The Forbidden Trail Part 4

Ole laughed. "Your father's got you bluffed too, Rog."

"You'll see!" returned Roger, through his white teeth. "You'll see." And he started abruptly for home.

The first week of September slipped into the second. The night of the fourteenth, John Moore said at the supper table, "I bought the old Preble place, to-day. Traded in this place for it, so we'll have that free and clear out of the wreck."

"What do you mean?" faltered Mrs. Moore.

"What I say," he snapped. "The Russian contract has been canceled. Money never was so tight in thirty years as it is now. Wolf says he thinks there's a panic coming, and so does the bank. I can't borrow a cent more. I'm through with my fling, Alice, and I'm going back to a farm."

Roger choked a little on his tea. His mother said, unsteadily, "John dear, if going back to the farm brings you back to me, I shall thank G.o.d for the strike."

Roger's father scowled at his wife for a moment, then suddenly something, perhaps the gentleness of her voice and the sweetness of her eyes, caused him to push his chair back and going around to her side to kneel with his head against her shoulder.

Roger slipped out of the room, blowing his nose. He went into the back yard and sat scowling at the swimming pool until he heard the front door click on his father, then he went to bed.

The following day when Roger went into the office, his father's coat was hanging on the accustomed hook, but his father was not there. Vaguely alarmed, Roger started a search through the factory. His alarm proved unfounded, for he discovered his father in the little building that had been the original factory. He looked up when Roger came in.

"Look, Rog," he said. "I'd like to take this old machine up to the farm with us. We could store it somewhere. It's the first machine--the one I started business with."

Roger nodded but could not speak. Moore looked around the room.

"Well, I've had a good run for my hard work," he said, bitterly. "An old man at fifty and a worn out farm to spend my old age on."

"You've got Mother and me. And why don't you start again, Father? I'd help."

"I'm too old, Roger. I've lost my vim. We'll close the shop, to-day. A man's coming up from Chicago to buy in the machinery."

A half hour later, Moore posted a great sign on the office door. "This factory goes out of business to-day." Then with the various keys of the buildings in his pocket, he went home. Roger hung about to see how the men took the news.

By noon, the two hundred employees of the factory with many of their wives and children were gathered in the factory yard. At first they seemed cynically amused by what they called Moore's bluff. By mid-afternoon, however, after repeated a.s.surances from Roger that his father was going to be a farmer, the crowd became surly. A strange man got up and made a speech. He said that capitalists like Moore should be destroyed, that men such as he were a menace to America. Roger, standing by Ole's side, saw suddenly in his inner mind his father's gray head on his mother's shoulder.

"You lie, you dirty anarchist!" he roared, and heaved a brick at the speaker's head.

There was an uproar. Some one helped the speaker wipe the blood out of his eyes and tied his head up, while Ole pinned both Roger's arms behind him.

"They say that's Moore's boy threw that brick," cried the speaker. "Come up here, you h.e.l.l cat, and show yourself to these downtrodden workmen."

"Let me go, Ole," said Roger, with sudden calm. "I want to say something."

Ole looked into Roger's blue eyes. "All right," he said, after a moment, "only if you get mad again, I can't answer for this crowd. They're sore."

"I'm all right," muttered Roger, and he pushed his way to the office steps where the speaker stood. "Here I am," he cried; "what about it?"

"Here he is," roared the stranger, pulling Roger round to face the crowd. "If he tries murder now, what'll he do when he has a factory of his own?"

Roger thrust his trembling hands into his trousers pockets. "Don't you think it!" he shouted. "What do I want of a factory? To let a crowd of ignoramuses like you ruin me--just out of ignorance and envy? Not on your life! My father's going onto a farm and I'm going with him. I hope you're all satisfied."

"Farm!" sneered the stranger. "Why, he'll have a bunch of scabs up here to-morrow. I know Moore!"

What Roger might have said, one cannot know, for at that moment a man drove up in an automobile and shouldered his way up to the office door.

He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket as he mounted the steps.

"Who are you?" asked Roger. "I'm Mr. Moore's son!"

"I'm Mr. Wrench of Chicago. Trouble serious?"

"No," replied the boy. "Just a lot of hot air."

"One moment please," said the strange speaker. "There'll be serious trouble here if some questions aren't answered. What is your business here?"

"I'm to see to the dismantling of the factory," answered Mr. Wrench, indifferently.

A long breath seemed to rise from the listening crowd. Automatically it broke up into little groups and the best efforts of the strike leaders could not pull it together again. Roger felt that the excitement was all over and he made his way slowly home.

At midnight that night a terrific explosion shook the little town of Eagle's Wing. Roger had not finished pulling on his clothes when the fire bells began to ring. He caught his father rus.h.i.+ng out of the front door. Ernie and his father joined them and they followed other hurrying groups toward the factory.

It was all ablaze, as well as several of the workmen's houses, which with the main factory building had been demolished by the explosion.

Everybody asked questions at once and a hundred pairs of hands tried to help unreel the hose and bring it to bear on the main blaze.

"Turn on the water!" shouted a fireman.

"No! No!" roared a voice, and a man in his unders.h.i.+rt rushed up and tried to tear the hose away from those that directed it. It was Oscar.

"No! Let her burn! Let her burn! We'll show that infernal hound of a Moore if he can take our chances away from us!"

"Oh, then 'twas you!" cried Moore, and he leaped for Oscar.

A dozen men sprang to pull them apart, but Roger was there first. He hung onto his father in desperate silence, while others pulled Oscar away. Mr. Wolf and Ernest followed the Moores as Roger led the way to a seat on a heap of debris.

"There, old friend, there!" said Wolf. "Don't take it so hard! I know! I know! If it was my store it would break the heart of me. But we cannot break. We cannot."

Roger kept his hand on his father's shoulder. Moore rested his head on his hand and said nothing.

"It's all right, Daddy! You walloped him a good one," said Roger.

"His old snoot was all over his face," added Ernest in a cheerful voice.

"Hush, boys, come away for a little bit," said Mr. Wolf. And he led the two back toward the hose. But Roger would not go far. He loitered behind lest some one should molest that silent figure on the heap of debris.

All the vicinity was brilliant with firelight. And standing waiting thus he saw a sight that he never was to forget. It was his father, bowing his head on a piece of the twisted, wrecked machinery--the machinery into which he had put the pa.s.sionate hopes and dreams of his manhood.

And moving nearer lest some one else should see, Roger saw that his father was sobbing as if indeed his heart was broken.

That picture was to direct the entire course of Roger's life. For it never left him. And at first it filled his boyish mind with such bitterness that he could not hear of labor and its strivings and troubles without seeing red.

But as the years on the farm slipped by and the atmosphere of compet.i.tion and of feverish ambition gave place to the sweet silences, the quiet plodding, the placid sureness of farm living, the bitterness gave way to a dream.

Gradually Roger ceased to blame the factory workmen who had destroyed his father, or to blame his father for the egotism and selfishness that had driven his employees into reckless stubbornness. He saw behind both the urge of the inevitable, unquenchable desire of human beings for happiness; for the happiness that comes only when men have sufficient leisure in which to expand their minds and souls.

And as he grew older and read deeper it seemed to him that the solution lay only indirectly in any system of government. It seemed to him that until man had learned how to use directly and freely the power sources of nature, inequalities of wealth would always persist. And he had learned in one bitter lesson that unhappiness and economic inequality go hand in hand.