Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

20 PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY going to do that — on one condition : That you drop this talk of a strike. Will you forget it, and wait till I have tried to intercede for you with the directors of the road?" By a cheer, the men signified their willingness to do so. The whistle blew, marking the end of the noon hour, and they scattered to their work, while Stoddard walked back to the one-story wooden house where he lived with his young sister Edith, to prepare for the trip to the city he had promised the workingmen he would take in their interests to see Van Nest. "I'll be back on the job again this evening," Stoddard told Edith reassuringly, as he kissed her good-by. "Don't worry about me, young un, while I'm gone." Mr. Van Nest was indisposed, and had not come down to his office that day Stoddard learned when he arrived there. The railroad president was to be found at his home, where he had called a directors' meeting in his library for half past three o'clock that afternoon, and Stoddard turned his steps in the direction of the capitalist's house. There, at the moment, Van Nest's only daughter, Janet, was taking leave of her fiance, Kenneth Stuyvesant, a young society man who was about to depart with his crack regiment for its annual summer encampment near the Waybrun Valley. "I like you in your uniform, Ken," she told him, "because for the first time you look as though you could do something !" Laughing over the remark, which was in keeping with others she had been making of late upon the fact of his idleness, Kenneth took his departure. A moment later, Janet entered the drawing-room— and stopped short. A strange young man, in an ill-fitting, greasestained suit of clothes, was sitting there. John Stoddard rose from the chair he had been bidden to take by the servant who had gone to the library to inform Van Nest of his arrival at the millionaire's residence. "I am Miss Van Nest," Janet announced formally. "Whom are you waiting to see?" "Your father," smiled John. "My name's Stoddard — I'm the contracting engineer who's building his new bridge out at Waybrun Valley, you know." Janet's manner instantly thawed. "Oh !" she exclaimed with a laugh, urging him by a gesture to resume his seat. "I didn't even know my father was building a new bridge." The servant returned at that moment to inform John that Mr. Van Nest would see him in the library at once. On his way to the door, the young man looked back over his shoulder and gravely nodded at his employer's beautiful daughter. "You ought to come out and see what we're doing some time," he advised her. Janet stood looking after him, a glow of admiration in her eyes for the strength his figure had plainly displayed. He looked as though he could do something, she thought; as though doing something was as necessary to his existence as breathing. She glanced around at the luxury by which she was surrounded, by not a single effort of her own, and her lip curled contemptuously. "Yes," she murmured, looking again toward the door through which John Stoddard had gone, "I think I will come and see what you are doing!" In the library, John made his plea for a raise in the workingman's pay to Van Nest and the directors of the road who were assembled there. He tried to make them see that a dollar and twentyfour cents a day was not a living wage for a man with a family. It would mean nothing individually to any of the capitalists if they were to grant an increase to the men, who were toiling for them, of only a few cents a day apiece. But he soon saw that all his words were but words to his hearers, and he broke off abruptly : "If I can't appeal to your sense of fairness, gentlemen, then let me try another way to persuade you to grant this increase in wages. The men are thoroughly dissatisfied ; they want better pay for their jobs, or — they don't want the jobs. They're talking of striking already. My advice to you is to grant them the increase they want, in order to see your bridge constructed on time. If you refuse, I warn you that there's likely to be trouble." "You can take care of that, all right," snapped Van Nest, from the head of the table. "It's what we pay you for. The men don't get a cent more. That's settled." Stoddard bowed and withdrew. With a sick heart, not alone because his mission had failed, but because he knew what its failure meant to the men in whose behalf he had made his plea for the raise in wages to which. they were fairly entitled, he returned to the construction camp, and there, in his shack, received a delegation of three workingmen, who were headed by Lavinsky. As the committee turned to depart, after hearing from Stoddard that the directors had refused to grant the increase in pay, the agitator charged : "You're standin' in with them yourself! It was all a bluff about your askin' for a raise in wages for us — you didn't fool me with it to-day, anyhow. I told the men how this would turn out. And now I'm goin' to tell 'em somethin' else, too !" Lavinsky was as good as his word. What he told the workingmen, at a meeting to which he called them all within the next half hour, was that they had just one hope left of getting the increase in wages they wanted — by striking, and tying up the work on the bridge until their demands were granted. It was put to a vote. And the decision to strike was carried unanimously. On the following day, Janet Van Nest proposed to her Aunt Sarah — who lived with her father and her — that they motor out to Waybrun Valley to pay Kenneth a call at the camp of his regiment. But when they reached the construction camp beside the uncompleted bridge, Janet ordered the chauffeur to stop. "I think I'll pay Mr. Stoddard a call, auntie," she informed her chaperon. "He's the chief engineer who's building this bridge for daddy, you remember, that I met at the house yesterday. You can wait here in the car for me — I won't be long." But that, as it turned out, was a gross misstatement of fact. An hour and a half passed, while Aunt Sarah sat in the motor car and Stoddard was showing Janet around the work and into some of the houses of the workingmen, so, as he phrased it, "she could see how the people live who put the money in your father's pockets by their labor." Janet was interested in all the young man showed her — but, frankly, more interested in the young man himself. She contrasted himself and his work with her fiance and his idle life. It was not a comparison that resulted flatteringly to Mr. Kenneth Stuyvesant. That young gentleman, just as Janet was leaving the last of the workingmen's shacks she had visited with Stod