on to it; and I have pointed out the easy way to salvage the industrial
ship. Can't you give me your blessing and let me go in peace?"
The blessing was not withheld, but neither was it given.
"I came here with my own back-load of trouble, but it seems that I'm not
the only camel in the caravan," said the young ironmaster, thoughtfully.
"What is it, Kenneth? anything you can unload on me?"
"You wouldn't understand," was the gentle evasion. "I can only give you
my word that neither Miss Margery nor Miss Charlotte are in any way
concerned in it."
"And you don't want to draw your money out of the plant?"
"No. For your sake I wish I had more to put in."
Once again Raymer took refuge in silence. After a time he said: "You've
been a brother to me, Griswold, and I shall never forget that. But if I
needed your help in the money pinch, I'm needing it worse now. I'll do
the right thing by Margery; I think I've been meaning to, all along; if
I haven't, it's only because this whole town has been fixing up a match
between Charlotte and me ever since we were school kids together--you
know how a fellow gets into the way of taking a thing like that for
granted merely because everybody else does?"
"Yes; I know."
"Well, I guess it isn't a heart-breaker on either side. If Charlotte
cares, she doesn't take the trouble to show it. Just the same, on the
other hand, I've got a shred or two of decency left, Kenneth. I'm not
going to marry myself out of this fight with Jasper Grierson--not in a
million years. Stay over and help me see it through; and when we win
out, I promise you I'll do the square thing."
By no means could Edward Raymer know that he had set the whispering
devil at work again at the ear of the man who was rocking gently in the
desk-chair. But the demon was busily suggesting, and the man was
listening. Was there not more than an even chance that Andrew Galbraith
would die, after all? He was old, with the life-reserves spent and the
weight of the years upon him. And if he should not die, there was still
a chance that days might elapse before he would be able to gather
himself sufficiently to remember and to raise the hue and cry. Griswold
put a hot hand across the corner of the table and felt for Raymer's cool
one.
"There's only one other way, Edward; and that is to fight like the
devil," he said, speaking as one who has weighed and measured and
decided. "What do you say?"
"If you will stay," Raymer began, hesitantly.
"I'll stay--as long as I can." Then, with the note of harshness
returning: "We'll make the fight, and we'll give these muckers of yours
all they are looking for. Shut the plant doors to-morrow morning and
make it a lock-out. I'll be over bright and early and we'll place a
bunch of wire orders in the cities for strike-breakers. That will bring
them to time."
Raymer got up slowly and felt in the dark for his hat.
"Strike-breakers!" he groaned. "Griswold, it would make my father turn
over in his coffin if he could know that we've come to that! But I guess
you're right. Everybody says I'm too soft-hearted to be a master of men.
Well, I must be getting home. To-morrow morning, at the plant? All
right; good-night."
And he turned to grope his way to the door and through the dark upper
hall and down the stair.
XXXI
NARROWING WALLS
When Griswold had reached across the corner of his writing-table in the
unlighted study to strike hands with Edward Raymer upon the promise to
stay and help, it is conceivable that he gave the impelling motive its
just due. To step aside was to become a fugitive, leaving a fugitive's
plain trail and half-confession of guilt behind him to direct the
pursuit. To stay and face the crisis coldly was equally out of the
question for a man of temperament. The call to action came as a draught
of fiery wine to the overspent and he accepted in a sudden upsurge of
self-centring that took nothing into the account save the welcome
excitement of a conflict.
It was with rather more than less of the self-centring that he joined
the conference with Raymer and the shop bosses in the offices of the
plant the following morning. Having slept upon the quarrel, Raymer was
on the conciliatory hand, and four of the five department foremen were
with him. In the early hours of the forenoon a compromise was still
possible. The prompt closing of the shops had had its effect, and a
deputation of the older workmen came to plead for arbitration and a
peaceful settlement of the trouble. Raymer, who had evidently been
taking counsel with his womankind, would have consented to this
proposal, but Griswold fought it and finally carried his point. "No
compromise" was the answer sent back to the locked-out workmen, and with
it went the ultimatum, which Griswold himself snapped out at the leader
of the conciliators: "Tell your committee that it is unconditional
surrender, and it must be made before five o'clock this afternoon.
Otherwise, not a man of you can come back on any terms."
At the hurling of this firebrand, three of the five department heads
drew their pay-envelopes and went away. Then Griswold proceeded to make
the breach impassable by calling upon the sheriff for a guard of
deputies. Raymer shook his head gloomily when the thrower of firebrands
sent the 'phone message to the sheriff's office.
"That settles it beyond any hope of a patch-up," he said sorrowfully.
"If we hadn't declared war before, we've done it now. I'm prophesying
that nobody will weaken when it comes to the pay-roll test this
afternoon."
"Because we have taken steps to protect our property?" rasped the
fighting partner.
"Because we have taken the step which serves notice upon them that we
consider them criminals, at least in intention. You'd resent it
yourself, Griswold. If anybody should pull the law on you before you had
done anything to deserve it, I'm much mistaken if you wouldn't----"
"Oh, hell!" was the biting interruption; and Raymer could not know upon
what inward fires he had unwittingly flung a handful of inflammables.
It was during the paying-off interval in the afternoon that Broffin
strolled across the railroad tracks, and, after listening to one or two
of the incendiary speeches at the storm-centre mass meeting in front of
McGuire's, went on past the potteries to the Raymer plant.
Several things had happened since the afternoon when he had sat behind
the sheltering window curtain in the writing-room of the summer-resort
hotel listening to Miss Grierson's story. For one, Teller Johnson, of
the Bayou State Security, had pleaded his inability to leave his post
unless ordered to do so by the president: the cashier was sick and the
bank was short-handed. For another, there had been a peppery protest
entered by the good Doctor Bertie--transformed for the moment into an
exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying
espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors
thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be
the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska
as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The
village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all
he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as
it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell
about the past, present, and future concerns of one Matthew Broffin: in
short, he was becoming a suspicious character.
Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his
teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in
sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and
Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story
had seemed to clear Griswold--if anything short of a court acquittal
could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told
him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he
was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go
into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had
seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for
himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little
better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he
was taking an active part in the foundry fight--about the last thing
that might be expected of a man dodging the police.
In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only
bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to
believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into
certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude.
Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own
present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted
Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to
remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and
Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in
Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the
warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson--or
both.
"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious
one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a
keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the
sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry
a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than
I've been stacking him up to be."
Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down
on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick,
and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive
for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a
target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt
to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.
Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a
paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the
office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers
he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of
McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearer view turned
up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy;
he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man
with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in
his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue
laws.
Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had
brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it
was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding
the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired
to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips
had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and
Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at
odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of
the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.
Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away.
Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may
still be a man of like passions--and generous prepossessions--with other
men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play,
made him forget the limitations of his trade. "By grapples, the old
swine!" he was muttering to himself as he made a slow circuit of the
plant enclosure. "Somebody ought to tell them two young ducks what
they're up against. For a picayune, I'd do it, myself. Huh!--and the
little black-eyed girl playin' fast an' loose with both of 'em at once
while the old money-octippus eats 'em alive!"
Thus Broffin, circling the Raymer works by way of the four enclosing
streets; and when his back was turned the man called Clancy pointed him
out to the group of discontents.
"D'ye see that felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays
up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows,
ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see
him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep
tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer
chances and step on him like a cockroach. He's a Pinkerton!"
XXXII
THE LION'S SHARE
Wahaska, microcosmic and village-conscious in spite of its city charter,
was duly thrilled and excited when, on the day following the storm and
shipwreck, it found itself the scene of an angry conflict between
capital and labor.
Reports varied as to the origin of the trouble. Among the retired
farmers, who still called Raymer "Eddie" and spoke of him as "John
Raymer's boy," it was the generally expressed opinion that he was both
too young and too easy-going to be a successful industry captain in the
larger field he had lately entered. In the workingmen's quarter, which
lay principally beyond the railroad tracks, public opinion was less
lenient and the young ironmaster, figuring hitherto only as a good boss
with a few unnecessary college ideas, was denounced as a "kid-glove"
reformer who made his profit-sharing fad an excuse for advancing his
favorites, and who was accordingly to be "brought to time" by the strong
hand of the organization.
It was a crude surprise, both to the West Side and to "Pottery Flat," to
find the new book-writing partner not only taking an active part in the
fight, but apparently directing the capitalistic hostilities with a
high hand. Quite early in the forenoon it was known on the street that
Griswold had taken the field with Raymer; that the lock-out was his
reply to the strike notice; and that it was at his suggestion that a
dozen deputies had been sworn in to guard the Raymer plant--the iron
works lying just outside of the corporation lines. A little later came
the news that he had sent a counter ultimatum to the representatives of
the labor forces sitting in permanence in their hall over McGuire's
saloon. From two o'clock until five the offices of the plant would be
open, and all former employees would be paid in full and discharged.
Those who failed to make application between the hours named would not
be taken back on any terms.
From two to five in the afternoon Wahaska, figuratively speaking, held
its breath. At half-past three, young Dahlgren, of the _Daily Wahaskan_,
spoiled a good story for his own paper by spreading the report that most
of the men had sullenly drawn their pay, but as yet not a man of them
had signed on for further employment. At four o'clock the _Daily
Wahaskan's_ windows bore a bulletin to the effect that a mass
indignation meeting was in progress in front of the Pottery Flat saloon;
and at half-past four it was whispered about that war had been declared.
Raymer and Griswold were telegraphing for strike-breakers; and the men
were swearing that the plant would be picketed and that scabs would be
dealt with as traitors and enemies.
It was between half-past four and five that Miss Grierson, driving in
the basket phaeton, made her appearance on the streets, evoking the
usual ripple of comment among the gossipers on the Winnebago porch as
she tooled her clean-limbed little Morgan to a stop in front of the
Farmers' and Merchants' Bank.
Since it was long past the closing hours, the curtains were drawn in the
bank doors and street-facing windows. But there was a side entrance, and
when she tapped on the glass of the door an obsequious janitor made
haste to admit her. "Yo' paw's busy, right now, Miss Mahg'ry," the negro
said; but she ignored the hint and went straight to the door of the
private room, entering without warning.
As the janitor had intimated, her father was not alone. In the chair at
the desk-end sat a man florid of face, hard-eyed and gross-bodied. His
hat was on the back of his head, and clamped between his teeth under the
bristling mustaches he held one of Jasper Grierson's fat black cigars.
The conference paused when the door opened; but when Margery crossed the
room and perched herself on the deep seat of the farthest window, it
went on in guarded tones at a silent signal from the banker to his
visitor.
There was a trade journal lying in the window-seat, and Miss Grierson
took it up to become idly immersed in a study of the advertising
pictures. If she listened to the low-toned talk it was only
mechanically, one would say. Yet there was a quickening of the breath
now and again, and a pressing of the white teeth upon the ripe lower
lip, as she turned the pages of the advertising supplement; these,
though only detached sentences of the talk drifted across to her
window-seat.
"You're fixed to put the entire responsibility for the ruction over onto
the other side of the house?" was one of the overheard sentences: it was
her father's query, and she also heard the answer. "We're goin' to put
'em in bad, don't you forget it. There'll be some broken heads, most
likely, and if they're ours, somebody'll pay for 'em." A little farther
along it was her father who said: "You've got to quit this running to
me. Keep to your own side of the fence. Murray's got his orders, and
he'll pay the bills. If anything breaks loose, I won't know you. Get
that?" "I'm on," said the red-faced man; and shortly afterward he took
his leave.
When the door had closed behind the man who looked like a ward heeler or
a walking delegate, and who had been both, and many other and more
questionable things, by turns, Jasper Grierson swung his huge chair to
face the window.
"Well?" he said, "how's Galbraith coming along?"
"There is no change," was the sober rejoinder. "He is still lying in a
half-stupor, just as he was last night and this morning. Doctor Farnham
shakes his head and won't say anything."
"You mustn't let him die," warned the man in the big chair, half
jocularly. "There's too much money in him."
The smouldering fires in the daughter's eyes leaped up at the
provocation lurking in the grim brutality; but they were dying down
again when she put the trade journal aside and said: "I didn't come here
to tell you about Mr. Galbraith. I came to give you notice that it is
time to quit."
"Time to quit what?"
"You know. When I asked you to put Mr. Raymer under obligations to you,
I said I'd tell you when it was time to stop."
Jasper Grierson sat back in his chair and chuckled.
"Lord love you!" he said, "I'd clean forgot that you had a tea-party
stake in that game, Madgie; I had, for a fact!"
"Well, it is time to remember it," was the cool reply.
"What was I to remember?"
"That you were to turn around and help him out of his trouble when I
gave you the word."
The president of the Farmers' and Merchants' tilted his chair to the
lounging angle and laughed; a slow gurgling laugh that spread from lip
to eye and thence abroad through his great frame until he shook like a
grotesque incarnation of the god of mirth.
"I was to turn around and help him out of the hole, was I? Oh, no; I
guess not," he denied. "It's business now, little girl, and the
tea-fights are barred. I'll give you a check for that span o' blacks you
were looking at, and we'll call it square."
"Does that mean that you intend to go on until you have smashed him?"
she asked, quietly ignoring the putative bribe.
"I'm going to put him out of business--him and that other fool friend of
yours--if that's what you mean."
Again the sudden lightning glowed in Margery Grierson's eyes, but, as
before, the flash was only momentary. There was passion enough in blood
and brain, but there was also a will, and the will was the stronger.
"Please!" she besought him.
"Please what?"
"Please ruin somebody else, and let Mr.----let these two go!"
Grierson's laugh this time was brutally sardonic.
"So you're caught at last, are you, girlie? I was wondering if you
wouldn't come out o' that pool with the hook in your mouth. But you
might as well pull loose, even if it does hurt a little. Raymer and
Griswold have got to come under."
She looked across at him steadily and again there was a struggle, short
and sharp, between the leaping passions and the indomitable will. Yet
she could speak softly.
"That is your last word, is it?"
"You can call it that, if you like: yes."
"What is the reason? Why do you hate these two so desperately?" she
asked.
Jasper Grierson fanned away the nimbus of cigar smoke with which he had
surrounded himself and stared gloomily at her through the rift.
"Who said anything about hating?" he derided. "That's a fool woman's
notion. This is business, and there ain't any such thing as hate in
business. Raymer's iron-shop happens to be in the road of a bigger
thing, and it's got to move out; that's all."
She nodded slowly. "I thought so," she said, half-absently: "and the
'bigger thing' has some more money in it for you. Oh, how I do despise
it all!"
"Oh, no, you don't," he contradicted, falling back into the half-jocular
vein. "You're a pretty good spender, yourself, Madgie. If you didn't
have plenty of money to eat and drink and wear and breathe----"
"I hate it!" she said coldly. Then she dragged the talk back to the
channel it was leaving. "I ought to have broken in sooner; I might have
known what you would do. You are responsible for this labor trouble they
are having over at the iron works. Don't bother to deny it; I know. That
was your 'heeler'--the man you had here when I came. You don't play fair
with many people: don't you think you'd better make an exception of me?"
Grierson was mouthing his cigar again and the smoky nimbus was
thickening to its customary density when he said: "You're nothing but a
spoiled baby, Madge. If you'd cry for the moon, you'd think you ought to
have it. I've said my say, and that's all there is to it. Trot along
home and 'tend to your tea-parties: that's your part of the game. I can
play my hand alone."
She slipped out of the window-seat and crossed the room quickly to stand
before him.
"I'll go, when you have answered one question," she said, the suppressed
passions finding their way into her voice. "I've asked for bread and
you've given me a stone. I've said 'please' to you, and you slapped me
for it. Do you think you can afford to shove me over to the other side?"
"I don't know what you're driving at, now," was the even-toned
rejoinder.
"Don't you? Then I'll tell you. You have been pinching this town for the
lion's share ever since we came here--shaking it down as you used to
shake down the"--she broke off short, and again the indomitable will got
the better of the seething passions. "We'll let the by-gones go, and
come down to the present. What if some of the things you are doing here
and now should get into print?"
"For instance?" he suggested, when she paused.
"This Raymer affair, for one thing. You don't own the _Wahaskan_--yet:
supposing it should come out to-morrow morning with the true story of
this disgraceful piece of buccaneering, telling how you tried first to
squeeze him through the bank loan, and when that failed, how you bribed
his workmen to make trouble?"
"You go to Randolph and try it," said the gray wolf, jeeringly. "In the
first place, he wouldn't believe it--coming from you. He wouldn't forget
that you're my daughter, however much you are trying to forget it. In
the next place he'd want proof--damned good proof--if he was going to
make a fight on me. He'd know that one of two things would happen; if he
failed to get me, I'd get him."
The daughter who had asked for bread and had been given a stone put her
face in her hands and moved toward the door. But at the last moment she
turned again like a spiteful little tiger-cat at bay.
"You think I can't prove it? That is where you fall down. I can convince
Mr. Randolph if I choose to try. And that isn't all: I can tell him how
you have planned to sell Mr. Galbraith a tract of 'virgin' pine that has
been culled over for the best timber at least three times in the past
five years!"
Jasper Grierson started from his chair and made a quick clutch into
smoky space. "Madge--you little devil!" he gritted.
But the grasping hands closed upon nothing, and the sound of the closing
door was his only answer.
* * * * *