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"Nobody will have to work at all," was the answer, "but we do want all the men to lend a hand to help us out as soon as they can." While Mr. Smith was speaking several other workmen came in. They, too, were Gautier employees, and they had pickaxes on their shoulders. They heard the agent's last remark, and one of them, stepping forward, said: "A good many of us are working cleaning up the town.
A man living to-day in the heart of civilization, where money is in reality legs and wings and hands, is nothing more than a torso without it, he thought. He felt mutilated, unspeakably humiliated. It seemed more out of his ability to get any honest employment than it had ever done before. A number of laborers with their dinner-satchels, and their pickaxes over their shoulders, passed him.
Bartley hurried to the mine, and found that several stout fellows had gone down with their pickaxes and other tools to clear the shaft, but that it must be terribly slow work, so few men could work at a time in that narrow space.
One day the vessel was raised six feet out of the water by the pressure of the ice; and it became so probable that she would fall on her broadside, that the men were employed with shovels and pickaxes in smoothing a place on the ice for her to lie upon."
Word was sent immediately to the union's headquarters. A body of twenty-odd men, carrying shovels and pickaxes and dinner-pails, moved toward the gates. At their head was Bennington himself. He placed the great key in the lock and swung the gates inward. The men passed in quickly. Bennington was last. He turned for a moment and gazed calmly at the threatening faces of the strikers.
The traitor's body had been thrown on the ground, in a corner of the room, the bed was overturned and broken, all the straw had been torn from the mattress, and the wife and sons of the dead man, armed with pickaxes and spades, were wildly overturning the beaten soil that formed the floor of the hovel. They were seeking the hidden treasures. "What do you want?" demanded the widow, rudely.
Some standing erect, apparently carrying long lance-like weapons over their shoulders; others similarly armed, in stooping positions; while not a few appeared to be actively engaged, handling huge pickaxes, with which they repeatedly struck downwards, as if excavating the soil!
While the tree was being cut down, the cadets and teachers had been busy with pickaxes and shovels, and also with their rakes and wet swabs, and had put out much of the fire elsewhere. One more tree had to be leveled, and this work was done by Joe and Bart. Then, after five minutes more of hard work, the last of the fire was extinguished, and the crowd in the woods was left in darkness.
A man stood on the other side of the post, swearing with just as much gusto; the burden of his remarks being that he wasn't afraid of any by-joosly old split codfish that ever came ashore insulting reference to Cap'n Sproul's seafaring life. Behind Cap'n Sproul were men with pickaxes, shovels, and hoes listening.
The moon's centre was then 33 degrees 40 minutes high. The 31st of August, betimes in the morning, I went ashore with ten or eleven men to search for water. We went armed with muskets and cutlasses for our defence, expecting to see people there, and carried also shovels and pickaxes to dig wells.