McClintock looked with singular affection at the swelling girths of iron which held the panting lungs of the monster the men had doomed to silence, and swore his most elaborate oath.
“No, I never did, Smith. You'd think they had money to burn the way they chucked their job.”
“When do you suppose I'll get a chance to build steam again?”
“Oakley says we won't start up before the first of September.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE first weeks of the strike slipped by without excitement. Harvest time came and went. A rainless August browned the earth and seared the woods with its heat, but nothing happened to vary the dull monotony. The shops, a sepulchre of sound, stood silent and empty. General Cornish, in the rôle of the avenger, did not appear on the scene, to Oakley's discomfiture and to the joy of the men. A sullen sadness rested on the town. The women began to develop shrewish tempers and a trying conversational habit, while their husbands squandered their rapidly dwindling means in the saloons. There was large talk and a variety of threats, but no lawlessness.
Simultaneously with the inauguration of the strike, Jeffy reappeared mysteriously. He hinted darkly at foreign travel under singularly favorable auspices, and intimated that he had been sojourning in a community where there was always some one to “throw a few whiskeys” into him when his “coppers got hot,” and where he had “fed his face” three times a day, so bounteous was the charity.
At intervals a rumor was given currency that Oakley was on the verge of starting up with imported labor, and the men, dividing the watches, met each train; but only familiar types, such as the casual commercial traveller with his grips, the farmer from up or down the line, with his inevitable paper parcels, and the stray wayfarer were seen to step from the Huckleberry's battered coaches. Finally it dawned upon the men that Dan was bent on starving them into submission.