day during the strike, and twenty-five a week after it was settled.
So our friend got a pair of "slaughter-pen" boots and "jeans," and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing-beds—a throng of stupid black negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollowchested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening stench of fresh blood—and all struggling to dress a dozen or two of cattle in the same place where, twenty-four hours ago, the old killinggang had been speeding, with their marvellous precision, turning out four hundred carcasses every hour!
The negroes and the "toughs" from the Levée did not want to work, and every few minutes some of them would feel obliged to retire and recuperate. In a couple of days Durham and Company had electric fans up to cool off the rooms for them, and even couches for them to rest on; and meantime they could go out and find a shady corner and take a "snooze," and as there was no place for any one in particular, and no system, it might be hours before their boss discovered them. As for the poor office employees, they did their best, moved to it by terror; thirty of them had been "fired" in a bunch that first morning for refusing to serve, besides a number of women clerks and typewriters who had declined to act as waitresses.
It was such a force as this that Jurgis had to organize. He did his best, flying here and there, placing them in rows and showing them the tricks; he had never given an order in his life before, but he had taken enough of them to know, and he soon fell into the spirit of it, and roared and stormed like any old stager. He had not the most tractable pupils, however. "See hyar, boss," a big black "buck" would begin, "ef you doan' like de way Ah does dis job, you kin git somebody else to do it." Then a crowd would gather and listen, muttering threats. After the first meal nearly all the steel knives had been missing, and now every negro had one, ground to a fine point, hidden in his boots.
