Chapter 20

He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs. Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could know....

The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another, in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had put aside to dry.

The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.

"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.

There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light the gas?"

"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar--no, not the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."

A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.

"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.

"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time, but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming. It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum: we can do as we please about the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and the shop must be run as a closed shop."

If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters became a prediction fulfilled.

"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel about it?"

"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of trouble medicine."

"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a lock-out."

"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I guess, under the skin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth--which I'm not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've got to take them into the account, haven't we?"

"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight--all they want of it and a little more for good measure."

Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of the heart of common sense and sanity.

"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."

Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair. When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.

"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"

"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."

"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without resorting to surgery and blood-letting."

"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.

"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"

Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.

"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't know."

"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer could not see it.

"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit and you know her--know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red blood in him. But I'm twenty-eight years old and well past the time when the young man's fancy lightly turns--and all that. I can't ignore the--the--well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't exactly the word."

"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.

"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested. "But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows anything about save that--happily, in all probability--she isn't living. And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway--at the risk of splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly scandalized."

By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not know.

"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?" came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only waiting for you to speak?"

"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth--even in the dark. If I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and--and caddish. Yet I honestly believe that-- Oh, hang it all! can't you see how impossible you're making it, old man?"

"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder. "It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as cured."

For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.

"Well, I'll be-- Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is stirring up the trouble?"

"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you another way."

"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are proposing?"

"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."

Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent with tobacco smoke.

"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length. "After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I _can't_ ask Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."

"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way----"

"I am putting it precisely that way."

"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"

Griswold was inexorable.

"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any father--better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it that she gets a square deal."

"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer----"

"That is it, exactly."

"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"

"I am," was the cool reply.

"Well, of all the-- Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying, but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."

"It isn't--yet."

"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like to be putting it on Madge Grierson's----"

Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.

"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."

"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you are coming back?"

"No."

Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.

"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"

"No."

"Then Charlotte has?"

"No."

"Confound it all! can't you say anything but 'No'? Do you mean to tell me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone, yours goes with it!"

"You are freely welcome to the money, Edward--if you can manage to hang 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.