Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/327

 Yet even up to this time there had been those who took the news quite calmly, young clerks in stores who owned nothing, workmen on the docks and in the mills who owned no real property nor hoped to. The land was still there, wasn't it? The stores still stood—and the mills. Somebody owned them—somebody would pay wages. So at the first it was only the propertied classes who were greatly excited beyond curiosity. But the unpropertied began to see that their self-interest was affected also. With values unsettled, business would be unstable; there would be less money to buy with, fewer goods to be purchased and fewer clerks needed to sell them; less work, less prosperity, less. . . It took not more than two hours for everybody to understand that this was everybody's calamity; that from the top scum to the bottom slime nobody in Socatullo County was immune. No logs from the hills meant no wages for taking them out; no lumber from the mills meant no wages for turning logs into dimension-stuff that went into the holds and onto the decks of ships; and no wages meant—starvation! And that is property catastrophe reduced to its final and inevitable terms.

Starvation! The mass thought of hunger makes for panic. Nobody had given the order to close Schuler's; it just closed. So with the other business places. And the same thing was happening on the docks; longshoremen dropped their hooks and slings swung empty from the booms of ships. It was happening in the very mills themselves. Saws turned and there were none to feed them, endless chains rattled but bore no grist of logs nor of lumber; suction pipes wheezed no streams of sawdust to the incinerators.