with the efficiency of this new mechanism.  I tell you, Gabriel, we’ve got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants!  All that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make possible, is theirs.  And back of that, military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair!  And back of all those, the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!”

Gabriel thought, a moment, before replying.  Then said he: 

“I know it, Craig.  All the more reason why we must hit them at once, and hit hard!  These reports here,” and he gestured at the papers that Brevard had spread out under the lamp-light, “prove that, at the proper signal, every chance indicates that we can paralyze transportation—­the keynote of the whole situation.

“True, the government—­that is to say, the Air Trust, and that is to say, Flint and Waldron—­can keep men in every engine-cab in the country.  They can keep them at every switch and junction.  But this isn’t France, remember, nor is it any small, compact European country.  Conditions are wholly different here.  Everywhere, vast stretches of track exist.  No power on earth—­not even Flint and Waldron’s—­can guard all those hundreds of thousands of miles.  And so I tell you, taking our data simply from these reports and not counting on any more organized strength than they show, we have today got the means of cutting and crippling, for a week at least, the movements of troops to Niagara.  And that, just that, is all we need!”

A little silence.  Then said Catherine: 

“You mean, Gabriel, that if we can keep the troops back for a little while, and annihilate the Air Trust plant itself, the great revolution will follow?”

He nodded, with a smouldering fire in his eyes.

“Yes,” said he.  “If we can loosen the grip of this monster for only forty-eight hours, and flash the news to this bleeding, sweating, choking land that the grip is loosened—­after that we need do no more. Apres nous, le deluge; only not now in the sense of wreck and ruin, but meaning that this deluge shall forever wash away the tyranny and crime of Capitalism!  Forever and a day, to leave us free once more, free men and women, standing erect and facing God’s own sunlight, our heritage and birthplace in this world!”

Catherine made no answer, but her hand clasped his.  The light on her magnificent masses of copper-golden hair, braided about her head, enhanced her beauty.  And so for a moment, the little group sat there about the table—­the group on which now so infinitely much depended; and the lamp-glow shone upon their precious plans, reports and diagrams.

Into each others’ eyes they looked, and knew the moment of final conflict was drawn very near, at last.  The moment which, in failure or success, should for long years, for decades, for centuries perhaps, determine whether the world and all its teeming millions were to be slave or free.