 stocks, and you
know I did it and yet keep still and don't report me, you will get the stocks if
anybody informs on you.«
    »Ah, but that would serve you but right,« said Dowley, »for you must inform.
So saith the law.«
    The others coincided.
    »Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down. But there's one thing
which certainly isn't fair. The magistrate fixes a mechanic's wage at 1 cent a
day, for instance. The law says that if any master shall venture, even under
utmost press of business, to pay anything over that cent a day, even for a
single day, he shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he
did it and doesn't inform, they also shall be fined and pilloried. Now it seems
to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us, that because you
thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within a week you have paid a cent
and fifteen mil -«
    Oh, I tell you it was a smasher! You ought to have seen them go to pieces,
the whole gang. I had just slipped up on poor smiling and complacent Dowley so
nice and easy and softly, that he never suspected anything was going to happen
till the blow came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.
    A fine effect. In fact as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time
to work it up in. But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little.
I was expecting to scare them, but I wasn't expecting to scare them to death.
They were mighty near it, though. You see they had been a whole lifetime
learning to appreciate the pillory; and to have that thing staring them in the
face, and every one of them distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I
chose to go and report - well, it was awful, and they couldn't seem to recover
from the shock, they couldn't seem to pull themselves together. Pale, shaky,
dumb, pitiful? Why, they weren't any better than so many dead men. It was very
uncomfortable. Of course I thought they would appeal to me to keep mum, and then
we would shake hands, and take a drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an
end. But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly oppressed and
suspicious people
