VI.

When she opened her eyes again, not only Otis Greenough but John Villard and an office-boy were bending anxiously over her.

“My dear girl,” the agent was saying, “bless me, my dear, what is it? How came you here and who has harmed you?”

“Don’t be alarmed, sir,” was her reply, as she got on her feet; and then, somewhat excitedly, she told the events of the last fifteen or twenty minutes, interrupted, every other sentence, by such ejaculations as, “Great Scott,” “Bless me,” “The rascals,” “Confound them,” from the elderly man, while the younger one listened in silent amazement.

Rapid search was made and the night-watch was found sleeping, in a stupor which was evidently the work of a drug; while the police were, as usual, nowhere to be found.

Salome was taken into the office—not without inward trembling, as she feared further evidences of the miscreants.

Mr. Villard soon reported two kegs of gunpowder and a small dynamite bomb in the room below, at the same time congratulating, most heartily, the young woman who had saved their lives as well as the mills.

But her courage was now at a low ebb, and, woman-like, she shivered at the close proximity of gunpowder, and begged to be taken home.

Mr. Greenough, who had come to realize the danger to himself and to the mills which his obstinacy had provoked, was also anxious to leave the premises and glad to accompany Salome home.

John Villard, meanwhile, attended to the duty of finding new watchmen who should be reliable,—a difficult task. Against his will, he promised Salome not to sleep at the mills, as he had been doing since the machinery had been tampered with.

Salome was nearly prostrated when she reached home, and had but little strength left with which to importune the agent to consent to any terms for a settlement; but as the oldman was, for once, thoroughly frightened, it was not difficult to exact a promise that he would consider a compromise.

Mrs. Soule, when she learned of Salome’s intrepidity,—set forth as it was by Mr. Greenough’s gratitude and gallant appreciation,—was greatly concerned for her niece and put her straightway to bed, where, in fact, she had supposed her to be for the past hour, and where she wept over and caressed her as she had not done since the girl had left home for boarding-school. And then, what was far more to the purpose, she gave her a bath of alcohol and olive oil, and soothed her to sleep.

Early the next morning the agent of the Shawsheen Mills sent a messenger over to the dingy room which served as headquarters for the Labor Union, begging for an interview.

As this was the first overture of peace from his side, it was natural that it should be hailed with glee by the officers of the Union. And although, the day before, the leaders of the strike had been closeted together in a serious debate as to how much they should yield to Capital, they now unanimously agreed not to “weaken” in the smallest degree.

As for the agent, he had been persuaded to yield every point demanded by the strikers, insisting only upon the one condition, that the Labor Union should be disbanded.

The question of ten hours he granted without a murmur. He quibbled a long time over the wage question, and the subject of weekly payments, and only on seeing the dogged determination of the laborers did he come to terms on that. But he very properly, and too peremptorily, refused to remove the spinning frames which had formed one subject of contention. And then he proceeded to overthrow the good effects of what concessions he had made, by violently denouncing all labor unions, and vigorously insisting that the one known as the Shawsheen Labor Union be immediately and forever disbanded.

“Never,” said the foremost of the committee, “will we submit to so arbitrary a demand. We have a perfect right to organize our forces and assert our claims. How can we—a band of day-laborers,—dependent on capital for a bare living, win a single cause for ourselves without combinations of this kind? There are scores of questions which involve not our welfare in oneway alone, but our health, our wages, our morals, our manhood, which we, as single individuals, can never cope with, but which, as a united force, we can adjust. Besides, in all departments of labor, the women and children equal or exceed the men. There are to-day one hundred and seventy-five thousand more women working in mills than there were ten years ago; and what are they but the weakest and most dependent of employes? They have no strength to agitate; they have no power to change any existing order of things. All they can do is to toil and submit. We owe it to them as men, as husbands, brothers, and sons, to lighten their burdens. As free American citizens we owe it to ourselves, to settle the conditions of our own lives, so far as may be. This can only be done by combinations of the laboring classes strong enough to compel manufacturers to concede us our rights.”

“You are right to a degree,” answered Villard, before Mr. Greenough could swallow his surprise at hearing such sentiments from one of his operatives; “I believe there are some rights which you can only secure by a combination of your forces as working-men. But when youlet reason lose its sway, and passion take its place; when you are influenced by unworthy demagogues and unbalanced cranks, and seek to effect by strikes and such arbitrary measures what might be better secured by a more conciliatory course, you must not be surprised if you do not succeed in bull-dozing a rich concern like this into obedience, and——”

“And when, by your —— labour unions, you sink so low as to countenance incendiarism and murder—yes, sirs—that is what you attempted last night, sirs,—you can’t expect this mill is going to countenance them. I’ll see you all starve and rot first,” and Otis Greenough’s face was purple with anger.

“We have already disclaimed all knowledge in our Union, sir,” said one of the committee, “of last night’s outrage.”

“Blast it, what do I care for that?” roared the agent, as usual, out of temper. “Whether you knew it or not, it was done under cover of your strike, and your Union, and was one of the precious outgrowths of it. Give up the —— thing, I say—or there is no compromise with these mills.”

“There is little use in prolonging this interview,I am afraid,” said the first of the committee, taking up his hat.

“Impudent dogs!” said Mr. Greenough, as Villard tried to speak, anxious to put things on a more satisfactory basis before the meeting closed. “Let them go. They’ll find hard hoeing before they reach the end of their row.”

“And, sir,” retorted a fiery-looking man who had not spoken before, “if it comes to open war you’ll find us tough customers. We shall fight it out like men, even if we starve like beasts.”

And with these words the committee departed, leaving matters worse than ever before in the affairs of the Shawsheen Mills.

In vain did the two superintendents plead and argue and threaten the choleric old agent. His blood was up and he was a veritable charger on the eve of battle. There was no state board of arbitration then, and therefore no available way of settling their difficulties except among themselves. And as discussion only made matters worse, the subject which was always uppermost in these three men’s minds was tacitly dropped. Every precaution was taken to insure the mills from the danger it hadescaped the night before, and a detective was obtained from Boston to hunt out the criminals who had perpetrated the dastardly act.

At noon, they were all surprised by a note from Miss Shepard. It ran as follows:

“Dear Mr. Greenough,

“As the owner of the Shawsheen Mill property, I hereby appoint a meeting of all its officers at my house, to-night. Please have them here at eight o’clock.

“Pardon me for the liberty I have seemed to take, and believe me ever a loving and respectful friend,

“Salome Shepard.”

“Well, you hear that, boys,” said Mr. Greenough, after reading it aloud. “Be on hand. Tell the treasurer and cashier and head book-keeper. We’ll all be there. The Lord only knows what she is up to; but if that young woman hasn’t got a level head on her shoulders, then I don’t know who has.”

“I reckon you’re right, sir,” echoed Mr. Burnham, while John Villard laughed in his sleeve at the young woman who evidentlydreamed of settling a prolonged strike. “Why,” he said to himself, “she has never known enough of the practical side of mill-life to recognize one of her operatives, and hardly knows the different brands of cloth manufactured by them.”

Salome Shepard had waked at an early hour that morning and found herself unable to sleep again. Her mind was alive with gratitude for the part she had been able to play the night before, with apprehension for the future, and with increasing self-accusation for the state of things in the Shawsheen Mills, both past and present.

“Pshaw!” she said to herself while dressing, true to her habit of communing with her own conscience in default of a visible mentor, “how can I be blamed for the state of things here? The entire business of the mills was put out of my hands by my father’s will. I could have done no differently.”

“You could,” replied that sternest of modern inquisitors—a New England conscience. “It was in your power to see that the moral and physical condition of these people was improvedand cultivated. It was in your power to give them better homes and more privileges. It was in your power to raise their standards of life and to create new ones. But you have ignored their very existence, and let them live a mean and sordid life of unremitting toil, in order to furnish you with money to live a selfish life of luxurious ease.”

Salome tied the blue ribbons to her wrapper, and giving her crimps a last touch went down to breakfast.

Knowing she would be opposed, she said nothing of her plans for the morning to her aunt, but simply announced, after they had left the table, that she was going for a long walk.

Then she went upstairs and put on the plainest costume she owned (which, by the way, was a tailor-made gown that had cost her one hundred and fifty dollars), and started for the tenement houses where her operatives lived.

It did not occur to her to feel any fear; nor that the miscreants who had planned the explosion for the previous night might be watching her footsteps. She felt it incumbent upon her to see for herself exactly how these peoplelived, and what they were bearing and suffering in consequence of the strike.

In the bright glare of the morning sun, the tenement houses had never looked so dingy and mean. They were built in Newbern Shepard’s day, and had received but very few repairs since that time. Although it was cold January weather, Salome counted a dozen panes of glass gone from the first house, and noticed that the lower hinge to the front door was broken. It was a two-story wooden building with four tenements of four rooms each.

She ascended the rickety steps and rapped on the door. One of the women saw her from a front window and came to the door, holding it open only so far as to permit her to see the strange caller.

“Good-morning,” said Salome in pleasant tones.

“Good-morning, miss.” The politeness of Salome’s manner thawed the other woman, and the door opened a little wider. “Will you walk in?”

That was precisely what she had come for, and Salome stepped inside with alacrity. She found herself in the sitting-room and living-roomof the family. It was a meager home. The remnant of a faded oil-cloth was on the floor. The walls were unpapered and devoid of any attempts at ornament, except one unframed, dilapidated old lithograph of “The Queen of the West,”—a buxom young woman with disproportionately large black eyes, a dress of bright scarlet cut extremelydécolleté, and cheeks of a yet more vivid hue. A pine table covered with a stamped red cloth was littered with cheap, trashy story-papers and pamphlets addressed “To the Laboring Men of America.” An old lounge, with broken springs, and six common wooden chairs constituted the other furnishings of the room.

Salome’s first thought as she looked about her was:

“I don’t wonder these people get discontented and clamor for something which seems to them better.”

But she found, before the forenoon was over, many houses that were not so pleasant as this. For, once inside these rooms, everything was neat and clean, and the woman who answered her questions was civil if not talkative.

She found that five people lived in thesefour small rooms: this woman, her two daughters, a son-in-law, and a grandchild. She also found that the other tenements contained five, six, and seven people, making twenty-three in all. There were absolutely no sanitary arrangements, and she discovered that the sanitation of this tenement house district consisted only of surface drainage. According to the statements of her hostess, there was nearly always somebody “ailing” in these houses.

The first house she went into was a fair sample of the remainder. A few were slightly better, but more were in a worse condition. In most instances she was respectfully received, although at three houses she was met by ungracious people, and received gruff replies to her kindly-put inquiries.

Everywhere, strong, able-bodied men were lounging about in enforced idleness; and one of them, resenting, with true American independence, this intrusion into the sacred precincts of his miserable home, plainly intimated that “they was well enough off now, and didn’t want no rich folks as was livin’ on moneytheyearned, to come pryin’ round their houses.” Finally, at the last of the tenement houses shewas met by a surly, burly mule-spinner, who gruffly refused her admittance.

Nothing daunted, however, she sought out a boarding-house for the young women of the mills. The landlady, recognizing her, invited her in and willingly told her all about the life of mill-girls, offering, at last, to show her their rooms.

Salome gladly accepted and followed the woman up bare, unpainted stairs to the rooms on the second and third floors. These were small and perfectly bare of comforts, almost of necessities. The floors were uncarpeted and guiltless of paint, or even of a very recent application of soap and water. They had no closets. A common pine bedstead—sometimes two of them—in each room, two chairs, in one of which stood a tin basin, while beside it on the floor stood a bucket of water, and a small bureau, made up the sum total of the furniture. In only one room did Salome see any evidences of a literary taste, and that, if she had known it, was a cheap paper, the worst of the sensational class.

Salome’s heart sank within her. She no longer wondered that the mill-girls of to-daywere a discontented, ignorant set, nor that many of them sank into lives of degradation.

“The rooms are good enough for the girls,” said the woman, noticing the look of disgust on Salome’s tell-tale face. “They seem poor enough to elegant ladies like you. But these girls know no better. And they are good enough to sleep off a drunk in,” she added, roughly.

“You don’t mean to say,” asked her guest, “that any of your girls get intoxicated?”

“Intoxicated? I don’t know what else you’d call it, when they have to be helped in at eleven o’clock Saturday night, and put to bed, and don’t get up again until Monday morning.”

Salome was sick with pity and shame for her sex. She no longer questioned whether she had a mission toward these, her people.

She went home and wrote the note to Mr. Greenough, given in an earlier part of this chapter.

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