“You mean—­”

“Exactly what I say.”

“But—­you don’t understand the business.  Who is going to run it while you learn?”

“I don’t want to know how this business was run.  It’s not going to be run that way. ...  There’s nothing you could teach me, Mr. Hangar. ...  Good afternoon.”

Rangar went white with rage.  Animosity toward this young man he had harbored since the beginning; it flowered into hatred.  But he dared not voice it.  It was not in Hangar’s nature to be open, to fight without cover.  If he spoke, the check for six months’ salary might be withdrawn, so, uttering none of the venom that flooded to his lips, he went away. ...  Rangar was the sort of man who vows to get even. ...

That evening Bonbright sat in his window and watched the army of his employees surge out of the big gate and fill the street.  Five thousand of them. ...  It was a sight that always fascinated him, as it had that first evening when he saw them, and came to a realization of what it meant to be overlord to such a multitude.  More than ever he realized it now—­for he was their overlord.  They were his men.  It was he who gave them the work that kept them alive; he who held their happiness, their comfort, their very existence in the hollow of his hand. ...  And he knew that in every one of those five thousand breasts burned resentment toward him.  He knew that their most friendly feeling toward him was suspicion.

It was easy to rebuild a plant; it was simple to construct new mills with every device that would make for efficiency.  That was not a problem to awe him.  It needed but the free expenditure of money, and there was money in plenty. ...  But here was a task and a problem whose difficulty and vastness filled him with misgiving.  He must turn that five thousand into one smooth-running, willing whole.  He must turn their resentment, their bitterness, their suspicion, into trust and confidence.  He must solve the problem of capital and labor. ...  An older, more experienced man might have smiled at Bonbright—­at his daring to conceive such a possibility.  But Bonbright dared to conceive it; dared to set himself the task of bringing it about.

That would be his work, peculiarly.  No one could help him with it, for it was personal, appertaining to him.  It was between Bonbright Foote and the five thousand.

It was inevitable that he should feel bitterness toward his father, for, but for his father, his work would now be enormously more simple.  If these men knew him as he was-knew of his interest in them, of his willingness to be fair-he would have had their confidence from the start.  His father had made him appear a tyrant, without consideration for labor; had made him a capitalist of the most detestable type.  It was a deep-seated impression.  It had been proven.  The men had experienced it; had felt the weight of Bonbright’s ruthless hand. ...  How could he make them believe it was not his hand?  How could he make them believe that the measures taken to crush the strike had not been his measures; that they had been carried out under his name but against his will?  It sounded absurd even to himself.  Nobody would believe it.