So all hands collected from the different parts of the Foundry to see the head.
They came up with easy and somewhat swaggering bearing,—a good many roughs, with here and there a ruffian. Several, as they approached, swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength, the sledges with which they had been tapping at the bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several wielded their long pokers like lances.
Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like Blackfeet in their warpaint. Their hairy chests showed, where some men parade elaborate shirt-bosoms. Some had their sleeves pushed up to the elbow to exhibit their compact flexors and extensors. Some had rolled their flannel up to the shoulder, above the bulging muscles of the upper arm. They wore aprons tied about the neck, like the bibs of our childhood,—or about the waist, like the coquettish articles which young housewives affect. But there was no coquetry in these great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib that ever suffered under bread-and-molasses or mud-pie treatment.
They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at ease, not without rough grace, in a sinuous line, coiled and knotted like a snake.
Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was to take down that Hydra’s two hundred crests of insubordination.
They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He read and ticketed each man, as he came up,—good, bad, or on the fence,—and marked each so that he would know him among a myriad.
The Hands faced the Head. It was a question whether the two hundred or the one would be master in Dunderbunk.
Which was boss? An old question.
It has to be settled whenever a new man claims power, and there is always a struggle until it is fought out by main force of brain or muscle.
Wade had made up his mind on this subject. He waited a moment until the men were still. He was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. He stood easily on his pins, as if he had eyed men and facts before. His mouth looked firm, his brow freighted, his nose clipper,—that the hands could see. But clipper noses are not always backed by a stout hull. Seemingly freighted brows sometimes carry nothing but ballast and dunnage. The firmness may be all in the moustache, while the mouth hides beneath, a mere silly slit. All which the hands knew.