The workingmen had sensed now the astounding significance of the news and the impulse to labor was paralyzed; they went out—to see about it.
The engineers heard this and turned off the power. They too went out. Silent, barn-like with only here and there the whirl of a wheel, the rhythmic exhaust of a jet of steam that itself seemed to pant discouraged: "What's the use! What's the use!" Those great hives of industry, for the first time unproducing, became huge cavernous solitudes.
But there was nothing of solitude about the streets of Edgewater. In front of the Blade office and about the corner by the First National they were a-jam and more or less a-rumble, the crowd more excited and excitable with every moment. Inflaming rumors flew about; nobody had all the information; some got fragments of it very vividly.
"What's it mean, Andy?" shouted one man, hopelessly wedged in a thick growth of shoulders, to an acquaintance who, peering from the vantage of a barrel, was getting a close-up of the latest bulletin.
"It just means our titles are gone—plumb gone—that's what!"
"Gone where?"—incredulously.
"Gone to thirty or forty dirty Indians. That's who we've been working for, fellows—a bunch of mangy bucks and rheumatic old squaws, and the guy that put us to work for 'em, that made us do it, was old John Boland."
The crowd was doubly, triply incensed: incensed because he whom they had venerated as a god had turned out a gigantic gambler; incensed because he had let the town grow and thrive in confidence when he
