Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/135

124 the valley, growing thicker and thicker with each new day of breathless atmosphere, depressed and blended with the weight and filth of smoke. At mid-day the sun was only a pale white disk overhead at which one might stare as harmlessly as at the moon. In the morning Floyd groped his way down the hill toward a void of clamor and sound; at nightfall, when he climbed the hill, the flames and illuminations that gave usually a splendor to New Rome, compensating for the squalor of its day, were blotted out by the damp murkiness, and again out of the invisible rang the harsh noises of the mills. These were more piercing, more continuous than ever; the locomotives, pushing or pulling their little trains with a slow caution, were sending up always their shrill whistles—in spite of which warnings there were two accidents during the week, two Italian laborers caught and run down between trains. An accident always caused a feeling of sullenness in the works; this was now intensified by the gloom of the weather and the increased discomfort of the conditions; the thick and acrid smoke that would not rise, the floating particles of grime that clogged one's breathing-passages, the chill dampness, worse than wind, worse than rain, that greeted the man who went sweating from his furnace to draw a breath of air. But worst of all was the oppression caused by the strange, imperfect sun in the sky, appearing hazily day after day, only to disappear vanquished by the clammy night. Some of the ignorant and superstitious foreigners found portents in this feeble inability of the sun, and stopped work; others went about their tasks cowed and afraid. Among the intelligent there was sullenness without fear, rebellion without animus, a hatred of the work itself, divorced, it seemed, from any feeling against their superiors or against the necessity that compelled them to such work. And in these days and nights the movement to "unionize" the mills advanced as it had not done in a whole month of summer.

Floyd was aware of the changing spirit; the men with