F. Hopkinson Smith

“ As he hurried over the road he recalled the face of Grogan's foreman, a big blond Swede, and that of Grogan's daughter, a slender fair-haired girl, who once came to the office for her father's pay; but all efforts at reviving the lineaments of Grogan failed. With this fact clear in his mind, he felt a tinge of disappointment. It would have relieved his temper to unload a portion of it upon the offending stevedore. Nothing cools a man's wrath so quickly as not knowing the size of the head he intends to hit. ”

“ He had never known an adjuster in his life.
“What's that?” asked Tom, still looking square at him, Quigg squirming under her glance like a worm on a pin.
“Well, the company can't tell how much feed was in the bins, and tools, and sech like,” he said, with another laugh.
A laugh is always a safe parry when a pair of clear gray search-light eyes are cutting into one like a rapier. ”

“ When Jennie tripped out Quigg started forward. The look on his face, as with swinging shoulders he slouched beside her, sent a thrill of indignation through Carl. He could give her up, perhaps, if Tom insisted, but never to a man like Quigg. Before the walking delegate had “passed the time of day,” the young sailor was close beside Jennie, within touch of her hand.
There was no love lost between the two men. Carl had not forgotten the proposition Quigg had made to him to leave Tom's employ, nor had Quigg forgotten the uplifted shovel with which his proposal had been greeted. ”

“ Dempsey's eyes glistened, a half-sigh of relief escaping him. Crimmins had not moved; the apparition stunned him.
On she came, her eyes fixed on the president, till she reached the table. Then she steadied herself for a moment, took a roll of papers from her dress, and sank into a chair.
No one spoke. The crowd pressed closer. Those outside the rail noiselessly mounted the benches and chairs, craning their necks. Every eye was fixed upon her.
Slowly and carefully she unrolled the contract, spreading it out before her, picked up a pen from the table, and without a word wrote her name. ”

“ Tom threw open the door and felt along the sill for the lantern and matches. They were not in their accustomed place. The man crouched, ran noiselessly toward the rear entrance, and crept in behind a stall. Tom laid her hand on the haunches of the horse and began rolling back his blanket. The man drew himself up slowly until his shoulders were on a level with the planking. Tom moved a step and turned her face. The man raised his arm, whirled a hammer high in the air, and brought it down upon her head.
When Cully led the Big Gray into his stall, a moment later, he stepped into a pool of blood. ”

“ Suddenly the little fellow gave a cry of terror and slid from the porch, trailing the shawl after him, his crutch jerking over the ground, his sobs almost choking him.
“Mammy! Cully! Stumpy's tied in the loft! Oh, somebody help me! He's in the loft! Oh, please, please!”
In the roar of the flames nobody heard him. The noise of axes beating down the burning fences drowned all other sounds. At this moment Tom was standing on a cart, passing up the buckets to Carl. Cully had crawled to the ridge-pole of the tool-house to watch both sides of the threatened roof. ”

“ Carl's budding hopes had been slightly nipped by the cold look in Tom's eye when she asked him if it took an hour to give Jennie a tattered apron. With some disappointment he noticed that except at rare intervals, and only when Tom was at home, he was no longer invited to the house. He had always been a timid, shrinking fellow where a woman was concerned, having followed the sea and lived among men since he was sixteen years old. ”

“ So Stumpy roamed through yard, kitchen, and stable, stalking over bleaching sheets, burglarizing the garden gate, and grazing wherever he chose.
The goat inspired no fear in anybody else. Jennie would chase him out of her way a dozen times a day, and Cully would play bullfight with him, and Carl and the other men would accord him his proper place, spanking him with the flat of a shovel whenever he interfered with their daily duties, or shying a corn-cob after him when his alertness carried him out of their reach. ”

“ During all this time Cully was watching the dying embers, and when all danger was over,—only the small stable with its two horses had been destroyed,—he led the Big Gray back to the pump, washed his head, sponging his eyes and mouth, and housed him in the big stable. Then he vanished.
Immediately on leaving the Big Gray, Cully had dodged behind the stable, run rapidly up the hill, keeping close to the fence, and had come out behind a group of scattering spectators. ”

“ Brother Knight Crimmins waved his hand to the speaker. “Just leave 'er to me, Dan,” he said, and started for Tom's house. Crimmins was delighted with his mission. He felt sure of bringing back her application within an hour. Nothing ever pleased him so much as to work a poor woman into an agony of fright with threats of the Union. Wives and daughters had often followed him out into the street, begging him to let the men alone for another week until they could pay the rent. Sometimes, when he relented, the more grateful would bless him for his magnanimity. ”

“ Babcock rose hurriedly, as this anxiety again took possession of him, and leaned over the deck-rail, scanning the sky. He did not like the drift of the low clouds off to the west; southeasters began that way. It looked as though the wind might change.
Some men would not have worried over these possibilities. Babcock did. He was that kind of man.
When the boat touched the shore, he sprang over the chains, and hurried through the ferry-slip.
“Keep an eye out, sir,” the bridge-tender called after him,—he had been directing him to Grogan's house,—“perhaps Tom may be on the road.” ”

“ In the open, elevators rose high as church steeples; long lines of canal-boats stretched themselves out like huge water-snakes, with hissing tugs for heads; enormous floats groaned under whole trains of cars; big, burly lighters drifted slowly with widespread oil-stained sails; monster derricks towered aloft, derricks that pick up a hundred-ton gun as easily as an ant does a grain of sand—each floating craft made necessary by some special industry peculiar to the port of New York, and each unlike any other craft in the harbor of any other city of the world. ”

“ Jennie always liked him with his throat bare; it reminded her of a hero she had once seen in a play, who stormed a fort and rescued all the starving women.
“Da brown horse seek; batta come to stabble an' see him,” Carl said, going direct to the porch, where he stood in front of Tom, resting one hand on his hip, his eyes never wandering from her face. He knew where Jennie was, but he never looked.
“What's the matter with him?” asked Tom, her thoughts far away at the moment.
“I don' know; he no eat da oats en da box.”
“Will he drink?” said Tom, awakening to the importance of the information. ”

“ Losing this contract, he had lost his only hope of paying them. Had it been awarded him, he could have found a dozen men who would have loaned him the money to take up these notes and so to pay Crane. He had comforted himself the night before with the thought that Justice Rowan could find some way to help him out of his dilemma; that the board would vote as the justice advised, and then, of course, Tom's bid would be invalidated. Now even this hope had failed him. “Whoever heard of a woman's doing a job for a city?” he kept repeating mechanically to himself. ”

“ Once she so far relaxed her rules in regard to Jennie's lover as to send for Carl to come to the house after supper, questioning him closely about the upper rigging of a new derrick she had seen. Carl's experience as a sailor was especially valuable in matters of this kind. He could not only splice a broken “fall,” and repair the sheaves and friction-rollers in a hoisting-block, but whenever the rigging got tangled aloft he could spring up the derrick like a cat and unreeve the rope in an instant. ”

“ McGaw's tempting promise made a deep impression upon Crimmins. He determined then and there to inflict some blow on Tom Grogan from which she could never recover. He was equally determined on one other thing—not to be caught.
Early the next morning Crimmins stationed himself outside O'Leary's where he could get an uninterrupted view of two streets. He stood hunched up against the jamb of O'Leary's door in the attitude of a corner loafer, with three parts of his body touching the wood—hip, shoulder, and cheek. ”

“ They must look out for themselves coming home late at night. At the brewery strike, two years before, hardly a day passed that some of the non-union men were not beaten into insensibility.
That night Carl came back again to the porch door, and in his quiet, earnest way said: “We have t'ink 'bout da Union. Da men not go—not laik da union man. We not 'fraid”—tapping his hip-pocket, where, sailor-like, he always carried his knife sheathed in a leather case.
Tom's eyes kindled as she looked into his manly face. ”

“ In this emergency McGaw again sought Crimmins's assistance. He urged the importance of his getting the contract, and he promised to make Crimmins foreman on the street, and to give him a share in the profits, if he would help him in some way to get the work now. The first step, he argued, was the necessity of crushing Tom. Everything else would be easy after that. Such a task, he felt, would not be altogether uncongenial to Crimmins, still smarting under Tom's contemptuous treatment of him the day he called upon her in his capacity of walking delegate. ”

“ The Union, in their deliberations, insisted that it was the “raised bid” which had ruined the business with McGaw and for them. It was therefore McGaw's duty to spare no effort to prevent her signing the contract. They had stuck by him in times gone by; he must now stick by them. One point was positively insisted upon: Union men must be employed on the work, whoever got it.
McGaw, however, was desperate. He denounced Tom in a vocabulary peculiar to himself and full of innuendoes and oaths, but without offering any suggestion as to how his threats against her might be carried out. ”

“ So when Patsy came limping up the garden path this morning, rubbing his eyes, his voice choking, and the tears streaming, and, burying his little face in Cully's jacket, poured out his tale of insult and suffering, that valiant defender of the right pulled his cap tight over his eyes and began a still-hunt through the tenements. ”

“ He could hardly believe the voice to be Tom's.
The judge looked at her with a quick, penetrating glance, which broadened into an expression of kindly interest when he read her entire honesty in her face. Then he turned to the president of the board.
“When you awarded this contract, whom did you expect to do the work, Mrs. Grogan or her husband?”
“Mrs. Grogan, of course. She has done her own work for years,” answered the president.
The judge tapped the arm of his chair with his pencil. The taps could be heard all over the room. Most men kept quiet in Bowker's presence, even men like Rowan. ”

“ The Scotchman was on his feet in an instant.
“I have listened,” he said, “to the talk that Justice Rowan has given us. It's very fine and tonguey, but it smothers up the facts. You can't rob this woman”—
“Question! question!” came from half a dozen throats.
“What's your pleasure, gentlemen?” asked the president, pounding with his gavel.
“I move,” said the courier member, “that the contract be awarded to Mr. Daniel McGaw as the lowest bidder, provided he can sign the contract to-night with proper bonds.” ”

“ Carl had to shield his face with his sleeve as he threw the water. Cully lay flat on the shingles, holding to the steaming blankets, and directing Carl's buckets with his outstretched finger when some greater spark lodged and gained headway. If they could keep these burning brands under until the heat had spent itself, they could perhaps save the tool-house and the larger stable.
All this time Patsy had stood on the porch where Tom had left him hanging over the railing wrapped in Jennie's shawl. He was not to move until she came for him: she wanted him out of the way of trampling feet. ”

“ Then it suddenly occurred to Babcock that, so far as he could remember, he had never seen Mr. Thomas Grogan, his stevedore. He knew Grogan's name, of course, and would have recognized his signature affixed to the little cramped notes with which his orders were always acknowledged, but the man himself might have passed unnoticed within three feet of him. This is not unusual where the work of a contractor lies in scattered places, and he must often depend on strangers in the several localities. ”

“ When this was propped up with a barrel stave it made a counter from which to pay the men, the paymaster standing inside.
Babcock was sitting on a keg of dock spikes inside this working shanty some days after he had discovered Tom's identity, watching his bookkeeper preparing the pay-roll, when a face was thrust through the square of the window. It was not a prepossessing face, rather pudgy and sleek, with uncertain, drooping mouth, and eyes that always looked over one's head when he talked. It was the property of Mr. Peter Lathers, the yardmaster of the depot. ”

“ Now, haul out, Cully, and let that other team back up.”
Babcock pushed open the door in the fence and stepped in. A loaded scow lay close beside the string-piece of the government wharf. Alongside its forward hatch was rigged a derrick with a swinging gaff. The “fall” led through a snatch-block in the planking of the dock, and operated an iron bucket that was hoisted by a big gray horse driven by a boy. A gang of men were filling these buckets, and a number of teams being loaded with their dumped contents. The captain of the scow was on the dock, holding the guy. ”

“ She had helped many of the men who, three years before, had been driven out of work by the majority vote of the Carpenters' Union, and who dared not go back and face the terrible excommunication, the social boycott, with all its insults and cruelties. She shuddered as she thought again of her suspicions years ago when the bucket had fallen that crushed in her husband's chest, and sent him to bed for months, only to leave it a wrecked man. ”

“ As Babcock stepped aside to let the boy pass he heard Cully shouting in answer to the little cripple's cries. “Cheese it, Patsy. Here's Pete Lathers comin' down de yard. Look out fer Stumpy. He'll have his dog on him.”
Patsy laid down the pail and crept through the door again, drawing the crutch after him. The yardmaster passed with a bulldog at his heels, and touching his hat to the contractor, turned the corner of the coal-shed.
“What is your name?” said Babcock gently. A cripple always appealed to him, especially a child. ”

“ A child's head appeared above the floor, followed by a cry of joy as the boy flung himself upon the straining rope. The next instant a half-frenzied goat sprang through the open door and landed in the yard below in the midst of the startled men and women. ”