"From the first of this month your pay will be four hundred a month.
Now do what you're told—or your pay stops instanter."
"Then I'll have to work for nothing," said Conrad serenely. "I'm not working for you—or you'd have been paying me four hundred for the last two years, and some one else to look after me." He examined the contractor up and down with frank disgust. "I don't know how any daughter of yours keeps me here."
Tressa came to them then and seized a hand of each. They made a pretty picture in the lighted doorway—the big, frowning father in the rear, the smaller foreman with one foot on the step, and between them this sweet girl whose whole horizon was bounded by them, holding a hand of each, now dimpling, now pouting, always pleading and certain of herself.
Down in the camp the peace of night had fallen. Weary and gorged, quieted by the evening's lounge and the music they loved, the crude off-scourings of a dozen nations had retired to their bunks and were sleeping as peacefully as if their consciences were clean. Here and there a light twinkled, but as the three in the doorway looked, they blanked out one by one. The soundless night had closed in.
Torrance moved uncomfortably. He would have yielded to anything but disobedience, and a disobedience that entailed the retention of men who had made a ridiculous demand and then attacked him when he refused it. Would it look as if he feared to discipline, as if the flash of a knife could cow him? Anything rather than knuckle down to such creatures!
"May I speak to the boss?"
A familiar voice came out of the darkness not a. yard from Conrad. They heard it with an inward start; the training of their lives had been never to exhibit alarm—it was one of the muscles whereby they controlled men like these.
"I hear what happen. I come for truth."
Torrance, at the first sound, had slipped the bandage and lowered his shirt sleeve, stained as it was. He brushed the other two aside and filled the doorway. A sudden disgust filled him lest the Pole should enter.
"You know the truth already, you skunk! You knew what would happen before it happened—or you thought you did. I guess I disappointed a few of you."