But now the experiment had been made, and the revelation had burst upon Edward that it had been a ghastly failure. Hal had not come to realise that labour was turbulent and lazy and incompetent, needing a strong hand to rule it; on the contrary, he had become one of these turbulent ones himself! A champion of the lazy and incompetent, an agitator, a fomenter of class-prejudice, an enemy of his own friends, and of his brother's business associates!
Never had Hal seen Edward in such a state of excitement. There was something really abnormal about him, Hal realised; it puzzled him vaguely while he talked, but he did not understand it until his brother told how he had come to be here. He had been attending a dinner-dance at the home of a friend, and Percy Harrigan had got him on the telephone at half past eleven o'clock at night. Percy had had a message from Cartwright, to the effect that Hal was leading a riot in North Valley; Percy had painted the situation in such lurid colours that Edward had made a dash and caught the midnight train, wearing his evening clothes, and without so much as a tooth-brush with him!
Hal could hardly keep from bursting out laughing. His brother, his punctilious and dignified brother, alighting from a sleeping-car at seven o'clock in the morning, wearing a dress suit and a silk hat! And here he was, Edward Warner Junior, the fastidious, who never paid less than a hundred and fifty dollars for a suit of clothes, clad in a “hand-me-down” for which he had expended twelve dollars and forty-eight cents in a “Jew-store” in a coal-town!
SECTION 11.
But Edward would not stop for a single smile; his every faculty was absorbed in the task he had before him, to get his brother out of this predicament, so dangerous and so humiliating. Hal had come to a town owned by Edward's business friends, and had proceeded to meddle in their affairs, to stir up their labouring people and imperil their property. That North Valley was the property of the General Fuel Company—not merely the mines and the houses, but likewise the people who lived in them—Edward seemed to have no doubt whatever; Hal got only exclamations of annoyance when he suggested any other point of view. Would there have been any town of North Valley, if it had not been for the capital and energy of the General Fuel Company? If the people of North Valley did not like the conditions which the General Fuel Company offered them, they had one simple and obvious remedy—to go somewhere else to work. But they stayed; they got out the General Fuel Company's coal, they took the General Fuel Company's wages—
“Well, they've stopped taking them now,” put in Hal.
All right, that was their affair, replied Edward. But let them stop because they wanted to—not because outside agitators put them up to it. At any rate, let the agitators not include a member of the Warner family!
The elder brother pictured old Peter Harrigan on his way back from the East; the state of unutterable fury in which he would arrive, the storm he would raise in the business world of Western City. Why, it was unimaginable, such a thing had never been heard of! “And right when we're opening up a new mine—when we need every dollar of credit we can get!”
“Aren't we big enough to stand off Peter Harrigan?” inquired Hal.
“We have plenty of other people to stand off,” was the answer. “We don't have to go out of our way to make enemies.”