“I tell you, sir,” shouted Nahum Beals, “the time will come when you will all thank God that you belong to the poor and down-trodden of this earth, and not to the rich and great—the time will come. There's knives to sharpen to-day, and wood for scaffolds as plenty as in the days of the French Revolution, and the hand that marks the time of day on the clock of men's patience with wrong and oppression has near gone round to the same hour and minute.”
Andrew Brewster looked at him, with a curious expression half of disgust, half of sympathy. His sense of dignity in the face of adversity inherited from his New England race was shocked; he was not one to be blindly swayed by another's fervor even when his own wrongs were in question. He would not have made a good follower in a revolution, nor a leader. He would simply have found his own place of fixed principle and abided there. Then, too, he had a judicial mind which could combine the elements of counsels for and against his own cause.
“Now, look at here,” he said, slowly, “I ain't goin' to say I don't think we ain't in a hard place, and that there's somethin' wrong that's to blame for it, but I dunno but you go most too far, Nahum; or, rather, I dunno as you go far enough. I dunno but we've got to dig down past the poor and the rich, farther into the everlastin' foundations of things to get at what's the trouble.”
Jim Tenny, standing in the parlor doorway, with an arm around Eva's waist, broke in suddenly with a defiant laugh. “I don't care nothin' about the everlastin' foundations of things, and I don't care a darn about the rich and the poor,” he proclaimed. “I'm willin' to leave that to lecturers and dynamiters, and let 'em settle it if they can. I don't grudge the rich nothin', and I ain't goin' to call the Almighty to account for givin' somebody else the biggest piece of pie; mebbe it would give me the stomach-ache. All I'm concerned about is Lloyd's shut-down.”
“That's so,” said Eva.
“I tell you, sir, it ain't the facts of the case, but the reason for the facts, which we must think of,” maintained Nahum Beals.
“I don't care a darn for the facts nor the reasons,” said Jim Tenny; “all I care about is I'm out of work maybe till spring, with my mother dependent on me, and not a cent laid up, I've been so darned careless, and here's Eva says she won't marry me till I get work.”
“I won't,” said Eva, who was very pale, except for burning spots on her cheeks.
“She's afraid she won't get frostin' on her cake, and silk dresses, I expect,” Jim Tenny said, and laughed, but his laugh was very bitter.
“Jim Tenny, you know better than that,” Eva cried, sharply. “I won't stand that.”