But the direst want would not have made him touch a penny of it.
He disliked animals. But in a curious shame-faced fashion he liked flowers. Such portions of his garden as were useless for vegetables he had planted out in flowers. But he never cut them and brought them into the house, and he watched jealously that no one else should do so. He kept poisoned meat around for such dogs in the neighborhood as wandered in, and Anna had found him once callously watching the death agonies of one of them.
Such, at the time the Spencer mill began work on its new shell contract, was Herman Klein, sturdily honest, just according to his ideas of justice, callous rather than cruel, but the citizen of a world bounded by his memories of Germany, his life at the mill, and his home.
But, for all that, he was not a man the German organization in America put much faith in. Rudolph, feeling his way, had had one or two conversations with him early in the war that had made him report adversely.
“Let them stop all this fighting,” Herman had said. “What matter now who commenced it? Let them all stop. It is the only way.”
“Sure, let them stop!” said Rudolph, easily. “Let them stop trying to destroy Germany.”
“That is nonsense,” Herman affirmed, sturdily. “Do you think I know nothing? I, who was in the Prussian Guard for five years. Think you I know nothing of the plan?”
The report of the German atrocities, however, found him frankly incredulous, and one noon hour, in the mill, having read the Belgian King's statement that the German army in Belgium had protected its advance with women and children, Rudolph found him tearing the papers to shreds furiously.
“Such lies!” he cried. “It is not possible that they should be believed.”
The sinking of the Lusitania, however, left him thoughtful and depressed. In vain Rudolph argued with him.