“Twenty dollars, yeah!”
“Not a measly penny! You’re having two whole dollars a week now to squander——”
“I’m filling a superintendent’s job here that couldn’t be filled by any one else short of thirty. I’ll pay board at home. But I want what I’m worth and I’m not a bit unreasonable to ask it.”
They compromised on twelve dollars.
The box-shop “help” trooped back exultantly. Nat knew how to handle human nature. The peak of production was regained in a single afternoon.
Outside, the labor differences at the Forge plant were colloquially known as “the box-shop strike.” But Johnathan would have had an arm torn out before he would have admitted any strike. His boy had simply “poisoned the minds” of the help against his own father and they had refused to work.
“I’ve got an awful problem on my hands, Doctor Dodd,” he told the pastor of the Methodist church the following Thursday evening. “And where it’s going to end, the Father only knows. My son’s behavior is graying my hair. Think of him having no more filial loyalty than engineering a walk-out of my employees and keeping them out until I give him a raise in his wages of six hundred per cent!”
“God will humble him,” the kindly old man solaced. “The sympathy of the community is with you, Brother Forge!”
III
And now the long-dreaded, the sickening thing, had happened. All the father’s care and worry and training had gone for naught. Nathan had taken up with a girl!