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.

The club at last had secured a building for itself—or rather the refusal of one—and this meeting was called to decide upon ratifying the purchase. It was held in a large upper room of the building under discussion, which had been the gymnasium of a German Turn Verein, and still had stowed away in its comers some of the apparatus that the athletes had used.

When Horace, as president, called the gathering to order, there were some forty men present, representing very fairly the business and professional classes of the village. Schuyler Tenney was there as one of the newer members; and Reuben Tracy, with John Fairchild, Dr. Lester, Father Chance, and others of the founders, sat near one another farther back in the hall.

The president, with ready facility, laid before the meeting the business at hand. The building they were in could be purchased, or rented on a reasonably extended lease. It seemed to the committee better to take it than to think of erecting one for themselves—at least for the present. So much money would be needed: so much for furniture, so much for repairs, etc.; so much for heating and lighting, so much for service, and so on—a very compact and lucid statement, indeed.

A half hour was passed in more or less inconclusive discussion before Reuben Tracy rose to his feet and began to speak. The story that he and Boyce were no longer friends had gone the round of the room, and some men turned their chairs to give him the closer attention with eye and ear. Before long all were listening with deep interest to every word.

Reuben started by saying that there was something even more important than the question of the new building, and that was the question of what the club itself meant. In its inception, the idea of creating machinery for municipal improvement had been foremost. Certainly he and those associated with him in projecting the original meeting had taken that view of their work. That meeting had contented itself with an indefinite expression of good intentions, but still had not dissented from the idea that the club was to mean something and to do something. Now it became necessary, before final steps were taken, to ask what that something was to be. So far as he gathered, much thought had been given as to the probable receipts and expenditure, as to where the card-room, the billiard-room, the lunch-room, and so forth should be located, and as to the adoption of all modern facilities for making themselves comfortable in their new club-house. But about the original objects of the club he had not heard a syllable. To him this attitude was profoundly unsatisfactory. At the present moment, the village was laboring under a heavy load of trouble and anxiety. Nearly if not quite a thousand families were painfully affected by the abrupt stoppage of the two largest works in the section. If actual want was not already experienced, at least the vivid threat of it hung over their poorer neighbors all about them. This fact, it seemed to him, must appeal to them all much more than any conceivable suggestion about furnishing a place in which they might sit about at their ease in leisure hours. He put it to the citizens before him, that their way was made exceptionally clear for them by this calamity which had overtaken their village. If the club meant anything, it must mean an organization to help these poor people who were suddenly, through no fault of their own, deprived of incomes and employment. That was something vital, pressing, urgent; easy-chairs and billiard-tables could wait, but the unemployed artisans of Thessaly and their families could not.

This in substance was what Reuben said; and when he had finished there succeeded a curious instant of dead silence, and then a loud confusion of comment. Half a dozen men were on their feet now, among them both Tenney and John Fairchild.

The hardware merchant spoke first, and what he said was not so prudent as those who knew him best might have expected. The novel excitement of speaking in public got into his head, and he not only used language like a more illiterate man than he really was, but he attacked Tracy personally for striving to foment trouble between capital and labor, and thereby created an unfavorable impression upon the minds of his listeners.

Editor Fairchild had ready a motion that the building be taken on a lease, but that a special committee be appointed by the meeting to devise means for using it to assist the men of Thessaly now out of employment, and that until the present labor crisis was over, all questions of furnishing a club-house proper be laid on the table. He spoke vigorously in support of this measure, and when he had finished there was a significant round of applause.

Horace rose when order had been restored, and speaking with some hesitation, said that he would put the motion, and that if it were carried he would appoint such a committee, but——

“I said ‘to be appointed by the meeting’!” called out John Fairchild, sharply.

The president did not finish his sentence, but sat down again, and Tenney pushed forward and whispered in his ear. Two or three others gathered sympathetically about, and then still others joined the group formed about the president, and discussed eagerly in undertones this new situation.

“I must decline to put the motion. It does not arise out of the report. It is out of order,” answered Horace at last, as a result of this faction conference.

“Then I will put it myself,” cried Fairchild, rising. “But I beg first to move that you leave the chair!” Horace looked with angered uncertainty down upon the men who remained seated about Fairchild. They were as thirty to his ten, or thereabouts. He could not stand up against this majority. For a moment he had a fleeting notion of trying to conciliate it, and steer a middle course, but Tenney’s presence had made that impossible. He laid down his gavel, and, gathering up his hat and coat, stepped off the platform to the floor.

“There is no need of moving that,” he said. “I’ll go without it. So far as I am concerned, the meeting is over, and the club doesn’t exist.”

He led the way out, followed by Tenney, Jones the match-manufacturer, the Rev. Dr. Turner, and five or six others. One or two gentlemen rose as if to join the procession, and then thinking better of it sat down again.

By general suggestion, John Fairchild took the chair thus vacated, but beyond approving the outlines of his plan, and appointing a committee with Tracy at its head to see what could be done to carry it out, the meeting found very little to do. It was agreed that this committee should also consider the question of funds, and should call a meeting when it was ready to report, which should be at the earliest possible date.

Then the meeting broke up, and its members dispersed, not without well-founded apprehensions that they had heard the last of the Thessaly Citizens’ Club.