He joined in the laughter which followed.
In the doorway he cut a pigeon-wing in which his thin, bowed legs looked comically humorous.
Jud Carpenter was a power in the mill, standing as he did so near to the management. To the poor, ignorant ones around him he was the mouth-piece of the mill, and they feared him even more than they did Kingsley himself, Kingsley with his ironical ways and lilting eye-glasses. With them Jud's nod alone was sufficient.
They were still grouped around the office awaiting their turn. In the faces of some were shrewdness, cunning, hypocrisy. Some looked out through dull eyes, humbled and brow-beaten and unfeeling. But all of them when they spoke to Jud Carpenter—Jud Carpenter who stood in with the managers of the mill—became at once the grinning, fawning framework of a human being.
“Yes, boys,” said Jud patronizingly as Stallings went out, “this here mill is a god-send to us po' folks who've got chillun to burn. They ain't a day we ortenter git down on our knees an' thank Mr. Kingsley an' Mister Travis there. You know I done took down that sign I useter have hangin' up in my house in the hall—that sign which said, God bless our home? I've put up another one now.”
“What you done put up now, Jud?” grinned a tall weaver with that blank look of expectancy which settles over the face of the middle man in a negro minstrel troupe when he passes the stale question to the end man, knowing the joke which was coming.
“Why, I've put up,” said Jud brutally, “'Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me.' That's scriptural authority for cotton mills, ain't it?”
The paying went on, after the uproarious laughter had subsided, and down the long row only the clinking of silver was heard, intermingled now and then with the shrill voice of some creature disputing with Kingsley about her account. Generally it ran thus: “It cyant be thet away. Sixty hours at five cents an hour—wal, but didn't the chillun wuck no longer than that? I cyant—I cyant—I jes' cyant live on that little bit.”
Such it was, and it floated down the line to Helen like the wail of a lost soul. When her time came Kingsley met her with a smile. Then he gave her an order and Travis handed her a bright crisp ten-dollar bill.
She looked at him in astonishment. “But—but,” she said. “Surely, I didn't earn all this, did I? Maggie—you had to pay Maggie for teaching me this week. It was she who earned it. I cannot take it.”