At length all agreed to strike, and the whistle in the shops was set shrieking its dismal protest. The men swarmed into the building, where each got together his kit of tools. They were quite jolly now, and laughed and jested a good deal. Presently they were streaming off up-town, with their coats over their arms, and the strike was on.
An unusual stillness fell on the yards and in the shops. The belts, as they swept on and on in endless revolutions, cut this stillness with a sharp, incisive hiss. The machinery seemed to hammer at it, as if to beat out some lasting echo. Then, gradually, the volume of sound lessened. It mumbled to a dotage of decreasing force, and then everything stopped with a sudden jar. The shops had shut down.
McClintock came from the office and entered the works, pulling the big doors to after him. He wanted to see that all was made snug. He cursed loudly as he strode through the deserted building. It was the first time since he had been with the road that the shops had been closed, and it affected him strangely.
The place held a dreadful, ghostly inertness. The belts and shafting, with its innumerable cogs and connections, reached out like the heavy-knuckled tentacles of some great, lifeless monster. The sunlight stole through the broken, cobwebbed windows, to fall on heaps of rusty iron and heaps of dirty shavings.
In the engine-room he discovered Smith Roberts and his assistant, Joe Webber, banking the fires, preparatory to leaving. They were the only men about the place. Roberts closed a furnace-door with a bang, threw down his shovel, and drew a grimy arm across his forehead.
"Did you ever see such a lot of lunkheads, Milt? I'll bet they'll be kicking themselves good and hard before they get to the wind-up of this."
McClintock looked with singular affection at the swelling girths of iron which held the panting lungs of the monster the men had doomed to silence, and swore his most elaborate oath.
"No, I never did, Smith. You'd think they had money to burn the way they chucked their job."
"When do you suppose I'll get a chance to build steam again?"
"Oakley says we won't start up before the first of September."
THE first weeks of the strike slipped by without excitement. Harvest time came and went. A rainless August browned the earth and seared the woods with its heat, but nothing happened to vary the dull monotony. The shops, a sepulchre of sound, stood silent and empty. General Cornish, in the rôle of the avenger, did not appear on the scene, to Oakley's discomfiture and to the joy of the men. A sullen sadness rested on the town. The women began to develop shrewish tempers and a trying conversational habit, while their husbands squandered their rapidly dwindling means in the saloons. There was large talk and a variety of threats, but no lawlessness.