“Attention! Forward, guide right!” shouted a captain.
The men went swinging down the broad cement sidewalk past the window and the advertising man. In their faces was something determined and grim. A sickly smile flitted across the face of the grey-haired man and then faded. The advertising man, without knowing just what was going on felt that the older man was afraid. He sensed the terror in his face. In his heart he was glad to see it.
The manufacturer began to talk excitedly. “Now what's this?” he demanded. “What's going on? What kind of a volcano are we men of affairs walking over? Haven't we had enough trouble with labour? What are they doing now?” Again he walked up and down past the table where the advertising man sat looking at him. “We'll let the book go,” he said. “Come to-morrow. Come any time. I want to look into this. I want to find out what's going on.”
Leaving the office of the bicycle company John Van Moore ran along the street past stores and houses. He did not try to follow the Marching Men but ran forward blindly, filled with excitement. He remembered the words of the newspaper man about the song of labour, and was drunk with the thought that he had caught the swing of it. A hundred times he had seen men pouring out of factory doors at the end of the day. Always before they had been just a mass of individuals. Each had been thinking of his own affairs and each man had shuffled off into his own street and had been lost in the dim alleyways between the tall grimy buildings. Now all of this was changed. The men did not shuffle off alone but marched along the street shoulder to shoulder.
A lump came also into the throat of this man and he like that other by the factory wall began to say words. “The song of labour is here. It has begun to get itself sung!” he cried.
John Van Moore was beside himself. The face of the fat man pale with terror came back into his mind. On the sidewalk before a grocery store he stopped and shouted with delight. Then he began dancing wildly about, startling a group of children who with fingers in their mouths stood with staring eyes watching.
CHAPTER III
All through the early months of that year in Chicago, rumours of a new and not understandable movement among labourers ran about among men of affairs. In a way the labourers understood the undercurrent of terror their marching together had inspired and like the advertising man dancing on the sidewalk before the grocery were made happy by it. Grim satisfaction dwelt in their hearts. Remembering their boyhoods and the creeping terror that invaded their fathers' houses in times of depression they were glad to spread terror among the homes of the rich and the well-to-do. For years they had been going through life blindly, striving to forget age and poverty. Now they felt that life had a purpose, that they were marching toward some end. When in the past they had been told that power dwelt in them they had not believed. “He is not to be trusted,” thought the man at the machine looking at the man at work at the next machine. “I have heard him talk and at bottom he is a fool.”