ould be installed. Peter tried to find out how these accidents
had happened, but each line of investigation led up a blind alley. Jesse
Brown, his foreman, seemed to be loyal, but he was easy-going and weak.
With many of his own friends among the workers both at the camp and
mills he tried to hold his job by carrying water on both shoulders and
the consequences were inevitable. He moved along the line of least
resistance and the trouble grew. Peter saw his weakness and would have
picked another man to supersede him, but there was no other available.
The truth was that though the men's wages were high for the kind of work
that they were doing, the discontent that they had brought with them was
in the air. The evening papers brought word of trouble in every
direction, the threatened railroad and steel strikes and the prospect of
a coalless winter when the miners went out as they threatened to do on
the first of November.

At first Peter had thought that individually many of the men liked him.
He had done what he could for their comfort and paid them the highest
price justifiable, but gradually he found that his influence was being
undermined and that the good-natured lagging which Peter had at first
tried to tolerate had turned to loafing on the job, and finally to overt
acts of rebellion. More men had been sent away and others with even less
conscience had taken their places. Some of them had enunciated
Bolshevist doctrines as wild as any of Flynn's or Jacobi's. Jonathan K.
McGuire stood as a type which represented the hierarchy of wealth and
was therefore their hereditary enemy. Peter in a quiet talk at the
bunk-house one night had told them that once Jonathan K. McGuire had
been as poor, if not poorer, than any one of them. But even as he spoke
he had felt that his words had made no impression. It was what McGuire
was _now_ that mattered, they told him. All this land, all this lumber,
was the people's, and they'd get it too in time. With great earnestness,
born of a personal experience of which they could not dream, Peter
pointed out to them what had happened and was now happening in Russia
and painted a harrowing picture of helplessness and starvation, but they
smoked their pipes in silence and answered him not at all. They were
not to be reasoned with. If the Soviet came to America they were willing
to try it. They would try anything once.

But Shad Wells was "canny" and Peter had never succeeded in tracing any
of t