"I order."
The unmistakable warning in the abrupt retort silenced Werner for the moment; the distant peril seemed the less ominous.
"There's no hurry," he suggested after an interval. "He thinks he's got the hole almost filled, but we can hold him up any time by pulling down some more of the trestle—"
"And I stand under!" snapped Koppy.
"Well, of course, you don't need to. You're president of The
Independent Workers of the World."
Koppy glanced at him from beneath lowering brows, but Werner assumed a look of blankest innocence as he rolled himself a fresh cigarette.
"Or," he reflected, "we might leave some one behind to blow it up after it's finished."
"Never finished," declared Koppy. "The bosses must know the Workers have spoken."
"But three of us, I notice, are to do all the speaking," Werner growled to himself. "Next thing to being President of the United States I'd be president of the Workers of the World—and the last's the safest job."
Koppy went to the window and looked through into the darkening shadows. A man slid through the undergrowth out there and disappeared. Several more drifted in and out of sight. As he looked, a half hundred passed furtively, slinking along, silent, moving back into the bush and the shadows, a procession of guilty mutes, glancing neither to right nor left, held to their course by the promise of the coming gathering.