began the Inspector maliciously
"I’d like it, sir. I’d do my best. I’ve done bush work in the Hills, and Blue Pete knocked something into me about trails."
"It always surprises me," began the Inspector maliciously, "how eager young husbands are to get away–"
"May I take Helen, sir?"
"No–you–may–not! What do you think this is–a honeymoon? In the first place you’ll probably be located in some defunct end-of-steel village where even the ghosts are abominable. In the next place you’ll be too busy to know you’re married. Horse-thieves? Bah! This is different stuff. You’ll be up against something new. We’ve more than a suspicion that those devils, the Independent Workers of the World, are at the bottom of it. When you get on the trail of the I.W.W., Boy, there’ll be no chivalry of the plains. It’ll be knives, and poison, and dynamite . . . and darkness for deeds of darkness. All the criminals you’ve met are saints compared with these foreign devils. Thank the Lord, they’ve come no further from the States as yet than the construction camps!"
He rose and deliberately removed the tunic that was to him the badge of office.
"Speaking unofficially," he observed, "my advice is to shoot first and enquire after. Remember that every Pole and Russian and Hungarian there carries a knife or a slug–he has to in self-protection–and uses it as we do slang. Every foreign workman on a railway construction gang is a potential murderer. . . . I’d rather give evidence for you on a murder charge than strew flowers on your grave."
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