Chris said she didn’t know, but soon, anyhow; and was moved to a stark curiosity: Ake, why do you want to marry me so bad? Just to sleep with a woman: that all? I’ve been married twice already, you know, and it doesn’t seem it was lucky for the men.

He said he was willing to take his risk; and he didn’t suppose that Colquohoun or Tavendale had thought themselves cheated, however they ended.

She said she had little mind for any man again, that was the plain truth of it. If she married at all it would be with little liking, necessity only the drive.

Ake nodded: We’d soon alter that, never fear. And fear itself leapt in her heart at his look. There’s no woman yet that I couldn’t content.

Trease wouldn’t squeal, an old hand him, and the Station Inspector wouldn’t let the chaps go into his cell and give the bastard a taste of what he needed, he could raise hell in the courts over-easily, he knew the law inside out and bottom up. So he was letten out, laughed, and went home; and still there wasn’t the ghost of a clue to point to the names of the striker sods who’d flung the pepper or drowned old Edwards.

The Gowans gates pickets had a fair dog’s life, bobbies badgering them backward and forward, keen to have out their sticks and let fly. The manager had ta’en on a bouroch of blacklegs with a bit of the plant on the go again, but bobbies or no to march by their side the scabs were scared to their marrow-bones to be seen going in or out of the Works.

Sergeant Sim Leslie went to the Inspector and said he wasn’t sure, but he had an idea, that the striker at the bottom of most of the business was the young toff Tavendale from the Gowans office. He’d known him back in the toun of Segget, as coarse a loon as you’d meet anywhere.—And the Chief said Is this a moral homily? or what have you got to say about him? And Feet habbered a little and then got it out: That assault on him at the Beach last year when he was taking a couple in charge for naked bathing—ay, not a stitch—he was nearly sure ’twas the Tavendale loon; besides, his stepfather had been a Red, a minister that fair demoralized a parish. And the Chief said he wasn’t interested in genealogy, had Feet any clue to this Tavendale having drowned Johnny Edwards or thrown the pepper?

Feet said he hadn’t; and went back on his beat on the Docks patrol that centred now round the Gowans gates. The picket was dozing away in the lithe from a stiff bit blow of wind from the harbour as Feet came bapping along the calsays. He stopped and looked at the nearest picket, a surly-looking young sod he was, cowering down in the shelter of a barrel. And this picket instead of raspberrying him as most of the impudent muckers would do, looked round about him sly and said low: Hey, Feet, a word with you, there.