Koppy waved his hand, and they rejoined him.
Patches of darkness already filled the forest, but a late sun filtered through the tree tops in the thinner spaces and wove a pattern of colour on the brown leaves and dead green moss, the slender spruce needles and straight-standing trunks. Nature was in a gentle glow; the pure clear air of falling evening draped the earth in sweetness. Yet through it wound long lines of ghoulish men who felt it not, held to fiendish things by mistaken ambitions, by an unjustified bitterness that fed on its own helplessness. For, after all, the varying moods of nature are but constituents of a formula of which each man provides for himself the other half—else would the Eskimo be a paragon, the hunter a saint.
Koppy had explained it to Tressa in fiery words; the Independent Workers of the World had found tilled soil in the breasts of these unthinking men. By feeding their smouldering bitterness against conditions due largely to themselves it had won their unreasoning fidelity; like dogs they crept to heel. Here at last was a medium in which to express their wrath. That it could profit them nothing mattered not. All they read was that, under-dogs as they were doomed to be, they might make their masters suffer.
Werner, more sensitive to the silences, grumbled at his leader's back.
"Cheerful sport, this. A real hi-larious way to end a dull day."
Morani's lip curled.
"It's all right for you, Chico," muttered Werner. "All you got to do to get your blood running fresh is to slip that stiletto into somebody's ribs. They don't expect any better of a Dago. Me? They'd fasten a rope under my ears and wish me pleasant voyage."
The Italian expectorated noisily.
"I suppose," continued Werner, "you might's well do that as spit macaroni talk at me. You get me roused and I'll tear off chunks of German and throw them—"
Koppy's hand went up for silence. The men plodded on.