From his hiding place Ralph could catch a glimpse of the boy’s white face in the half dusk. He could also overhear what Billy was saying.
“I tell you men it won’t do,” he argued persuasively. “You know they are on the look out for you. Haven’t I been all up and down the track for days getting reports for you? You say your strike has failed and other men are at work at your old jobs, but I can’t see how it will help you or your cause to try wrecking the track, or doing any kind of mischief. Please don’t.” His voice had a high sweetness.
He had leaned over from the men’s shoulders and spoke like a child asking a favor. Yet the older men were listening to him with serious faces.
Ralph could not believe what he actually saw and heard.
“You’ve got to win some day, if you’ll only have patience; we have all agreed on that fact,” Billy continued, still in his sweet boy’s voice. “Of course it may take a long time, but it is the biggest fight on earth, to win justice for the poor; so you know everybody has got to have a lot of patience. If you are going to do wrong things because you think the rich have done wrong to you, I can’t see how you are any better than they are. And I wouldn’t trust you any more than I do them, once you get the same power.”
It was occurring to Ralph Marshall, as he stood absorbedly listening to the youthful speaker, that Billy Webster was discussing in a simple, school-boy fashion certain of the biggest social problems of the day.
But what most impressed him was not what Billy said—almost any clever, visionary boy might have read the views he expressed and repeated them parrot fashion. The extraordinary thing was the way the men listened.
Actually, by some strange gift of nature, Billy was a leader among them—an influence they respected, even if they would not follow it.
“You made a mistake with that ugly piece of work you did the other night,” he went on pleadingly, “but no one was hurt and you have not been found out. Promise me you’ll never do a job like that again?”
Then Billy slid down to the ground again.