love with another. His passion stimulated his slow wits into unwonted action, until his mind began to form exasperating pictures of intimacies which drove him half mad.
He knew it was imprudent that it might attract the attention of thieves or detectives; but to save his life he could not have kept from doing it. At last he scratched his hand on the pin which was doing duty for the button he had lost in his scuffle with Sleeny. "Ah!" he said to himself, with humorous banter, "it won't do to be married in a coat with the buttons off."
There was not an Irish laborer in the city but knew his way to his ward club as well as to mass. Among those who had taken part in the late exciting events and had now reverted to private life was Sam Sleeny. His short sentence had expired; he had paid his fine and come back to Matchin's. But he was not the quiet, contented workman he had been. He was sour, sullen, and discontented.
I'm your friend, if you've got one in the world. You mustn't lose a minute more. You've got time now to catch the 8.40. Come, jump in a hack and be off." His earnestness and rapidity confused Sleeny, and drove all thoughts of the hammer from his mind. He stared at Offitt blankly, and said, "Why, what are you givin' me now?" "I'm a-givin' you truth and friendship, and fewest words is best.
He did not, for the moment, see what object Offitt could have in lying so, until the thought occurred to him: "May be there's a reward out!" But when the blood-stained hammer was shown and identified by Offitt, all doubt was cleared away in a flash from the dull brain of Sleeny. He saw the whole horrible plot of which he was the victim.
"The rest goes for propagatin' our ideas, and especially for influencin' the press." Sleeny was a dull man, but he made up his mind on the way home that the question which had so long puzzled him how Offitt made his living was partly solved. Sleeny, though a Bread-winner in full standing, was not yet sufficiently impressed with the wrongs of labor to throw down his hammer and saw.
"That's all solid," said Sleeny, who was indifferently interested in these abstractions. "But what you goin' to do about it?" "Do!" cried Offitt. "We are goin' to make war on capital. We are goin' to scare the blood-suckers into terms. We are goin' to get our rights peaceably, if we can't get them any other way. We are goin' to prove that a man is better than a moneybag."
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