putting themselves in the wrong and committing illegalities
through that overpowering craving for dramatic promptness natural
to uneducated minds.

All the men had not come out of the Bantock Burden pit. Something
was wrong there, an indecision if nothing else; the mine was still
working, and there was a rumor that men from Durham had been held
in readiness by Lord Redcar, and were already in the mine. Now, it
is absolutely impossible to ascertain certainly how things stood at
that time. The newspapers say this and that, but nothing trustworthy
remains.

I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of
that stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord
Redcar had not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time
as myself and incontinently end its stagnation.

He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put
up the best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all
that afternoon in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as
conspicuously as possible for the scratch force of "blacklegs"--as
we called them--who were, he said and we believed, to replace the
strikers in his pits.

I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
Burden pit, and--I do not know what happened.

Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.

I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up