The Rainy Day Railroad War. Holman Day
of the embankment. “Nice! Good! All good to eat. But they want mucha more—too mucha!”
He struck himself repeated blows on the breast with one fist and pointed with the other hand at the men who came swarming up the side of the graded road bed.
“You coma look—look to the nice br-read, meat all good, beer—plenty much to eat, dr-rink!” the padrone gasped in appeal, as he circled about Parker to put him between the rioters and himself.
The men who came after, screaming and cursing, jerking their arms above their heads, rolling back their lips from their yellow teeth, were apparently so many lunatics whose frenzy was not to be stayed. But undisciplined natures whose excesses spring from lack of self control are all the more ready to respond to the masterful control of others.
First of all the men recognized in Parker the champion who had won their first rights from the padrone.
They stopped their shrill vituperation and, crowding about him, began to bleat their explanations and appeals. But he threw out his arms, pushed them back a safe distance from the panting Dominick and roared them into silence, brandishing his fists, as he would have quelled a noisy school.
When they understood that he wished them to be quiet they were silent, all leaning forward, their eyes shining, their lips apart, their fists clinched as tho they were holding their tongues in leash by that means, their dark, brown faces alight with wistful, almost palpitating eagerness. The regard they fixed on his face was baleful in its intentness.
“Looka what they do,” yelled Dominick rushing to his side. He had stripped his sleeve back from his arm. Blood was trickling from a knife gash.
Then the tumult broke out again from the crowd. Two men leaped forward shaking their hats in their hands and screaming assertions and pointing quivering fingers at bullet holes in the crowns.
“Shut up!” barked the young man. The presence of the satiric and unsympathetic old engineer nerved him to settle the dispute, if he might. The hint from the other that he had been meddling in what was outside his business gave him an uncomfortable sense of responsibility.
“About face and back to the camp,” he shouted. “I will look at your dinner and we shall see!”
They hesitated a moment, but he went among them, pushing them down the bank.
He followed with the padrone behind the jabbering throng, and the two engineers came along at his earnest request.
“Mr. Searles,” said Parker after a little while, as they walked side by side, “being an older and wiser man than I am you are probably right in suggesting that I did wrong in interfering in this affair at the outset. But,” he half-chuckled, “I am going to lay the blame on my professor in sociology. He set me to thinking pretty hard in college and I guess I haven't been out from under his influence long enough to get hardened into the selfish views of my fellowman.”
There was earnestness under his smile.
“My boy,” said the elder, “I am not blaming you for what you have done for the poor devils. But I have been all for business in my life. Business hasn't seemed to mix well with philanthropy. I haven't dared to think of what I ought to do. I have thought only of what I had to do, to earn a living for my family.”
“Well,” said Parker, “if the P. K. & R. folks decide that I've been meddling in matters that are none of my business I have no family to suffer for my indiscretion—but I have prospects and I know that a discharged man is worse off than a man who has started.”
The elder man patted Parker's arm.
“As it stands now—and I'm speaking as a friend, young man, and not as a captious critic—you have set this Italian camp all askew by giving them countenance in the first place. They haven't any regulators in their heads, you see! When you're feeding charity to that kind of ruck you've got to be careful Parker, that they don't trample you down when they rush for the trough.”
The young man walked along up the hillside in silence. But just as they arrived in front of the long camp the scowl of puzzled hesitation disappeared from his forehead.
“As old Uncle Flanders used to say,” he muttered, “'When a man sticks his finger into a tight knot-hole he'd better pull it out mighty quick, before it swells, even if he does leave some skin on the edges.'”
The men halted and grouped themselves about the door. Their eager looks and nudgings of each other showed plainly that they expected their champion to take up their cause against the padrone once more.
Dominick prudently halted at a little distance.
“You go look for yourself, Sir Engineer,” he shouted; “on the kettle, in the table all about and you see whatta I feed to those beasts when I try to satisfy.”
The men retorted in shrill chorus leaping about and gesticulating till their joints snapped.
Parker resolutely pushed through the throng without trying to understand what they were saying to him and slammed the door in the faces of the few who attempted to crowd in with him. Those who anxiously peered through the windows saw him examine the food set out on the table for the noon meal, lift the covers from the stew pans on the rusty stove and then pass into the little building behind the main camp. The great stone ovens for the bread-baking were located there.
When at last he came out he faced them with grim visage, squared the shoulders that had borne many a football assault and called to Dominick.
“Go inside,” he said, “and coax those two helpers of yours out of those ovens. They couldn't understand my Italian. Tell them that they are safe. Let the padrone through, men! Do you hear?”
The crowd sullenly parted and Dominick trotted up the lane they left, hastening with apprehensive shruggings of his shoulders.
“Go about your work,” said Parker, clutching his arm a moment as the padrone hastened past. “I can see it isn't your fault this time.”
“Now, men,” he cried, turning to the throng, “few words and short so that you may all understand. Dominick's dinner is good. Good as any in the line boarding camps. I'm going to eat here. You come in and eat too.”
A mumbling began among them and immediately it swelled into a jabbering chorus as the few who understood translated his words to the others.
He leaped down off the muddy stoop and strode among them, cuffing this one and that of those malcontents who were noisiest.
“That young man certainly understands dago nature,” muttered Searles to the other engineer. “A club, good grit and a hard fist will drive them when a machine gun wouldn't.”
“I stood up for you when you were not used right,” shouted the young man. “He has given you what I told him to give you—what you asked for. Go in there and get it.”
He knew who the ring-leaders in the mutiny were and he drove those into the camp first. The others followed. In five minutes they were all at their places at table munching quietly. Another man, even with equal determination, might have not succeeded. But the greediest grumbler among them understood that this young man had first been as valiant to secure their rights as he was now ready to curb their rebellion.
In his own heart he was loathing this role of arbiter and mentor. His first interference had come out of his natural sense of justice. He had pitied this herd of men who had been so helplessly appealing against their wrongs.
As he stood at one end of the room now and gazed at them, he realized with a little pang of self-reproach that his latest exploit had been prompted by as much of a desire to set himself right with the company as to square the padrone's critical case.
Later, when they were trudging down the hill together Searles said with a little touch of malice,
“For a philanthropist, Parker, you seem to relish rough-house about as well as any one I ever saw, I've heard for a long time that football makes prizefighters