Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/381

Rh It was to children, fatally rattle-brained and flighty babies, belonging essentially to the most turbulent and the most reckless class of the Antwerp proletariat, that they turned over work for which sufficiently careful and steady manipulators could not be found!

And so that nothing would be lacking to the stakes, so that the challenge would cry the louder to God or rather, to Hell, these little hands, unskilled and clumsy, were provided with cumbersome and rudimentary tools.

Finally, as a supreme provocation, a steam engine and its fire-box were accommodated next to the gunpowder-maker; quite literally, the powder was being treated in the fire!

Considering only the little difficulty required by the work itself, "regular child's play," as the greedy capitalist said with a chuckle, he had carried off two hundred of the very young blackguards swarming in the Quartier des Bateliers and the Quartier de la Minque, offspring of drunkards, women peddlers, pilots, smugglers and runners, hopeless vagrants to whom he paid a few cents a day, Béjard worried as little about the safety of the poor children as he had about that of the emigrants. Laurent even imagined that he recognized, among the moss-grown and tarry boards, the wreckage oi The Gina, and, going even further back, he thought of the boats whose construction was helped, in the time of Béjard, senior, by the children tortured to amuse Béjard, junior.

The eldest of the boys, to whom Laurent had just spoken, was but sixteen years old, and Laurent learned from him that the majority of his companions had not yet reached that age.

In questioning them, Paridael took a hitherto