“Hello, you’re back, are you?” was his greeting to his son. “I see the whole crowd of workmen in your rolling-mills decided last night not to submit to the new scale; unanimous, the paper says. Seen it?”
“No, but I guessed they would,” said Horace, nonchalantly. “They can all be damned.”
The General turned over his paper. “There’s an editorial,” he went on, “taking the workmen’s side, out and out. Says there’s something very mysterious about the whole business. Winds up with a hint that steps will be taken to test the legality of the trust, and probe the conspiracy that underlies it. Those are the words—‘probe the conspiracy.’ Evidently, you’re going to have John Fairchild in your wool. He’s a good fighter, once you get him stirred up.”
“He can be damned, too,” said Horace, taking a chair and lighting a cigar. “These free-trade editors make a lot of noise, but they don’t do anything else. They’re merely blue-bottle flies on a window-pane—a deuce of a nuisance to nervous people, that’s all. I’m not nervous, myself.”
The General smiled with good-humored sarcasm at his offspring. “Seems to me it wasn’t so long ago that you were tarred with the same brush yourself,” he commented.
“Most fellows are free-traders until it touches their own pockets, or rather until they get something in their pockets to be touched. Then they learn sense,” replied Horace.
“You can count them by thousands,” said the General. “But what of the other poor devils—the millions of consumers who pay through the nose, in order to keep those pockets full, eh? They never seem to learn sense.”
Horace smiled a little, and then stretched out his limbs in a comprehensive yawn. “I can’t sleep on the cars as well as I used to,” he said, in explanation. “I almost wish now I’d gone to bed when I got home. I don’t want to be sleepy this afternoon, of all times.”
The General had returned to his paper. “I see there’s a story afloat that you chaps mean to bring in French Canadian workmen, when the other fellows are locked out. I thought there was a contract labor law against that.”
Horace yawned again, and then, rising, poured out a little glassful of spirits from a bottle on the mantel, and tossed it off. “No,” he said, “it’s easy enough to get around that. Wendover is up to all those dodges. Besides, I think they are already domiciled in Massachusetts.”