Jimmie Higgins eBook

And next morning at the shop, more excitement!  It was four years now that Jimmie had been in the employ of old man Granitch, and in all that time he had done but one thing; standing in a vast room amid a confusion of whirling belts and wheels, a roar and screech and grumble and whirl that completely annulled one of the five senses.  There came in front of him, mechanically propelled, a tray full of small oblong blocks of steel, which he fed, one with each hand, into two places in a machine; the machine took these blocks, and rounded off one end, and ground the rest a little smaller, and put a thread on it, and it dropped into a tray on the other side, a bolt.  Because Jimmie had to watch the machine, and keep the oil-cups full, his was classed as semi-skilled labour, and was paid nineteen and a half cents an hour.  Some time ago an expert had studied the process, and figured that with labour at that price it was one-eighth of a cent per hour cheaper to have the work done by hand than to instal a machine to do it; and so for four years Jimmie had his job, standing on one spot from seven to twelve, and again from twelve-thirty to six, and carrying home every Saturday night the sum of twelve dollars and twenty-nine cents.  You might have thought that the huge machine-works would have made it twelve-thirty for good measure; but if so, you do not understand large scale production.

And now, all of an instant and without warning, Jimmie’s precisely ordered and habitual world came to an end.  He was at his post when the whistle blew, but the machinery did not move.  And presently came the Irish foreman with the curt announcement that the machinery would never move again, at least not on that spot; it was to be cleared out of the way, and new machinery set up, and they were to fall to forthwith with wrenches and hammers and crow-bars to make a new world!

So for a week they did; and meantime, every night as he went home, Jimmie saw people’s homes being wrecked—­roofs falling in clouds of dust, and gangs of men loading the debris into huge motor-trucks.  Before long they had got acetylene torches, and were working all night-gangs of labourers who lived in tents on vacant lots outside the city and kept their canvas cots warm with double shifts of sleepers.  Jimmie Higgins realized the dreadful truth, that in spite of all the agitation of Socialists, the war had actually come to Leesville!

CHAPTER IV

JIMMIE HIGGINS STRIKES IT RICH

I

It was some time before Jimmie understood the nature of the new machinery he was helping to set up.  It was nobody’s business to explain, for he was only a pair of hands and a strong back; he was not supposed to be a brain—­while as for a soul or a conscience, nobody was supposed to be that.  Russian agents had come to Leesville with seventeen millions of the money which the Paris bankers had put up; and so overnight whole blocks of homes were swept out of existence, and a huge new steel structure was rising, and on the spot where for four years Jimmie had made certain motions of the hands, they were preparing to manufacture new machinery for the quantity production of shell-casings.