The challenge came from the back of the hall. It came in a quiet, refined voice that swept through the hall with the cold cut of a knife. Someone had risen from a sitting position on a table. He stood up. It was the tall, dark figure of Father Adam clad in a garment which enveloped him from head to foot like the black cassock of a priest.
"Do you?" he cried again, as the startled leader stared stupidly at the interrupter.
Every eye turned to the back of the hall on the instant. The men on the platform looked up from their work to witness the daring of one who could interrupt the elected leader of the people. One man, slight, foreign-looking, who had been seated at the back of the platform stood up and leant against the wall.
"You know nothing of these people you are determined to destroy with machine guns," Father Adam went on. "You know nothing of the men with whom you are dealing, either the owners of the mill, or the men who have found an ample livelihood under their organisation. How can you know them? You are dastardly agents of an alien company, sent and paid to wreck a wholly Canadian enterprise. This is your first object. Your second is even more sinister, for you are the agents of that mad Leninism which has destroyed a whole race of workers in a vast country like Russia. You are a supreme pestilence seeking to destroy such human nature as will listen to your vile doctrines. It is I, I, Father Adam, tell you so. The men here to-night, whom you are inciting to theft and brutal murder, know me. They know me as their servant, as their loyal comrade and helper, ready to answer their call when trouble overtakes them, ready to yield them of my best service in the day of prosperity or the night of their woe. And as it is with them so it is with their women and their babes. That's the reason I am here to-night, the black night of their woe. And so I ask them to listen to me now as they have listened many times before in the woods and the mills, which is the world to which we all belong. If they do that, if only reason asserts itself, they'll here and now turn on you, and rend you, you and your wretched gang. They'll cast you out of their midst, and fling off a foreign yoke, as they would cast out any other unclean pestilence for the purification of their homes. They'll pack you out into the northern night where no foul germs can exist. Are they to become thieves at your bidding? Are they to become murderers because your foreign money has bought them machine guns? Would they go back to their women, and their innocent babes, wiping their blood-stained hands to ask them to rejoice in the brutal crime committed in the name of brotherhood and fellowship? No, sir. I know them. You don't—"
The Bolshevist flung out a denouncing hand and bellowed in his seething wrath:
"Traitor! He is of the Cap—"
But immediate uproar drowned his denunciation and a great voice shouted in the din.
"Let him speak."
A dozen other voices strove to make themselves heard, and a wild pandemonium was rising when clear and sharp Father Adam's voice rang out again above it.
"I tell you they'll have no more of you," he cried as the leader dropped back to his seat, and the dark man at the back of the platform further bestirred himself. "Order them now to man your machine guns and murder the men in the power house! Give your orders here and now! Read out your list of names and see—"