"I will shoot the first man who sets a foot on this piazza," defiantly
cries the detective, at the same time drawing his revolver. "Get back to
your breakers. If the superintendent sees you on this side of the river,
you'll all get _sacked_," he adds as a threat more terrible than the
shooting of one of them.
"We don't want to make trouble," explains O'Neil. "All that we ask is
that we may take the body of Metz and give it decent burial. Has the
superintendent said we could not have it?"
Mr. Judson, the superintendent of the Giant Breakers, appears at the
door. He steps out on the piazza.
A sullen roar greets him.
"Until the coroner has disposed of the case," he begins, "no one will be
permitted to touch the body. You have heard my decision. Now go back to
your work."
The recollection of the treachery practiced on them in the riot of 1900,
when their dead fellow-workmen were put in crates and buried by the
police at night, without religious rites, comes to the minds of all.
They have sworn then that never again would they be cheated of the right
to bury their martyred brothers.
"Give us the body," cry a hundred voices in chorus.
"Go on, go on," shout the pressing thousands. "Go in and get it."
The forces for a storm have been gathering since the first tidings of
the tragedy reached the people.
When they heard that Carl Metz, the foreman of the Keystone furnace, had
killed Gorman Purdy and had then ended his own life, they were
dumbfounded.
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