“Well, it’s an interesting theory,” Insall admitted indulgently.

“I’m merely amplifying your suggestions, only you won’t admit that they are yours.  And she was your protegee.”  “And you are going to take her off my hands.”  “I’m not so sure,” said Mrs. Maturin.

CHAPTER XIX

The Hampton strike had reached the state of grim deadlock characteristic of all stubborn wars.  There were aggressions, retaliations on both sides, the antagonism grew more intense.  The older labour unions were accused by the strikers of playing the employers’ game, and thus grew to be hated even more than the “capitalists.”  These organizations of the skilled had entered but half-heartedly into a struggle that now began to threaten, indeed, their very existence, and when it was charged that the Textile Workers had been attempting to secure recruits from the ranks of the strikers, and 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.