The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney.
Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more of its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. Those who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less about the matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called him corrupt, which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, the chartered machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation to suit those who furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity of Port Argent had always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a complicated motive, half private, hardly confessed.
Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, and noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were gathering their tools.
“All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on the east side next.”
Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and it occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men like Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him.
He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an eccentric.
Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way of incident. “Everything goes,” was the phrase there, meaning it is accepted and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it.
Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room in The Press building. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him a machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men to drive it—what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances and hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type to run that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and what “the boys” wanted, why, they wanted their “jobs,” like everybody else. Hennion wanted his own.
Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that moment, and nearly ran into him.
“Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night.”