The Thessaly Manufacturing Company, which concerned a much larger number of workmen, stood on a somewhat different footing. Mechanics who knew men who were friendly with Schuyler Tenney learned in a roundabout fashion that he really had been forced into closing the mills by the action of the Minster women. When you came to think of it, this seemed very plausible. Then the understanding sifted about among the men that the Minsters were, in reality, the chief owners of the Manufacturing Company, and that Tenney was only a business manager and minor partner, who had been overruled by these heartless women. All this did not make friends for Tenney. The lounging workmen on the street comers eyed him scowlingly when he went by, but their active hatred passed him over and concentrated itself upon the widow and daughters of Stephen Minster. On occasion now, when fresh rumors of the coming of French Canadian workmen were in the air, very sinister things were muttered about these women. Before the lockout had been two days old, one of the State officers of a labor association had visited Thessaly, had addressed a hastily convened meeting of the ejected workmen, and had promised liberal assistance from the central organization. He had gone away again, but two or three subordinate officials of the body had appeared in town and were still there. They professed to be preparing detailed information upon which their chiefs could act intelligently. They had money in their pockets, and displayed a quite metropolitan freedom about spending it over the various bars. Some of the more conservative workmen thought these emissaries put in altogether too much time at these bars, but they were evidently popular with the great bulk of the men. They had a large fund of encouraging reminiscence about the way bloated capitalists had been beaten and humbled and brought down to their knees elsewhere in the country, and they were evidently quite confident that the workers would win this fight, too. Just how it was to be won no one mentioned, but when the financial aid began to come in it would be time to talk about that. And when the French Canadians came, too, it would be time--The rest of this familiar sentence was always left unspoken, but lowering brows and significant nods told how it should be finished. So completely did this great paralytic stroke to industry monopolize attention, that events in the village, not immediately connected with it, passed almost unnoticed. Nobody gave a second thought, for example, to the dissolution of the law firm of Tracy & Boyce, much less dreamed of linking it in any way with the grand industrial drama which engaged public interest.