Dick and Jay were absorbing some of the optimism of their stout-hearted old friend. They had been a bit dubious about being able to get a job right away; and time meant a whole lot when it was only ninety days or so until the opening of Brighton.
"Montey Brown still boss of the yard?" queried Jay of the newcomer. He referred to Montague Brown, who for years had been yard superintendent of Bridgeford's bustling shipbuilding industry. Brown had told the boys when they went away into the service that their old jobs would be ready for them.
"Bet your life he's still around," was Larry's reassuring reply, to which he added, somewhat facetiously: "Montey couldn't be pried away from Bridgeford Yard by all the king's horses and all the king's men."
In lightning style Seymour traced the activities of the old workshop during the period of his re-employment following the expiration of his army term. During the war, it appeared, the yard had sailed serenely along, turning out new tonnage at a record-breaking clip, particularly vessels and equipment for the United States Navy.
Since the armistice there had come a change over the works. The places of hundreds of men who had gone out into the service had been taken for the most part by workmen of foreign birth. Many of them illiterate and unappreciative of American freedom, they had fallen easy prey to the radical labor leaders who had sprung up within the works like mushrooms growing overnight.
Preaching the doctrines of the Russian Reds, these extremists in economic thought had sown discord among the rank and file of the men, particularly the foreigners, preaching the dictatorship of the proletariat, which meant that the men who work with their hands must be the masters. Jay and Dick heard to their surprise that during the time the brave boys of America had been offering their services, their very lives, for their country, these Bolshevists had been openly plotting against the whole republican plan of American life.
"Secret meetings, wild speeches and all kinds of goings on," muttered Larry. "All the time talking about strikes and walkouts, and even threatening among themselves to take over the whole blamed works and run 'em themselves."
To the two naval veterans, who had always shared a distinctive pride in the big shipyard, this seemed an incredible state of affairs; laborers who had enjoyed fancy wages during the time of the war while millions of loyal Americans were serving abroad now fanning the flames of industrial revolution!
"Looks like there was lots more good work cut out for us fellows right here at home," was Dick's rather caustic comment.
"You bet your life there is, and we are getting back on the job just in time so far as I can see," was Larry's rejoinder, as he went on to relate some of the later developments in the yard's labor situation. Only the previous night, it appeared, the strike leaders, in a long and noisy meeting, had decided to submit their claims forthwith for a seven-hour day and a forty percent increase in wages.