got hungry
enough."

"Was there any pay in arrears when you shut down?"

"No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but I fought him out o' that."

"Good! Then what are they kicking about?"

"Oh, because they're out of a job. There are always a lot of keen noses
in a crowd the size of ours, and they've smelled out some o' the Farley
doin's. Of course, they don't believe in the cry of hard times; laborin'
men are always the last to believe that."

The train was tracking thunderously around the nose of Lebanon, and Tom
was looking out of the window again, this time for the first glimpse of
the Gordonia chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.

"That is where you will have to put your shoulder into the collar with
me, pappy," he said. "Most of the older men know me as a boy who has
grown up among them. When I spring my proposition, they'll howl, if only
for that reason."

But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously than ever.

"You won't get any help from the men, Buddy, more 'n what you pay for.
You know the whites--Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good sprinklin' o'
'huckleberries.' And the blacks don't count, one way or the other."

The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for Gordonia, and Tom was
gathering his dunnage.

"Our scramble is going to depend very largely on the outcome of the
meeting which I'm going to ask you to call for say, two o'clock this
afternoon on the floor of the foundry building," he said. "Will you stay
in town and get the men together, while I go home and see mother and
shape up my talk?"

Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have somewhat to do. And
so, in the very beginning of things, it was the son and not the father
who took the helm of the tempest-driven ship.

XX

DRY WELLS

As early as one o'clock in the afternoon, the elder Helgerson, acting as
day watchman at the iron-works, had opened the great yard gates, and the
men began to gather by twos and threes and in little caucusing knots on
the sand floor of the huge, iron-roofed foundry building. Some of the
more heedful set to work making seats of the wooden flask frames and
bottom boards; and in the pouring space fronting one of the cupolas they
built a rough-and-ready platform out of the same materials.

As the numbers increased the men fell into groups, dividing first on the
color-line, and then by trades, with the white miners in the majority
and doing most of the talking.