he bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several wielded
their long pokers like lances.

Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like Blackfeet in their
warpaint. Their hairy chests showed, where some men parade elaborate
shirt-bosoms. Some had their sleeves pushed up to the elbow to exhibit
their compact flexors and extensors. Some had rolled their flannel up to
the shoulder, above the bulging muscles of the upper arm. They wore aprons
tied about the neck, like the bibs of our childhood,--or about the waist,
like the coquettish articles which young housewives affect. But there was
no coquetry in these great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were
besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib that ever suffered under
bread-and-molasses or mud-pie treatment.

They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at ease, not without rough grace,
in a sinuous line, coiled and knotted like a snake.

Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was to take down that Hydra's two
hundred crests of insubordination.

They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He read and ticketed each man,
as he came up,--good, bad, or on the fence,--and marked each so that he
would know him among a myriad.

The Hands faced the Head. It was a question whether the two hundred or the
one would be master in Dunderbunk.

Which was boss? An old question.

It has to be settled whenever a new man claims power, and there is always
a struggle until it is fought out by main force of brain or muscle.

Wade had made up his mind on this subject. He waited a moment until the
men were still. He was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. He stood easily on
his pins, as if he had eyed men and facts before. His mouth looked firm,
his brow freighted, his nose clipper,--that the hands could see. But
clipper noses are not always backed by a stout hull. Seemingly freighted
brows sometimes carry nothing but ballast and dunnage. The firmness may be
all in the moustache, while the mouth hides beneath, a mere silly slit.
All which the hands knew.

Wade began, short and sharp as a trip-hammer, when it has a bar to shape.

"I'm the new Superintendent. Richard Wade is my name. I rang the bell
because I wanted to see you and have you see me. You know as well as I do
that these Works are in a bad way. They can't stay so. They must come up
and pay you regular wages and the Company profits. Every man of you has
got to be here on the spot when the bell strikes, and up to the mark in
his w