"How's the business, father?"

The question brought them perilously near what each had in mind. Perhaps one word of daring would have broken down the pride of their mutual obstinacy. Mr. Crocker growled out:

"Business is mighty shaky. Your precious Wall Street and politics have got every one scared to death. Mighty lucky we'll be if a crash doesn't hit us."

Had Bojo defended himself, the father might have reopened the question of his entering the mills; but he didn't, and after a few minutes of indefinite seeking for an opening Mr. Crocker went off as abruptly as he had come.

The next morning Bojo, to end this depressing period of inactivity, made a resolve to accept any opportunity, no matter how humble the salary, and went down to see Mr. Stoughton to ask him for the chance to start at the bottom. Skeeter received him with the same cordiality as before, but access to the father was not to be had that day. In desperation he sat down and wrote his request. Two days later he received his answer in the evening mail.

Mr. Thomas Crocker.

Dear Tom:

Please forgive any delay due to press of business. Just at present there is no vacancy, and frankly I would not advise you to take the step even if there were. I know you are young and impatient to be at work again, but I can not but feel that you would not be happy in making such a radical move, particularly when at any moment the opportunity you are looking for may turn up.

Cordially yours, J. N. STOUGHTON.

Granning came in as he was sitting by the wastebasket and slowly tearing this letter into minute shreds.

"h.e.l.lo, young fellow--what luck?"

"I think I'm on," said Bojo, slowly, feeling all at once shelved and abandoned. "The last thing people downtown have any use for, Granning, is a busted broker!"

"You have found that out, have you?" said Granning quickly.

Bojo nodded.

"Well, you're right." He sat down. "See here, old sport, why don't you do the thing you ought to do?"

"What's that?"

"Go down and see the old man and tell him you're ready to start for the mills to-morrow!"

"No, no, I can't do that."

"You want to do it, at heart. It's only pride that's keeping you."

"Perhaps, but that pride means a lot to me," said Bojo doggedly. "Never!

I'm not going to him a failure. So shut up about that."

"Well, what are you going to do?"

Bojo began to whistle, looking out the window.

"Suppose I were to offer you a job over at the factory?"

"Would you?" said Bojo, looking up with a leaping heart.

"That means starting in on rock bottom--as I did. Up at six, there at seven--beginning as a day laborer on a beautifully oily and smudgy blanking machine among a bunch of Polacks."

"Will you give me a chance?" said Bojo breathlessly.

"Will you stick it out?"

"You bet I will!"

"Done!"

And they shook hands with a resounding smack that seemed to explode all Bojo's pent-up feelings.

"All right, young fellow," said Granning with a grin. "To-morrow we'll find out what sort of stuff you're made of!"

CHAPTER XXI

BOJO IN OVERALLS

The day he entered the employ of the Dyer-Garnett Caster and Foundry Company was like an open door into the wonderland of industry. The sun, red and wrapped in dull mists, came stolidly out of the east as they crossed the river in the unearthly grays, with electric lights showing in wan ferry-boats. When they entered the factory a few minutes before seven, the laborers were pa.s.sing the time-clocks, punching their tickets, Polack and Saxon, Hun and American, Irish and Italian, the men a mixture of slouchy, unskilled laborers and keen, strong mechanics, home-owners and thinkers, the women of rather a higher cla.s.s, bright-eyed, deft, with a prevailing instinct for coquetry.

In the offices Dyer, lanky New Englander, engineer and inventor, and Garnett, the president, self-made, simple and shrewd, both in their shirt sleeves, gave him a cordial welcome. Unbeknown to Bojo, Granning had given a flattering picture of his future destination as heir apparent to the famous Crocker mills and his progressive desire for preliminary experience in factories that were handling problems of labor-saving along modern lines.

"Glad to meet you," said Garnett, gripping his hand. "Mr. Granning tells me you want to see the whole scheme from the bottom up. It's not playing football, Mr. Crocker."

"Hope not," said Bojo with a smile. "It's very good of you to give me an opportunity."

"Don't know how you'll feel about it after a couple of weeks. I'll get Davy--that's my son--to show you around. We're doing some things here you'll be interested in. Mr. Dyer's just installed some very pretty machines. Davy'll put you onto the ropes--he's just been through it.

That's a great plant of your father's--went through it last year.

Nothing finer in the country."

He found young Garnett a boy of twenty, just out of high-school, alert, eager, and stocked with practical knowledge. The morning he spent in exploration was a revelation. In his old prejudice against what he had confusedly termed business he had always recoiled as before a leveling process, stultifying to the imagination, a thing of mechanical movements and disciplined drudgery. He found instead his imagination leaping forward before the spectacle of each succeeding regiment of machines, before the teeming of progress, of the constant advance toward the harnessing of iron and steel things to the bidding of the human mind.

Cars were being switched at the sidings, unloading their cargoes of coiled steel; other cars were receiving the completed article, product of a score of intricate processes, stamped, turned, a.s.sembled, and hammered together, plated, lacquered, burnished, and packed for distribution. He had but a confused impression at first of these rooms of tireless wheels, automatic feeders and monstrous weights that sliced solid steel like paper. The noises deafened him: the sandy, grinding whirl of the tumbling room, the colliding shock of the blanking machines, the steel hiss of the burnishers--deafening voices that in the ensuing months were to become articulate utterances to his informed ears, songs of triumph, prophetic of a coming age.

In the burnishing-room grotesque human and inhuman arms reached down from a central pipe to the poisonous gases of the miniature furnaces.

"Granning's idea," said young Garnett. "Carries off the fumes. This room was a h.e.l.l before. Now it's clean and safe as a garden. Here's a machine the Governor's just installed--does the work of six women. Isn't it a beauty?"

Bojo looked beyond it to the cl.u.s.tered groups of women by long counters piled with steel parts, working rapidly at slow, intricate processes of a.s.sembling.

"I suppose you'll get a machine some day to do all that too," he said.

"Sure. Wherever you see more than two at a job there's something to be done. Look here." They stood by a couple of swarthy Polack women, who were placing tiny plugs in grooves on round surfaces to be covered and fastened with ball-bearing casters. "Looks pretty tough proposition to get out of those fingers. We've worked two years at it, but we'll get them yet. It's the slug shape that makes it hard; the simple ball-bearings were a cinch. Here's how we worked that out."

A machine was under Bojo's eyes that caught the open roller and plunged it into a circular arena, where from six converging gates steel b.a.l.l.s were released and fell instantly into place, a fraction of a second before the upper cover, descending, was fixed and hammered down.