The Forbidden Trail | Page 7

a narrow margin of profit that it makes their overhead look like Standard Oil profits. So far they've let my patents alone, chiefly, I suppose, because my machinery is efficient only for the comparatively small output. I never have been able to accumulate much working capital. A protracted strike would put me out of business. On the other hand a material increase in wage would kill that Russian contract and I've already borrowed money on it."
"Roger, you shouldn't have told your father that when he was tired," said Mrs. Moore, handing her husband his third cup of tea.
"Don't be a goose, Alice," returned Roger's father. "What are they going to ask for, Son?"
"A minimum of three dollars a day and eight hours."
"Then I'm finished!" exclaimed Moore, setting his lips.
"Why don't you tell them when they come to you just what you've told me?" asked Roger. "They'll understand."
"They won't believe a word of it. Nobody knows so much about a business as one of the workmen. And the poorer the workman the more he knows. I think I'll go up to see the Dean."
Roger and his mother sat late on the porch, while Mr. Moore conferred with his friend. Mrs. Moore summed up her own feelings on the matter of the strike when she said just as Roger started for bed:
"Well, as far as I'm concerned, I've never been so happy as I was when your father was just a plain mechanic, earning his two and a half or so a day and with no responsibility except to do his work well. Ever since he's been his own boss, he's been changing. I don't feel as if he were the same man I married. And what does he get out of it? Worry, worry, fuss, fuss. I tell you, Roger, my dear, I've come to the conclusion that the more complicated life gets, the less happiness there is in it."
Roger bent and kissed his mother. "Maybe I'll feel like that when I'm older," he said, "but I don't now. And I guess Father likes the worry. It's like playing a game. I'm going to get into it, you bet, just as soon as I get through school."
His mother made no reply.
On the morning of July fifteenth, a delegation of three workmen waited on John Moore in his office. They made exactly the demands that Roger had reported and they received the same reply that Roger had received, with just about the same amount of detail as to the running of the business. The strike was scheduled to begin on the first day of August.
Roger and Ernest, plugging away at the forge, heard the men's side constantly. At night Roger heard his father's. At first, naturally enough, both boys' sympathies were all with Roger's father. Then, because he was now a working man himself, Roger began to notice that his father had brutal ways with the men. Three or four times a day Moore always went through the factory. A careless mechanic would receive a cursing that, it suddenly occurred to Roger, no real man ought to endure. The least infringement of the factory rules was punished to the limit by a system of fines. Moore drove the men as relentlessly as he drove himself. This aspect of his father Roger naturally never discussed with his chum, but he spoke of it to his father on the morning of the first of August as they made their way to the factory.
"They think you feel to them just like you do to a machine and it makes them sore, all the time," said the boy.
"Heavens! what do they want? Must I kiss them good morning?" exclaimed Moore.
Roger laughed. "No, but I know what they mean. I've seen you when you talked as though you owned them--and not that either. It's sort of like if you could recollect their names, you'd hate 'em."
"Shucks, Rog! You're getting beyond your depth!" said his father.
The seven o'clock whistle did not blow that hot August morning. All the neighborhood of the factory was full of lounging men with clean faces and hands. It was like Sunday. Ernest went to work in his father's store. Roger spent the morning in the office with his father. In the afternoon he circulated among the men. At first many of them resented this. Naturally enough they looked on the boy as his father's spy.
But Moore had nothing to conceal nor had the men. Roger was intelligent and thoughtful far beyond his years, and little by little the men got in the habit of debating with him the merits of the case.
Roger forgot that summer that he was a boy. Even at Saturday afternoon baseball, his mind was struggling with a problem whose ramifications staggered his immature mind.
Ole Oleson, the forge boss, talked