Still, he was grateful for peace.  The strike dragged on, with only occasional acts of violence.  From the hill above Baxter a sniper daily fired with a long range rifle at the toluol tank in the center of one of the mills, and had so far escaped capture, as the tank had escaped damage.  But he knew well enough that a long strike was playing into the hands of the Reds.  It was impossible to sow the seeds of revolution so long as a man’s dinner-pail was full, his rent paid, and his family contented.  But a long strike, with bank accounts becoming exhausted and credit curtailed, would pave the way for revolution.

Old Anthony had had a drastic remedy for strikes.

“Let all the storekeepers, the country over, refuse credit to the strikers, and we’d have an end to this mess,” he said.

“We’d have an end to the storekeepers, too,” Howard had replied, grimly.

One good thing had come out of the bomb outrages.  They had had a salutary effect on the honest labor element.  These had no sympathy with such methods and said so.  But a certain element, both native and foreign born, secretly gloated and waited.

One thing surprised and irritated Howard.  Public sentiment was not so much with the strikers, as against the mill owners.  The strike worked a hardship to the stores and small businesses dependent on the great mills; they forgot the years when the Cardews had brought them prosperity, had indeed made them possible, and they felt now only bitter resentment at the loss of trade.  In his anger Howard saw them as parasites, fattening on the conceptions and strength of those who had made the city.  They were men who built nothing, originated nothing.  Men who hated the ladder by which they had climbed, who cared little how shaky its foundation, so long as it stood.

In September, lured by a false security, the governor ordered the demobilization of the state troops, save for two companies.  The men at the Baxter and Friendship plants, owned by the Cardews, had voted to remain out, but their leaders appeared to have them well in hand, and no trouble was anticipated.  The agents of the Department of Justice, however, were still suspicious.  The foreigners had plenty of money.  Given as they were to hoarding their savings in their homes, the local banks were unable to say if they were drawing on their reserves or were being financed from the outside.

Shortly before the mayoralty election trouble broke out in the western end of the state, and in the north, in the steel towns.  There were ugly riotings, bombs were sent through the mails, the old tactics of night shootings and destruction of property began.  In the threatening chaos Baxter and Friendship, and the city nearby, stood out by contrast for their very orderliness.  The state constabulary remained in diminished numbers, a still magnificent body of men but far too few for any real emergency, and the Federal agents, suspicious but puzzled, were removed to more turbulent fields.