The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4917]
"How do you get away with this to your father?" he asked her once.
"Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at Gus's."
"How do you mean, bad?"
"Well, they're Germans, for one thing, the sort that shouts about the Fatherland. They make me sick."
"Let's forget them, honey," said Graham, and reaching under the table-cloth, caught and held one of her hands.
He was beginning to look at things with the twisted vision of Marion's friends. He intended only to flirt a little with Anna Klein, but he considered that he was extremely virtuous and, perhaps, a bit of a fool for letting things go at that. Once, indeed, Tommy Hale happened on them in a road-house, sitting very quietly with a glass of beer before Graham and a lemonade in front of Anna, and had winked at him as though he had received him into the brotherhood of those who were seeing life.
Then, near the end of January, events took another step forward. Rudolph Klein was discharged from the mill.
Clayton, coming down one morning, found the manager, Hutchinson, and Dunbar in his office. The two men had had a difference of opinion, and the matter was laid before him.
"He is a constant disturbing element," Hutchinson finished; "I understand Mr. Dunbar's position, but we can't afford to have the men thrown into a ferment, constantly."
"If you discharge him you rouse his suspicions and those of his gang," said Dunbar, sturdily.
"There is a gang, then?"
"A gang! My God!"
In the end, however, Clayton decided to let Rudolph go. Hutchinson was insistent. Production was falling down. One or two accidents to the machinery lately looked like sabotage. He had found a black cat crudely drawn on the cement pavement outside his office-door that very morning, the black cat being the symbol of those I.W.W.'s who advocated destruction.
"What about the girl?" Dunbar asked, when the manager had gone.
"I have kept her, against my better judgment, Mr. Dunbar."
For just a moment Dunbar hesitated. He knew certain things that Clayton Spencer did not, things that it was his business to know. The girl might be valuable one of these days. She was in love with young Spencer. The time might come when he, Dunbar, would need to capitalize that love and use it against Rudolph and the rest of the crowd that met in the little room behind Shroeder's saloon. It was too bad, in a way. He was sorry for this man with the strong, repressed face and kindly mouth, who sat across from him. But these were strange times. A man could not be too scrupulous.
"Better keep her on for a month or two, anyhow," he said. "They're up to something, and I miss my guess if it isn't directed against you."
"How about Herman Klein?"
"Nothing doing," stated Mr. Dunbar, flatly. "Our informer is tending bar at Gus's. Herman listens and drinks their beer, but he's got the German fear of authority in him. He's a beer socialist. That's all."
But in that Mr. Dunbar left out of account the innate savagery that lurked under Herman's phlegmatic surface.
"You don't think it would do if she was moved to another office?"
"The point is this." Dunbar moved his chair forward. "The time may come when we will need the girl as an informer. Rudolph Klein is infatuated with her. Now I understand that she has a certain feeling of - loyalty to Mr. Graham. In that case" - he glanced at Clayton - "the welfare of the many, Mr. Spencer, against the few."
For a long time after he was gone Clayton sat at his desk, thinking. Every instinct in him revolted against the situation thus forced on him. There was something wrong with Dunbar's reasoning. Then it flashed on him that Dunbar probably was right, and that their points of view were