"Yes; but didn't you write me that the men were on strike?"
"I said the white miners were likely to make trouble if they got hungry enough."
"Was there any pay in arrears when you shut down?"
"No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but I fought him out o' that."
"Good! Then what are they kicking about?"
"Oh, because they're out of a job. There are always a lot of keen noses in a crowd the size of ours, and they've smelled out some o' the Farley doin's. Of course, they don't believe in the cry of hard times; laborin' men are always the last to believe that."
The train was tracking thunderously around the nose of Lebanon, and Tom was looking out of the window again, this time for the first glimpse of the Gordonia chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.
"That is where you will have to put your shoulder into the collar with me, pappy," he said. "Most of the older men know me as a boy who has grown up among them. When I spring my proposition, they'll howl, if only for that reason."
But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously than ever.
"You won't get any help from the men, Buddy, more 'n what you pay for. You know the whites—Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good sprinklin' o' 'huckleberries.' And the blacks don't count, one way or the other."