Eris looked wistfully at him, loitering still in the doorway, slim, grey-eyed, undeveloped.
Her stepmother laughed at her: “Notions,” she said. “Don’t you know you’d go to rack and rooin that way? You go to bed, Eris.... There’s fresh ginger snaps in the pantry.”
CHAPTER III
UNTIL the Great War turned the world upside down, Whitewater Farms made money after Odell married Ed Lister’s daughter.
Shortage of labour during the war cut into profits; taxes wiped them out; the ugly, Bolshevik attitude of labour after the war caused a deficit.
It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and factories would pay them enough in three days to permit them to remain idle the remainder of the week. No farmer could pay the swollen wages demanded for field labour, and survive financially.
Every village was full of idle louts who sneered at offered employment.
Fruit rotted in orchards, grain remained uncut, cattle stood neglected. The great American loafer leered at the situation. The very name of Labour stank. It stinks still. The Great American Ass has made the term a stench in the nostrils of civilisation.
The next year mills and factories began to lay off labour. Odell and Lister scraped together a few sulky field hands, mainly incompetents, men who had spent all their wages. Fields were sullenly tilled, crops gathered, cattle cared for.