“Why, Purdy!” exclaimed Larry. And then: “Did Ruth McKnight tell you?”
Purdick nodded.
“She didn’t know that I didn’t know. Neither did she know that my father was killed in the Steelville Furnace at the time when her father and Ollie’s was the general manager.”
“Well?” said Larry, failing to see the connection.
“Don’t you see?” said Purdick harshly. “Wasn’t he my father’s murderer? Wasn’t that loose plank and broken railing reported time and again, and nothing was done about them?”
Now there had been a time, and not so many months back, at that, when Larry Donovan, taking a leaf out of the book of his experience as an apprentice and helper in the railroad shop at home where he had heard some of the men constantly talking about the greed of the capitalists and their disregard for the comfort and safety of their workmen, would have given at least a qualified assent to little Purdick’s bitter charge. But he was no longer the one-sided fellow he had been when his college mates had called him “The Offish Worm.”
“Let’s see a minute,” he temporized. “Was it positively known that Mr. McKnight had been told about the loose board?”
“Put yourself in his place,” was Purdick’s retort. “If you were in charge of a mill or a furnace where men’s lives were at stake, wouldn’t you consider it a part of your job to see such reports and act upon them?”
“I know,” Larry countered quickly, “but I’ve worked in a shop long enough to know that a lot of things that ought to go to the man higher up never get there. We had a foreman who was always jumping on the men for kicking about bad safety appliances. I don’t believe he ever reported half of ’em to anybody who had the authority to order them fixed.”
It was just here that the real miracle began to show itself, like the face of the sun crawling out of the shadow of a total eclipse. Though he hardly realized it, and would, perhaps, have refused to admit it, the college year, so different from the year in which he had worked and failed, had planted a lot of new things in Charles Purdick. The timely help that had come at a moment when he was so sick and discouraged that it seemed as if he must give up the fight for an education; the way in which Larry had stood by him; the frank and helpful friendship of such “rotten rich” fellows as Dick Maxwell, Wally Dixon, Cal Rogers and Ollie McKnight; recollections of all these “mollifications,” if you could call them so, came crowding in when the old class-and-mass hatred tried to get in its word. And in the end it was the “mollifications” that won out—at least, in the matter of Ollie McKnight’s generous gift.