Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral, Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."
"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is due to have a strike on its hands. The management—which seems to have got itself consolidated in some way—shot out a lot of new bosses all along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C. S. & W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."
"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. & W.?"
"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."
"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. & W., who have been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local sympathizers."
"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon," Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will be asking us what we are going to do about it; whether we are going to fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft, as our predecessors did."
"We needn't go over that ground again—you and I, Upton," said Mr. Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.
Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:
"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand the gaff—this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the people as the accuser of your president—and hope to hold your job. The one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."
"Upton, if I thought you meant that—but I never know when to take you seriously."