"Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long?
Shall I have to give up work for any length of time ?" Ingolby asked.
"Longer than you'll like," was the enigmatical reply.

"It's the devil's own business," was the weary answer.

"Every minute's valuable to me now.
I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night.

There's all the trouble between the two towns; there's the strike on hand; there's that business of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there's--" he paused.
He was going to say, "There's that devil Marchand's designs on my bridge," but he thought better of it and stopped.

It had been his intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years.
Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing him for it afterwards.