“Hugh,” he said, lowering his voice unconsciously as he spoke, “I happened to glimpse something while I was nosing around the settlement here that gave me a bad feeling, because it means serious trouble ahead for these ignorant strikers if they push it any further.”
His mysterious words, of course, aroused the natural curiosity of the other.
“Come, what are you hinting at now, Billy? No one’s going to hear what you say, so out with it,” he told the stout chum.
Nevertheless Billy had to take another look around before he would consent to explain.
“You know, Hugh,” he began, “I’m rather fond of studying human nature, and this chance was too good to be wasted, so while some of you kept shop and treated those of the wounded who’d allow it, I just prowled and snooped and saw how these wretched foreigners make a job of half living, for that’s all it amounts to, say what you will.”
“Less talk, Billy, and get down to facts,” the scout master advised, knowing how the other loved to hear himself chatter.
Billy laughed good-naturedly and then proceeded without the least sign of being in the least put out by the rebuke.
“Well, I only wanted to explain how it came I was poking around that way. Most of the people are clustered about where the wounded strikers are lying in your emergency hospital, so I wasn’t interfered with even when I looked inside some of the awful shacks. Gee! but they’re bare of the commonest comforts of life, as we know them.”
“I could have told you that without looking, Billy; but you discovered something, you are trying to tell me; what was it?”
“In one shack I had the nerve to enter, so as to say I’d done the thing up brown, there was what seemed to be a carpenter’s bench, and a few tools lying on the same. But, Hugh,” and here Billy twisted his head around again to look right and left, “it wasn’t any ordinary work somebody had been doing there at the time the shooting started in.”