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He was afraid to disoblige the representative of so powerful a corporation as the Miantowona Iron Works, but he equally dreaded to risk his popularity with seven or eight hundred voters; so, like the crafty chancellor in Tennyson's poem, he dallied with his golden chain, and, smiling, but the question by. "Drat the man!" muttered Mr. Craggie, "does he want to blast my whole political career!
There was little or no work done that day in Stillwater outside the mills, and they were not running full handed. A number of men from the Miantowona Iron Works and Slocum's Yard Slocum employed some seventy or eighty hands lounged about the streets in their blouses, or stood in knots in front of the tavern, smoking short clay pipes.
There were a few who had protested against these resolutions and still disapproved of them, but were forced to go with the Association, which had really been dragged into the current by the other trades. The Dana Mills and the Miantowona Iron Works were paying lighter wages than similar establishments nearer the great city.
Bishop's stables burst into flames one midnight, whether fired intentionally or accidentally was not known; but the giant bellows at Dana's Mills was slit and two belts were cut at the Miantowona Iron Works that same night. At this juncture a report that out-of-town hands were coming to replace the strikers acted on the public mind like petroleum on fire.
The next day the steam-whistles of the Miantowona Iron Works and Dana's Mills sent the echoes flying beyond that undulating line of pines and hemlocks which half encircles Stillwater, and falls away loosely on either side, like an unclasped girdle. A calm, as if from out the cloudless blue sky that arched it day after day, seemed to drift down upon the village.
The old man declined to put down anything on the subscription paper then circulating; but he put down his sympathies to any amount. He held no stock in the concerns involved; he hated Slocum, and he hated the directors of the Miantowona Iron Works. The least he hoped was that Rowland Slocum would be laid out.
Alexander, the superintendent of the Miantowona Iron Works, and began groaning and hooting. Mr. Alexander sought out Mr. Craggie, and urged him, as a man of local weight and one accustomed to addressing the populace, to speak a few words to the mob. That was setting Mr. Craggie on the horns of a cruel dilemma.
Matthew, chap. xxii, v. 21: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." But as he did not make it quite plain which was Caesar, the trades-union or the Miantowona Iron Works, the sermon went for nothing, unless it could be regarded as a hint to those persons who had stolen a large piece of belting from the Dana Mills.
Now, sometimes it is an injustice that is being fought, and then it is right to fight it with the only weapon a poor man has to wield against a power which possesses a hundred weapons, and that's a strike. For example, the smelters and casters in the Miantowona Iron Works are meanly underpaid." "What, have they struck?"
While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitive bas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits. From the hour when he returned to the town until the end of his days Mr. Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties. Now he resisted a betterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured an injunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.
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