“You’ll keep anything I tell you under your hat?”
“Sure, if you say so.”
“Strike and blue hell to pay,” informed the cook solemnly. “Whole caboodle will throw down tools—tugmen, waterfront men, pole-cutters and all.”
“H’m, so that’s it—that’s why the mounted police are over here,” reflected Hammond. “What’s the grievance?”
“More pay and shorter hours. Ain’t that what they always say?”
“But I thought the North Star Company were always ready to consider the demands of the men?”
“Maybe they will this time,” replied Macdougal, “but I got a hunch they won’t. There’s something phony about this whole business. They’ve let a whole flock of bolsheviks and O.B.U. agitators into the camps and never even tried to stop them holdin’ meetings, and the foremen have been bullin’ the men the past few days just as if they wanted to egg them on. Besides I mistrust that faraway glint in Acey Smith’s wicked eyes these days. Whenever you see the Big Boss goin’ around like as if he was in a trance and he looks at you with that queer little devil-grin playin’ at the corners of his mouth there’s new hellery on foot, you can bank on that.”
“Then you think the North Star’s out to break the strike?”
“I don’t know,” Macdougal was rapidly divesting himself of mackinaw and shoepacks, “but I’ve a hunch Acey Smith has the dope from the higher-ups and that it ain’t for a settlement.”
Having so pronounced himself, the cook blew out the light and plunged into his bunk.