When Thessaly awoke one morning some fortnight later, and rubbed its eyes, and, looking again, discovered in truth that everything outside was white, the recognition of the familiar visitor was followed by a sigh. The children still had a noisy friendliness of greeting for the snow, and got out their sleds and bored anticipatory holes in their boot-heels with a thrill of old-time enthusiasm; but even their delight became subdued in its manifestations before noon had arrived—their elders seemed to take the advent of winter so seriously. Villagers, when they spoke to one another that morning, noted that the voice of the community had suddenly grown graver in tone and lower in pitch. The threat of the approaching season weighed with novel heaviness on the general mind.

For the first time since the place had begun its manufacturing career, Thessaly was idle. The Minster furnaces had been closed for more than two weeks; the mills of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company, for nearly that length of time. Half the bread-winners in the town were out of work and saw no prospect of present employment.

Usage is most of all advantageous in adversity; These artisans of Thessaly lacked experience in enforced idleness and the trick of making bricks without straw. Employment, regular and well requited, had become so much a matter of course that its sudden cessation now bewildered and angered them. Each day brought to their minds its fresh train of calamitous consequences. Children needed shoes; the flour-barrel was nearly empty; to lay in a pig for the winter might now be impossible. The question of rent quarter loomed black and menacing like a thunder-cloud on the horizon; and there were those with mortgages on their little homes, who already saw this cloud streaked with the lightning of impending tempest. Anxious housewives began to retrench at the grocer’s and butcher’s; but the saloons and tobacco shops had almost doubled their average of receipts.

Even on ordinary holidays the American workman, bitten as he is with the eager habitude of labor, more often than not some time during the day finds himself close to the place where at other times he is employed. There his thoughts are: thither his steps all unconsciously bend themselves. So now, in this melancholy, indefinite holiday which November had brought to Thessaly, the idlers instinctively hung about the deserted works. The tall, smokeless chimneys, the locked gates, the grimy windows—through which the huge dark forms of the motionless machines showed dimly, like the fossils of extinct monsters in a museum—the dreary stretches of cinder heaps and blackened waste which surrounded the silent buildings—all these had a cruel kind of fascination for the dispossessed toilers.

They came each day and stood lazily about in groups: they smoked in taciturnity, told sardonic stories, or discussed their grievance, each according to his mood; but they kept their eyes on the furnaces and mills whence wages came no more and where all was still. There was something in it akin in pathos to the visits a mother pays to the graveyard where her child lies hidden from sight under the grass and the flowers. It was the tomb of their daily avocation that these men came to look at.

But, as time went on, there grew to be less and less of the pathetic in what these men thought and said. The sense of having been wronged swelled within them until there was room for nothing but wrath. In a general way they understood that a trust had done this thing to them. But that was too vague and far-off an object for specific cursing. The Minster women were nearer home, and it was quite clear that they were the beneficiaries of the trust’s action. There were various stories told about the vast sum which these greedy women had been paid by the trust for shutting down their furnaces and stopping the output of iron ore from their fields, and as days succeeded one another this sum steadily magnified itself.

The Thessaly Manufacturing Company, which concerned a much larger number of workmen, stood on a somewhat different footing. Mechanics who knew men who were friendly with Schuyler Tenney learned in a roundabout fashion that he really had been forced into closing the mills by the action of the Minster women. When you came to think of it, this seemed very plausible. Then the understanding sifted about among the men that the Minsters were, in reality, the chief owners of the Manufacturing Company, and that Tenney was only a business manager and minor partner, who had been overruled by these heartless women. All this did not make friends for Tenney. The lounging workmen on the street comers eyed him scowlingly when he went by, but their active hatred passed him over and concentrated itself upon the widow and daughters of Stephen Minster. On occasion now, when fresh rumors of the coming of French Canadian workmen were in the air, very sinister things were muttered about these women.

Before the lockout had been two days old, one of the State officers of a labor association had visited Thessaly, had addressed a hastily convened meeting of the ejected workmen, and had promised liberal assistance from the central organization. He had gone away again, but two or three subordinate officials of the body had appeared in town and were still there. They professed to be preparing detailed information upon which their chiefs could act intelligently. They had money in their pockets, and displayed a quite metropolitan freedom about spending it over the various bars. Some of the more conservative workmen thought these emissaries put in altogether too much time at these bars, but they were evidently popular with the great bulk of the men. They had a large fund of encouraging reminiscence about the way bloated capitalists had been beaten and humbled and brought down to their knees elsewhere in the country, and they were evidently quite confident that the workers would win this fight, too. Just how it was to be won no one mentioned, but when the financial aid began to come in it would be time to talk about that. And when the French Canadians came, too, it would be time—The rest of this familiar sentence was always left unspoken, but lowering brows and significant nods told how it should be finished.

So completely did this great paralytic stroke to industry monopolize attention, that events in the village, not immediately connected with it, passed almost unnoticed. Nobody gave a second thought, for example, to the dissolution of the law firm of Tracy & Boyce, much less dreamed of linking it in any way with the grand industrial drama which engaged public interest.

Horace, at the same time, took rooms at the new brick hotel, the Central, which had been built near the railroad depot, and opened an office of his own a block or two lower down Main Street than the one he had vacated. This did not attract any special comment, and when, on the evening of the 16th of November, a meeting of the Thessaly Citizens’ Club was convened, fully half those who attended learned there for the first time that the two young lawyers had separated.
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