There was no answer, nor did any one come forward. Thorvik, hurrying from one to another, whispering, pointing, urging, seemed to have no influence at all. Dabney Mills, shrill and abusive, shouted something from the back of the crowd, but no one moved. Dan O’Leary burst into a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
“You should have heard them tell, on the way up the mountain, what they were going to do,” he declared to Beatrice at whose side he was standing. “Thorvik and Mills, why, they were breathing fire, and now look at them.” He stepped forward and stood by John Herrick. “Boys,” he said, “I’m through. I came up here with you to ask the boss a question, to find out if he had got away with any of the Irrigation Company’s funds. Well, I don’t care any more to ask it. I know he’s all right.”
Beatrice turned at a sound behind her and saw Olaf, followed by old Julia and Tim, come pushing through the door in the hall within. The man and the woman were both deaf and the boy slept in one of the outbuildings, so that they had only just now been awakened by the noise. Olaf’s eye was fixed unwaveringly upon Thorvik, and that worthy, suddenly becoming aware of the fact began to sidle away into the background and disappeared behind the bulk of a gigantic Slovak. Beatrice laid a restraining hand on Olaf’s arm, for John Herrick was speaking again.
“You shall have an explanation,” he began, “though I have been waiting for you to understand of yourselves. While you were talking up your strike, or rather while your leader was talking and you were listening, the Irrigation Company was coming to the end of its funds. Why? Because, after your valuable Thorvik came to this camp, construction dragged, no man did a full day’s work any more, time and material and money were being wasted until the whole enterprise was at the edge of disaster. Was it easy to raise more capital, do you think, when the whole place was seething with discontent and everybody knew that a strike was coming? No, the men who had put money into the project, far from being willing to subscribe more, were wishing they could withdraw. It came about that we moved first, and shut down the work the very night that you were ready to declare a strike. It was a good thing for both sides. We all needed a little time to think things over.”
He paused, as though for comment from his audience, but no one spoke and he went on again.
“While you have been—resting, I have been working, and I have managed to arrange for enough capital to carry on the work to the end, on one condition. When things are not to your liking, you are to use the good American way of talking things over and settling them peaceably, not the method you brought with you from over the sea, of rioting and burning and stirring up hatred between one man and another. On that basis we can go on. In a crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one man, and you have chosen to blame me. What you have been saying about me I neither know nor care, but if you had used your own wits instead of Thorvik’s, you would have seen how things really stood. And I will tell you this. Through all this time of waiting, I have kept in my safe a sufficient sum in cash for immediate use, so that when the time came to begin again, we could go forward without a day’s, without an hour’s delay. It is there, as I said, ready for you to earn it. And now have you had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolutions? Do you want to go back to work?”
“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from the crowd.
It was an American voice, but its refrain was taken up in a dozen foreign tongues. Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their leader and that they wished to work again.
“Then go home and get some sleep and we will start work in the morning,” John Herrick said. “The money will be there to pay your next week’s wages and there will be enough for one thing besides. It will buy your precious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country and we will all see that he makes use of it.”
“But—see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous voice rose above the murmur of approval, “I’ve be telling them——”