“Why don’t you come up to the hall, nights?” asked Durgin, accosting him on the street, one afternoon.  “You’d run a chance of hearing me hold forth some of these evenings.”

“You’ve answered your own question, William.  I shouldn’t like to see you making an idiot of yourself.”

“This is a square fight between labor and capital,” returned Durgin with dignity, “and every man ought to take a hand in it.”

“William,” said Stevens meditatively, “do you know about the Siamese twins?”

“What about ’em,—­they’re dead, ain’t they?” replied Durgin, with surprise.

“I believe so; but when they was alive, if you was to pinch one of those fellows, the other fellow would sing out.  If you was to black the eye of the left-hand chap, the right-hand chap wouldn’t have been able to see for a week.  When either of ’em fetched the other a clip, he knocked himself down.  Labor and capital is jined just as those two was.  When you’ve got this fact well into your skull, William, I shall be pleased to listen to your ideas at Grimsey’s Hall or anywhere else.”

Such conservatism as Stevens’s, however, was necessarily swept out of sight for the moment.  The wealthier citizens were in a state bordering on panic,—­all but Mr. Lemuel Shackford.  In his flapping linen duster, for the weather was very sultry now, Mr. Shackford was seen darting excitedly from street to street and hovering about the feverish crowds, like the stormy petrel wheeling on the edges of a gale.  Usually as chary of his sympathies as of his gold, he astonished every one by evincing an abnormal interest in the strikers.  The old man declined to put down anything on the subscription paper then circulating; but he put down his sympathies to any amount.  He held no stock in the concerns involved; he hated Slocum, and he hated the directors of the Miantowona Iron Works.  The least he hoped was that Rowland Slocum would be laid out.

So far the strikers had committed no overt act of note, unless it was the demolition of Han-Lin’s laundry.  Stubbs, the provision dealer, had been taught the rashness of exposing samples of potatoes in his door-way, and the “Tonsorial Emporium” of Professor Brown, a colored citizen, had been invaded by two humorists, who, after having their hair curled, refused to pay for it, and the professor had been too agitated to insist.  The story transpiring, ten or twelve of the boys had dropped in during the morning, and got shaved on the same terms.  “By golly, gen’l’men!” expostulated the professor, “ef dis yah thing goes on, dis darkey will be cleaned cl’ar out fo de week’s done.”  No act of real violence had been perpetrated as yet; but with bands of lawless men roaming over the village at all hours of the day and night, the situation was critical.