By the end of the week, however, there was no news of Anna. She had not
returned to the mill. Rudolph's friend on the detective force had found
no clew, and old Herman had advanced from brooding by the fire to long
and furious wanderings about the city streets.
He felt no remorse, only a growing and alarming fury. He returned at
night, to his cold and unkempt house, to cook himself a frugal and
wretched meal. His money had run very low, and with true German
stubbornness he refused to draw any from the savings bank.
Rudolph was very busy. There were meetings always, and to the little
inner circle that met behind Gus's barroom one night later in March, he
divulged the plan for the destruction of the new Spencer munition plant.
"But--will they take him back?" one of the men asked. He was of better
class than the rest, with a military bearing and a heavy German accent,
for all his careful English.
"Will a dog snatch at a bone?" countered Rudolph. "Take him back!
They'll be crazy about it."
"He has been there a long time. He may, at the last, weaken."
But Rudolph only laughed, and drank more whisky of the German agent's
providing.
"He won't weaken," he said. "Give me a few days more to find the girl,
and all hell won't hold him."
On the Sunday morning after the President had been before Congress, he
found Herman dressed for church, but sitting by the fire. All around
him lay the Sunday paper, and he barely raised his head when Rudolph
entered.
"Well, it's here!" said Rudolph.
"It has come. Yes."
"Wall Street will be opening champagne to-day."
Herman said nothing. But later on he opened up the fountain of rage in
his heart. It was wrong, all wrong. We had no quarrel with Germany.
It was the capitalists and politicians who had done it. And above all,
England.
He went far. He blamed America and Americans for his loss of work, for
Anna's disappearance. He searched his mind for grievances and found
them in the ore dust on the hill, which killed his garden; in the
inefficiency of the police, who could not find Anna; in the very
attitude of Clayton Spencer toward his resignation.
And on this smoldering fire Rudolph piled fuel Not that he said a great
deal. He worked around the cottage, washed dishes, threw pails of water
on the dirty porches, swept the floor, carried in coal and wood. And
gradually he began to play on the older man's vanity. He had had great
influence with the millworkers. No one man had ever had so much.