nd had secretly offered the millowners a scale of demands
in the hope that a sufficient number of operatives would return to
work, and so break the strike; a serious riot was barely averted.
"Scab-hunting agencies," the unions were called. One morning when it
was learned that the loom-fixers, almost to a man, had gone back to the
mills, a streetcar was stopped near the power house at the end of
Faber Street, and in a twinkling, before the militia or police could
interfere, motorman, conductor, and passengers were dragged from it and
the trolley pole removed. This and a number of similar aggressive acts
aroused the mill-owners and their agents to appeal with renewed vigour
to the public through the newspapers, which it was claimed they owned or
subsidized. Then followed a series of arraignments of the strike leaders
calculated to stir the wildest prejudices and fears of the citizens
of Hampton. Antonelli and Jastro--so rumour had it--in various nightly
speeches had advised their followers to "sleep in the daytime and prowl
like wild animals at night"; urged the power house employees to desert
and leave the city in darkness; made the declaration, "We will win if
we raise scaffolds on every street!" insisted that the strikers, too,
should have "gun permits," since the police hirelings carried arms. And
the fact that the mill-owners replied with pamphlets whose object was
proclaimed to be one of discrediting their leaders in the eyes of the
public still further infuriated the strikers. Such charges, of course,
had to be vehemently refuted, the motives behind them made clear, and
counter-accusations laid at the door of the mill-owners.

The atmosphere at Headquarters daily grew more tense. At any moment the
spark might be supplied to precipitate an explosion that would shake the
earth. The hungry, made more desperate by their own sufferings or the
spectacle of starving families, were increasingly difficult to control:
many wished to return to work, others clamoured for violence, nor were
these wholly discouraged by a portion of the leaders. A riot seemed
imminent--a riot Antonelli feared and firmly opposed, since it would
alienate the sympathy of that wider public in the country on which the
success of the strike depended. Watchful, yet apparently unconcerned,
unmoved by the quarrels, the fierce demands for "action," he sat on the
little stage, smoking his cigars and reading his newspapers.

Janet's nerves were taut. There h