I
"Well! What's the matter now? Lorst your job?"
With one hand resting upon the edge of the pail beside which she was kneeling, Mrs. Bindle looked up, challenge in her eyes. Bindle's unexpected appearance while she was washing the kitchen oilcloth filled her with foreboding.
"There's a strike on at the yard," he replied in a tone which, in spite of his endeavour to render it casual, sounded like a confession of guilt. He knew Mrs. Bindle; he knew also her views on strikes.
"A what?" she cried, rising to her feet and wiping her hands upon the coarse canvas apron that covered the skirt carefully festooned about her hips. "A what?"
"A strike," repeated Bindle. "They give Walter 'Odson the sack, so we all come out."
"Oh! you have, have you?" she cried, her thin lips disappearing ominously. "And when are you going back, I'd like to know?" She regarded him with an eye that he knew meant war.
"Can't say," he replied, as he proceeded to fill his pipe from a tin tobacco-box. "Depends on the Union," he added.
"The Union!" she cried with rising wrath. "I wish I had them here. I'd give them Union, throwing men out of work, with food the price it is. What's going to 'appen to us? Can you tell me that?" she demanded, her diction becoming a little frayed at the edges, owing to the intensity of her feelings.
Bindle remained silent. He realised that he was faced by a crisis.