Part 18

They came out of the pit and took the kafir back to the camp with them, leaving their tools where they lay. The old man went in obedience to their gestures without demur, and squatted himself on his hams to be talked to. The average Boer knows no native tongues; he will not condescend so far to the kafir; but Piet and his sons had yielded to their vicissitudes, and between them could command quite a number of dialects. Tembu, Fingo and the "kitchen kafir" of the Cape failed to gain any response; Klein Piet's few words of Bechuana only made the old man laugh; the Griqua "clicks" made him laugh more. Then, by an inspiration, Piet put a question in Basuto, the harsh speech of the mountaineers. Up went the black hand in a salute, and the old kafir replied in the same tongue.

"I am a doctor," he told them. "I am of The Men (the Zulus). I am walking north to my own people."

He spoke with a seriousness that was like courtesy, so attentive and gracious. To each of Piet's questions he gave a considered answer, ample and careful. There was no war in these parts, he told them; the nearest kraal was four days away. In any case, his people would not concern themselves with a single family of white people; they had nothing to fear.

"But," said Piet, "since I have been here, I have seen another white man. He watched me at work from a distance. Do you know who he was?"

The old kafir listened to him with a sedulous attention.

"It is said," he answered, "that white men have been seen hereabouts. My grandfather saw them, and his father. But I have never seen them."

Piet stared at him. "Your grandfather?" he cried. "But I saw him yesterday."

The old kafir nodded. "It is a tale that is told," he said. "A very old tale. White men came from yonder--" his lean finger waved to the darkling sea southwards,--"traveling on the water in a ----" he paused for a word.

"A ship," said Piet. "I know."

The old man nodded. "This was in the old times, before we Men had come to this country," he went on; "when white men were dreams. Here their ship halted; and that same night, the great wind of the year drove down on them. It was a wind that struck men as with a club and killed them; it lifted the sea as mowers lift hay and stacked it high on the veld, so that here where we sit was all water, and the shore was a mile inland. And with the water, the wind carried their ship, plunging and turning like a cow in a torrent; when the sea went back to its place, it stood here on the land, great and wonderful, with its white men swarming about it. That iron at which you were sweating was the hook with which they held their ship in one place."

Evening had come upon them while they talked; its shadows were cast over the sea and the shore, and the old kafir's strong face was lit by the leaping fire at which they sat. Piet looked over his shoulder at the darkling dome of the night, under which they sat in a hush of solitude.

"Yes," he said. "And what became of them?"

The old kafir spread his hands asunder before him.

"Who can tell?" he answered. "They were killed, of course; the kafirs who had escaped to the hills came back and made war on them. It lasted a while, for the white men fought cleverly; but in the end, there was a creeping by night, a narrowing ring of assegais, the hush of stealth; and last the roar of the warcry and a charge. The kafirs thronged on that ship like ants on a carrion; in the middle of it, the white men put fire to their powder, and all the ship and the fighters vanished in a spring of fire. Yes, all the white men were killed; but still they have been seen, slinking through the hills and returning by the stream. They were killed, but who is to say what became of them?"

The four Boers looked at one another; their breath came short and harsh. Piet recalled all that sense of strangeness with which the sight of the man by the stream had filled him; the growing night was suddenly dangerous and fearful.

Klein Piet turned to the old kafir. "All this was very long ago?" he said.

The kafir considered, with a forefinger that calculated on the fingers of his other hand.

"My grandfather was old," he said. "So old that he was blind. And _his_ grandfather had heard it as a tale of olden times."

Piet was still in thrall to the awe of the thing.

"Then I saw a spirit?" he demanded.

The old kafir shrugged, and a silence fell between them all. Jan and Andries had understood less than the half of what was said, but the ill-ease reached them like a contagion and they sat very close together, their eyes wide open and quick.

Piet was about to ask further questions, when Jan suddenly gripped his brother and started.

"Hark!" he cried. "What is that?"

The quick alarm strung them all to tenseness; only the old kafir cocked his eyebrow humorously and spat into the fire. The others rested where they sat, straining their ears.

"There!" cried Jan again.

It was a dull noise of metal on metal that they heard, a muffled ring and clink; it sounded again and again.

"Someone is cutting at the chains," said Piet hoarsely.

"It is they," said Klein Piet.

Susanna's hand stole into Piet's arm; he had almost forgotten that she was sitting a little behind him, so still had she been. But the touch of her hand made him the equal of his terrors; the man with a wife to shield cannot afford fears. He pressed her hand and rose to his feet.

"We are shivering like old women round a death-bed," he said. "Klein Piet, get your rifle; we will see who is mending our work for us."

Klein Piet obeyed, swallowing to ease his tight throat; the old kafir rose too, and the three of them went forth from the light of the fires and across the crisp grass to that dark pit where yet the "clink, clink" of the unseen work was sounding. Piet and his son walked abreast, the kafir a little behind them; his bare feet were soundless as he strode. The Boer was conscious of no fear; only of a strange lightening of his senses and a pricking in his skin such as he had known when he had lain on his rifle at night waiting for a charge of kafirs. As they went, the sound of the hammers grew clearer, till they could pick out the heavy note of the great sledge and the lighter cadence of the top-mall. They halted by an end of bush to mark the steady ring of them and make sure of their breath; the old kafir went on a few paces.

"So the tale was true," they heard him say; and then Piet sprang out, with Klein Piet at his heels, flung up his gun, and fired at the pit. The smoke of the shot blew back into their faces; its noise, peremptory and sudden, thrust their alert faculties from their poise; an effort was needed ere they saw clear again. The pit was empty.

"What did you see?" cried Klein Piet.

"I don't know," answered Piet. "I thought--but I don't know. Let us go and see what _they_ have done to the chain."

Klein Piet had his tinderbox in his pocket; by the light he made, they both bent to look at the link on the ground.

"It is deeper," said Klein Piet. "The cut is half through the iron."

They went back to the camp in a silence of utter bewilderment. To his wife's look and the questions of the younger boys, Piet only answered that he had found no one. The old kafir had gone off without a word to his place among Piet's kafirs, and presently Susanna moved off to her bed in the wagon. Piet packed Jan and Andries off after her, and remained smoking by the fire with Klein Piet opposite him.

"Now," said Klein Piet, when they were alone; "what was it you saw?"

Piet took the pipe from his lips and gazed at him across the fire.

"As sure as death," he said, "I saw the pit swarming with men like birds over a wheatfield. And you?"

"I saw it too," answered Klein Piet. "And the men with the hammers--they were naked to the waist and hairy like baboons."

They stared at each other stupidly, half-aghast at the knowledge they shared. Their faces, in the firelight, were white and hard.

"Have we trekked too far?" said Piet, almost in a whisper. "Can a man trek to hell? God, there are those hammers again."

Clink, Clink! they sounded, pounding away in the night, clear and even as the ticking of a clock.

"They will have it cut by morning," whispered Klein Piet. "What will happen then?"

Piet was listening to the sounds, with his pipe poised in front of his mouth. He shook his head.

"I don't know," he answered. "But we will see. Klein Piet, you and I will keep the _brand-wacht_ to-night. If anything is to happen, we will be awake for it."

"Yes, father," answered Klein Piet mechanically, and then the talk between them dropped. On either side of the fire they sat in long stages of silence, listening to the hammers plying in the night, their noise making a rythm above the slow murmur of the water on the beach. A little wind got up, blowing from the north; it carried the scent of the seaweed and the damp sand to their nostrils and fanned their smoldering fire to a clearer glow. Somewhere in the bush a jackal sobbed like a lost child; the wood ask clicked and rustled as it burned out and settled down. And through it all, like the dominant of a harmony, the hammers spoke their unceasing clink and the darkness stirred like a windy arras.

Perhaps the rythm lulled him somewhat; perhaps he was but sunk in a deeper thought; but Piet did not notice his son spring to his feet. Klein Piet shook him from his stupor; he came back to himself and to the agitated face of the young man leaning over him.

"The hammers have ceased," he shouted.

Klein Piet gabbled the words with lips that puckered and sagged in an ague of excitement. The elder man rose forthwith.

"Now we shall see!" he said.

He went down to crawl under one of the wagons into the open, but remained on his knees under it. Klein Piet, on all fours at his side, shivered and gulped. Their eyes wrestled with the baffling dark, and their pulses checked and raced; for something was moving out yonder. They could see but the loom of a great bulk, a blackness blacker than the night, something vast and tall--and it moved. As their eyes grew familiar with the darkness, they could see plainly that it moved; it seemed to slide slowly. Then, delicate but quite clear, some voice called and others answered. The sliding bulk took on an outline; it made a vague tracery against the faint sky as it neared them; each instant it was plainer to see. Piet, intent, every faculty set like a cocked pistol, noted a long flank, a tall, window-pierced structure that sloped. Old pictures and forgotten names fermented in his memory.

"_Allemachtig!_ It's a ship," he cried.

Superbly she passed them, that lost galleon of the young world, slipped from her age-long anchorage. Her high sides were a-bristle with her guns; her sails were sheeted and her head was to the east. There was a great company of men on board of her; on her high poop, rising like a citadel, a little group of them was black and busy. As she passed down the beach, she dipped and lifted like a burdened ship in a seaway. It was then Klein Piet had his moment of madness. Suddenly he screamed like a girl and began to scramble forward. "Wait for me!" he cried. "I will go with you. I am a sailor too."

He would have run down towards her, but Piet grasped him and held on. He struggled and they rolled together on the grass, fighting with one another. Then Klein Piet ceased as suddenly as he had begun.

"I am better now," he gasped, and Piet let him rise. They stood up together and gazed seaward. A squall was blowing in from the east, thick and black, with a gleam of white water under it. Was it a sail they saw, a ship that heeled to the brisk wind and was screened from sight by the rain? They crawled back under the wagon as the first wetness lit on their faces, and sat there together.

"If you tell me you saw a ship," said Piet suddenly, "I will call you a liar."

"Yes," said Klein Piet. "I must be a liar, for I saw one."

When Oom Piet finished this tale, he was wont to knock out his pipe on the heel of his boot.

"But in the morning, when we went back to our work," he always added, "there was the chain--cut through!"

A FOOTPATH MORALITY

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

Along the Hills, height after height Tosses the dappled light; Waters unhindered flow; The cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow; And young winds nothing can quell Scale the wild-chestnut citadel, Again to make Its thousand faery white pagodas shake. Up many a lane, The blue vervain A coverlid hath featly spread For the bees' bed, That those tired sylvan thieves May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves. To-morrow morn, Bright agrimony in the thickets born Will high uphold Each cinquefoil of plain gold; Dogwood in white will hood herself apace, And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace, And copper pimpernel, true as a clock, On the waste common by some rock Her lone dark-centred wheel draw in Long, long ere dusk begin.

This day Of infinite May Is far more fitly yours than ours, O spirit-bodied flowers! What heart disordered sore Comes through the greenwood door, Shall for your sake Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break: And hearts beneath no ban Will in your sight some penance do for man, Poor lagging man, content to be Sick with the impact of eternity, Who might keep step with you in the low grass, Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass! Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown To flourish fair, and fall fair, and be strewn Deep in that Will of God, where blend The origin of beauty and the end.

TAFT AND LABOR

BY

GEORGE W. ALGER

A labor record considered solely in its utilitarian aspect as a vote-getting device is not especially important to the general public. The attitude of a presidential candidate, however, towards the industrial and social problems of the working people is another matter. Does he know what they are? Does he see the great economic questions of labor and capital with eyes blinded by class prejudice or does he see them with the clear vision of a statesman? Does he intend to play a man's part in helping to solve them? The answer to these inquiries is of interest not merely to the capitalists and the workers but to all of us.

In his judicial career Mr. Taft has rendered some decisions in matters brought before him as a judge, which are bound to be a subject of discussion in the coming campaign. One group of these decisions deals with what may be described as rules of industrial warfare.

International agreement has done much toward civilizing international war. Capital and labor have no Hague Court. The limitations upon the scope and method of their warfare must come from the courts and the legislatures. The Treaty of Paris provided for the rights of neutrals, for the freedom of peaceful ships of commerce from plunder and destruction in war. The rights of neutrals in industrial war are less protected but are no less important. In that warfare the neutral party--the public--stands much as Mr. Pickwick did between the rival editors, receiving the fire-tongs on one side of the head and the carpet-bag on the other. The labor question in its militant phase is a public question largely because the public has no desire to occupy Mr. Pickwick's unhappy position.

It happens that all the so-called labor decisions which Judge Taft made when on the bench involve directly and primarily the rights of the general public and of outsiders having no direct part in any industrial quarrel, who against their will have been drawn into the warfare between capital and labor. In deciding these cases it has been necessary not only to consider the rights of labor in industrial disputes, but to pass upon the right of the general public and of disinterested outsiders to be let alone.

_A Veto to Economic Excommunication_

The first of these cases was one decided by Judge Taft in 1890 when he was a judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati. A Bricklayers' Union in Cincinnati, having about four hundred members, had a dispute with the firm of Parker Brothers, contracting bricklayers. The Union wanted Parker Brothers to pay a fine it had imposed upon one of their employees who was a member of the Union, to reinstate an apprentice who had left them, and to discharge another apprentice. Parker Brothers refused to do so. A strike was accordingly called. The Union also declared a boycott against Parker Brothers, and its business agent issued a circular to material men, contractors, and owners, which concluded with this announcement: "Any firm dealing in building materials who ignores this request, is hereby notified that we will not work his material upon any building nor for any contractor by whom we are employed. (Signed) Bricklayers' Union No. 1." One of the contractors to whom this notice was sent was the Moore Lime Company, engaged in selling lime in Cincinnati. Parker Brothers were customers of the Moores, and the Moores continued selling lime to them, notwithstanding the notice. Another circular was then sent out by the Union to its members, which read as follows: "Bricklayers' Union No. 1, Ohio. We, the members of the Bricklayers' Union, will not use material supplied by the following dealers until further notice": and in the list they put Moore & Company. The effect of the circular was to interfere with Moore & Company's business and to cause loss to their customers, who feared a similar fate. On these facts the Moores sued the Union for damage which they claimed had been done to their business by a wrongful and malicious conspiracy. The case was tried by a jury, which gave the Moores $2,250 damages. An appeal was taken by the Union to the Superior Court of Cincinnati, where Judge Taft presided.

The facts just related show the issue involved. The Moores' employees had no grievance against them. The only grievance which the Bricklayers had against them was that they refused to permit themselves to be used as a battering-ram in an assault on Parker Brothers. The Union insisted on the right to boycott Moore's Lime Company because Moore's Lime Company would not assist them in injuring the Parkers. Judge Taft decided, as other judges have decided in many cases, that such a combination to injure the Moores was without just cause or legal excuse and was illegal. This, so far as the Moores were concerned, was not a strike case, but a boycott, and in his decision Taft was very careful to draw the distinction and so express himself that the legal rights of labor in a lawful strike should not be impaired. He says:

If the workmen of an employer refuse to work for him except on better terms at a time when their withdrawal will cause great loss to him, and they intentionally inflict such loss to coerce him to come to their terms, they are bona fide exercising their lawful right to dispose of their labor for the purpose of lawful gain. But the dealings between Parker Brothers and their material men, or between such material men and their customers had not the remotest natural connection either with defendants' wages or their other terms of employment. There was no competition or possible contractual relation between the plaintiffs and defendants, where their interests were naturally opposed. The right of the plaintiffs (Moore & Company) to sell their material was not one which, in its exercise, brought them into legitimate conflict with the rights of defendants' Union and its members to dispose of their labor as they chose. The conflict was brought about by the efforts of defendants to use plaintiffs' right of trade to injure Parker Brothers, and, upon failure of this, to use plaintiffs' customers' right of trade to injure plaintiffs. Such effort cannot be in the bona fide exercise of trade, is without just cause, and is, therefore, malicious. The immediate motive of defendants here was to show to the building world what punishment and disaster necessarily followed a defiance of their demands. The remote motive of wishing to better their condition by the power so acquired, will not, as we think we have shown, make any legal justification for defendants' acts.

The doctrine of excommunication, the great engine of the Church in the Middle Ages, has not been revived and transferred from the Pope to the labor unions.

_End of the Engineers' Famous "Rule 12"_

The next decision of Taft's in a labor dispute came after his elevation to the Federal Bench, and again involved the same principle--the extent to which the rights of a third party, against whom neither labor nor capital has any grievance, can be impaired by involving him against his will in labor disputes. This case arose out of a strike of locomotive engineers on the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad in 1893. The strike had been called after numerous conferences between the railroad officials and Mr. Arthur, the representative of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. It was a legitimate strike, as against the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad, for higher wages. The phase of the controversy which came into court for Judge Taft's consideration, however, was not the strike itself, but grew out of an attempt by the Union to compel other railroads to refuse to receive freight from the Toledo Road and thereby paralyze that road and coerce it into granting the demands of the engineers.

On March 7, 1893, Mr. Arthur sent to the chairman of the General Adjustment Committees of the Brotherhood on eleven railroad systems in Ohio and neighboring States the following telegram: "There is a legal strike in force upon the Toledo-Ann Arbor & North Michigan Railroad. See that the men on your road comply with the laws of the Brotherhood. Notify your general manager." A "legal" strike, as the term was used, meant one to which the Grand Chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had consented, and meant the promulgation of Rule 12 of the organization, which provided in substance that after a strike had been declared against a railroad, it should, while the strike continued, be "a violation of obligation for a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers who may be employed _on a railroad running in connection with or adjacent to said road_, to handle the property belonging to said road or system in any way that may benefit said company with which the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers is at issue."

In obedience to Mr. Arthur's telegram, representatives of the Brotherhood on various railroads notified the general managers of these railroads that after a certain date the engineers would refuse to haul cars or freight forwarded by the Toledo Road. Some of these railroads thereafter notified the management of the Toledo Railroad that in view of the threatened actions of their own engineers, they would be obliged to discontinue receiving or forwarding freight for the road. The Toledo thereupon obtained from Judge Taft in the United States Circuit Court an injunction against the Pennsylvania Railroad and other railroad companies, enjoining them from refusing to handle its freight and commanding them to perform their railroad functions as required by the Interstate Commerce Act, which made it a criminal offense for connecting railroads to refuse to receive or transport freight from one another's lines. Mr. Arthur was made a party, and the injunction, issued, and sustained after hearing, directed him to rescind his order putting into effect Rule 12 of his organization. The decree did not require the employees of these other railroads to continue to work for the railroads if they saw fit to strike, but it did require them, as long as they were in the employ of those railroads, to handle the freight of the Toledo Road as they would the freight of any other road.