Then the
widow, with her children about her, had been put aboard another
sloop that was going back to her old home. Tom remembered, as if
it were yesterday, the heap of furniture and little pile of
kitchen things sold under the red flag outside the store near the
post-office.
She had seen, too, the suffering and misery of her neighbors
during the long strike at the brewery two years before, and the
moving in and out from house to tenement and tenement to shanty,
with never a day's work afterward for any man who left his job.
She had helped many of the men who, three years before, had been
driven out of work by the majority vote of the Carpenters' Union,
and who dared not go back and face the terrible excommunication,
the social boycott, with all its insults and cruelties. She
shuddered as she thought again of her suspicions years ago when
the bucket had fallen that crushed in her husband's chest, and
sent him to bed for months, only to leave it a wrecked man. The
rope that held the bucket had been burned by acid, Dr. Mason said.
Some grudge of the Union, she had always felt, was paid off then.
She knew what the present trouble meant, now that it was started,
and she knew in what it might end. But her courage never wavered.
She ran over in her mind the names of the several men who were
fighting her--McGaw, for whom she had a contempt; Dempsey and
Jimmie Brown, of the executive committee, both liquor-dealers;
Paterson, foreman of the gas-house; and the rest--dangerous
enemies, she knew.
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