ther times Janet had seen him overrule them ruthlessly;
humiliate them. There were days when things went wrong, when there were
delays, complications, more matters to attend to than usual. On one such
day, after the dinner hour, Mr. Orcutt entered the office. His long, lean
face wore a certain expression Janet had come to know, an expression that
always irritated Ditmar--the conscientious superintendent having the
unfortunate faculty of exaggerating annoyances by his very bearing.
Ditmar stopped in the midst of dictating a peculiarly difficult letter,
and looked up sharply.

"Well," he asked, "what's the trouble now?"

Orcutt seemed incapable of reading storm signals. When anything happened,
he had the air of declaring, "I told you so."

"You may remember I spoke to you once or twice, Mr. Ditmar, of the talk
over the fifty-four hour law that goes into effect in January."

"Yes, what of it?" Ditmar cut in. "The notices have been posted, as the
law requires."

"The hands have been grumbling, there are trouble makers among them. A
delegation came to me this noon and wanted to know whether we intended to
cut the pay to correspond to the shorter working hours."

"Of course it's going to be cut," said Ditmar. "What do they suppose?
That we're going to pay 'em for work they don't do? The hands not paid by
the piece are paid practically by the hour, not by the day. And there's
got to be some limit to this thing. If these damned demagogues in the
legislature keep on cutting down the hours of women and children every
three years or so--and we can't run the mill without the women and
children--we might as well shut down right now. Three years ago, when
they made it fifty-six hours, we were fools to keep up the pay. I said so
then, at the conference, but they wouldn't listen to me. They listened
this time. Holster and one or two others croaked, but we shut 'em up. No,
they won't get any more pay, not a damned cent."

Orcutt had listened patiently, lugubriously.

"I told them that."

"What did they say?"

"They said they thought there'd be a strike."

"Pooh! Strike!" exclaimed Ditmar with contemptuous violence. "Do you
believe that? You're always borrowing trouble, you are. They may have a
strike at one mill, the Clarendon. I hope they do, I hope Holster gets it
in the neck--he don't know how to run a mill anyway. We won't have any
strike, our people understand when they're well off, they've got all the
work they can do