“Oh, gosh!” The second lieutenant released his grips on the arms of the chair and clasped his head with both his hands. “The jig’s up!” he continued. “You’ve done it, Chick!”
“Done what, Mr. Brownell?”
“Given the enemy enough ammunition to blow Lieutenant McCormack into the middle of next week.”
“Will—will what I told ’em hurt ’im?”
“Hurt him! Thunder and Mars! It’ll send him to a military prison for life.”
Stunned, dazed, almost unseeing, Chick stumbled out of Brownell’s office into the street. Had the lieutenant for one minute realized what a staggering blow he had given to the boy, he would have dropped everything and hurried after him and disabused his simple mind of its belief in the enormity of his offense. As it was, the wretched hunchback, with an awful, self-accusing finger, piercing into his very vitals, hot and ice-cold by turns, slunk back to hide himself in his dingy corner in the printing-shop of Donatello. For if there was one thing on earth that he would have lost his right hand rather than to have done, it was a thing that might in any way have been injurious to Halpert McCormack. And if there was one person on earth for whom he would willingly have laid down his life and thought it a joy to do so, that person was his beloved first lieutenant.
The strike at the Barriscale plant, and at other smaller plants throughout the city, dragged on through the spring, unsettled and unbroken. But in May, just before starvation on the one side and insolvency on the other became an acute possibility, the union men, through an intermediate committee of interested citizens, came to terms with the companies.
The employers on the one hand made certain concessions, the employees on the other hand waived certain demands, and a settlement was reached.
But the leaders of the radicals would have none of it. Their men would not go back, they declared, until every original demand had been fully met, nor would they permit the union employees to resume work without them. Moreover, when they did return it would not be as wage-slaves, under a humiliating agreement, but as proprietors, having at least an equal voice with their former employers in the management of the business and the distribution of its profits. For was it not one of the chief tenets of their organization that: