with his unrelaxing
laugh, "I left enough strikers for the situation in Greenboro; don't
you worry about me."

"I think he done quite right to quit the strike if he got a chance
to work," Joseph Atkins interposed. "Folks have got to look out for
themselves, labor reform or no labor reform."

"That's the corner-stone of labor reform, seems to me," said Andrew.

"Seems to me sometimes you talk like a damned scab," cried Nahum
Beals, fiercely, red spots flickering in his thin cheeks. Andrew
looked at him, and spoke with slow wrath. "Look here, Nahum Beals,"
he said, "you're in my house, but I ain't goin' to stand no such
talk as that, I can tell you."

John Sargent laid a pacifically detaining hand on Nahum Beals's arm
as he strode past him. "Oh, Lord, stop rampagin' up and down like a
wildcat," he said. "What good do you think you're doin' tearin' and
shoutin' and insultin' people? He ain't talkin' like a scab, he's
only talkin' a tie to your string-piece."

"That's so," said Joseph Atkins. Sargent boarded with him, and the
board money was a godsend to him, now he was out of work. John
Sargent had fixed his own price, and it was an unheard-of one for
such simple fare as he had. His weekly dollars kept the whole poor
family in food. But John Sargent was a bachelor, and earning
remarkably good wages, and Joseph Atkins's ailing wife, whom illness
and privation had made unnaturally grasping and ungrateful, told her
cronies that it wasn't as if he couldn't afford it.

Up-stairs little Ellen lay in her bed, her doll in her arms,
listening to the low rumble of masculine voices in the room below.
Her mother had gone out, and there were only the men there. They
were smoking, and the odor of their pipes floated up into Ellen's
chamber through the door-cracks. She thought how her grandmother
Brewster would sniff when she came in next day. She could hear her
saying, "Well, for my part, if those men couldn't smoke their old
pipes somewhere else besides in my sittin'-room, I wouldn't have 'em
in the house." But that reflection did not trouble Ellen very long,
and she had never been disturbed herself by the odor of the pipes.
She thought of them insensibly as the usual atmosphere when men were
gathered together in any place except the church. She knew that they
were talking about that old trouble, and Nahum Beals's voice of high
wrath made her shrink; but, after all, she was removed from it all
that night into a little prospec