As Mr Girtley roared those words a sudden thought flashed through my mind, and I ran to the window, threw it open, and, as I did so, there beneath me, reaching down to the low roof of a building below, was a ladder, showing plainly enough the road by which the enemy had crept in.
From where I stood I looked out upon the backs of a score of buildings; printing-offices, warehouses, and the like, and at the window of one of these buildings I saw a couple of men, one of whom I felt certain was some one I had seen before, but where, I could not tell.
I was back and beside poor Hallett directly, giving both Mr Girtley and Tom a look which sent them to the window, to see that there was no doubt how the misfortune had occurred; but I was too much taken up with Hallett’s condition to say more then.
“Is he much hurt?” cried first one and then another.
“Looks like a judgment on him,” said the heavy, broad-faced man with whom I had had my short, verbal encounter.
“Why?” said Tom Girtley sharply.
“Inventing gimcrack things like that,” said the fellow in a tone of contempt, “to try and take the bread out of honest men’s mouths.”
“Good heavens! man, leave the room!” cried Mr Girtley in a rage. “Go and take off your clothes; they’ve been made by machinery! Go and grub up roots with your dirty fingers! don’t dig them with a spade—it’s a machine! Go and exist, and grovel like a toad or a slug, or any other noisome creature; you are not fit for the society of men!”
The brute was about to reply, but there was such a shout of laughter at Mr Girtley’s denunciation and its truthfulness, that he hurried out of the place, just as Hallett sat up and stared round.
“No,” he said, “not much hurt; I’m better now. A piece of iron struck me on the head. It is a mere nothing. Stunned me, I suppose.”