he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim did not lack energy, and his
employer's shop was filled with work demanding attention. For a week both
he and Joe had been returning to their work benches every evening. Jim
wanted to come because some driving influence within made him love the
thought of keeping the work always on the move, and Joe because Jim made
him come.

Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that
evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the
superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought
on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not
organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred
the town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fifty or
sixty men had decided to quit. "We won't work for a fellow like Ed Hall,"
they declared. "He sets a scale of prices and then, when we have driven
ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts the scale."
Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and two or three of
them, developing unexpected eloquence, began delivering speeches on street
corners. On the next day the strike spread and for several days the shop
had been closed. Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day
of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were
to be brought in.

And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into
the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and
McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were
being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a
man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the
corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained
factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or