The bosses tend more and more to become mere flunkeys of the plutocrats. Kelly belonged to the old school of boss, dating from the days when social organization was in the early stages, when the political organizer was feared and even served by the industrial organizer, the embryo plutocrats. He realized how necessary he was to his plutocratic master, and he made that master treat him almost as an equal. He was exacting ever larger pay for taking care of the voters and keeping them fooled; he was getting rich, and had as yet vague aspirations to respectability and fashion. He had stopped drinking, had "cut out the women," had made a beginning toward a less inelegant way of speaking the language. His view of life was what is called cynical. That is, he regarded himself as morally the equal of the respectable rulers of society—or of the preachers who attended to the religious part of the grand industry of "keeping the cow quiet while it was being milked."
But Mr. Kelly was explaining to Martin Hastings what he meant when he said that there was "hell to pay":
"That infernal little cuss, Victor Dorn," said he "made a speech in the Court House Square to-day. Of course, none of the decent papers—and they're all decent except his'n—will publish any of it. Still, there was about a thousand people there before he got through—and the thing'll spread."
"Speech?—what about?" said Hastings. "He's always shooting off his mouth. He'd better stop talking and go to work at some honest business."
"He's got on to the fact that this strike is a put-up job—that the company hired labor detectives in Chicago last winter to come down here and get hold of the union. He gave names—amounts paid—the whole damn thing."
"Um," said Hastings, rubbing his skinny hands along the shiny pantaloons over his meagre legs. "Um."
"But that ain't all," pursued Kelly. "He read out a list of the men told off to pretend to set fire to the car barns and start the riot—those Chicago chaps, you know."
"I don't know anything about it," said Hastings sharply.
Kelly smiled slightly—amused scorn. It seemed absurd to him for the old man to keep up the pretense of ignorance. In fact, Hastings was ignorant—of the details. He was not quite the aloof plutocrat of the modern school, who permits himself to know nothing of details beyond the dividend rate and similar innocent looking results of causes at which sometimes hell itself would shudder. But, while he was more active than the conscience-easing devices now working smoothly made necessary, he never permitted himself to know any unnecessary criminal or wicked fact about his enterprises.
"I don't know," he repeated. "And I don't want to know."