“No, if it hadn’t been for Peters, the strike, like enough, would have took. But he won’t stand in nobody’s way again.”
While Monk spoke, he drew out a sharp, slender knife, and ran his finger along the blade.
“I tell you, Shiflet, we must do it the night after this blast’s done, and the men in the shed say the coal will run out on the 6th, that’s to-morrow. When Peters is fixed, the managers will have to give in or quit runnin’ the furnace.”
Both men sat with their arms leaning on the table, and the flickering light of the tallow candle between them showed two faces, rough, begrimed by smoke and soot, and disfigured by evil passions, that grew fiercer as they calmly plotted against the life of a fellow-being.
“We’ll meet at one, where the roads cross. It’ll be quiet then, and Peters’s house is alone.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Shiflet, with a grin that rendered his brute-like countenance doubly repulsive. “I’m confounded tired. Bring your candle and light me down them infernal stairs.”
The men stood up. Monk, small and slim, was dwarfed by the almost giant stature of his companion. With a few parting words as to secrecy and silence, they separated.
Monk stood on the upper step until Shiflet disappeared, then closed the door and replaced the candle on the table.
The room, neither large nor small, was a mere hole, smoked, dirty, and unplastered, high up in a frame tenement-house. Two or three chairs, an old chest of drawers, a rickety bedstead, and pine table, composed its furniture. Some old boots and broken pieces of pig-iron lay scattered about. The small, box-shaped window was set just below where the ceiling or roof sloped to the wall. The only door led directly to the stairs that went down two, three flights to the ground. There were many such places in Agatha, where the furnace-hands lived.
Monk walked rapidly up and down the room, as if making an effort to wear off the excitement that the last few moments had brought upon him. His features had lost much of the malignant expression, which was by no means habitual. His countenance was not hardened or stamped with the impress of crime like Shiflet’s, who had just parted from him at the door—a countenance in which every trace of conscience had long ago been erased. Monk’s face was neither good nor bad, neither bright nor dull; but he was a man easily wrought into a passion, governed by impulse.