In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude. Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson—or both.
"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than I've been stacking him up to be."
Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick, and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.
Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearer view turned up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy; he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue laws.
Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.
Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away. Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may still be a man of like passions—and generous prepossessions—with other men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play, made him forget the limitations of his trade. "By grapples, the old swine!" he was muttering to himself as he made a slow circuit of the plant enclosure. "Somebody ought to tell them two young ducks what they're up against. For a picayune, I'd do it, myself. Huh!—and the little black-eyed girl playin' fast an' loose with both of 'em at once while the old money-octippus eats 'em alive!"
Thus Broffin, circling the Raymer works by way of the four enclosing streets; and when his back was turned the man called Clancy pointed him out to the group of discontents.
"D'ye see that felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer chances and step on him like a cockroach. He's a Pinkerton!"