Wade began, short and sharp as a trip-hammer, when it has a bar to shape.
“I’m the new Superintendent. Richard Wade is my name. I rang the bell because I wanted to see you and have you see me. You know as well as I do that these Works are in a bad way. They can’t stay so. They must come up and pay you regular wages and the Company profits. Every man of you has got to be here on the spot when the bell strikes, and up to the mark in his work. You haven’t been,—and you know it. You’ve turned out rotten iron,—stuff that any honest shop would be ashamed of. Now there’s to be a new leaf turned over here. You’re to be paid on the nail; but you’ve got to earn your money. I won’t have any idlers or shirkers or rebels about me. I shall work hard myself, and every man of you will, or he leaves the shop. Now, if anybody has a complaint to make, I’ll hear him before you all.”
The men were evidently impressed with Wade’s Inaugural. It meant something. But they were not to be put down so easily, after long misrule. There began to be a whisper,—
“B’il in, Bill Tarbox! and talk up to him!”
Presently Bill shouldered forward and faced the new ruler.
Since Bill took to drink and degradation, he had been the butt-end of riot and revolt at the Foundry. He had had his own way with Whiffler. He did not like to abdicate and give in to this new chap without testing him.
In a better mood, Bill would have liked Wade’s looks and words; but today he had a sore head, a sour face, and a bitter heart from last night’s spree. And then he had heard—it was as well known already in Dunderbunk as if the town-crier had cried it—that Wade was lodging at Mrs. Purtett’s, where poor Bill was excluded. So Bill stepped forward as spokesman of the ruffianly element, and the immoral force gathered behind and backed him heavily.
Tarbox, too, was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. But he had sagged one inch for want of self-respect. He had spoilt his color and dyed his moustache. He wore foxy-black pantaloons tucked into red-topped boots, with the name of the maker on a gilt shield. His red flannel shirt was open at the neck and caught with a black handkerchief. His damaged tile was in permanent crape for the late lamented Poole.
“We allow,” says Bill, in a tone halfway between Lablache’s De profundis and a burglar’s bull-dog’s snarl, “that we’ve did our work as good as need to be did. We ‘xpect we know our rights. We ha’n’t ben treated fair, and I’m damned if we’re go’n’ to stan’ it.”
“Stop!” says Wade. “No swearing in this shop!”