SARTWELL, as he had written to his daughter and telegraphed to Barney Hope, found himself very busy, now the men had come back. Although he dismissed none who had taken part in the strike, he rearranged, with a dogged ruthlessness, the whole service of the works. Few men got their old jobs back again, or their old wages. There were promotions and retrogradations, although no one was discharged. At first it seemed to the men that this was a mere brutal display of power, presided over by wanton caprice, but as time went on they began to see the glimmering of a method in the weaving of the web. Those who were degraded to the meanest and most poorly paid work the firm had to offer were the men who had been most hot-headed in bringing on the strike, and the most persistent in opposing its conclusion. The soberer heads among the men, who had been thrust into the background during the agitation, were in every instance given promotion and higher pay; and as these changes took place one after another--for Sartwell was not the man to disorganize the works by any sweepingly radical changes--the general conclusion was that the manager merely desired to show the men that those whom they had valued lightly were the workmen whom he prized. Yet it could not be denied, even by those who lost in the game of reorganization, that the more conservative men thus advanced were among the most capable workmen in the factory. They were the men who had most to lose by a strike, and had naturally been most reluctant to enter into a contest the end of which no one could foresee. By-and-by it began to be suspected that the manager must have in his possession a complete and accurate record of every action and speech during the strike, so entirely did his shifting about of the pawns, which he played with such cool and silent relentlessness, coincide with the doings of each piece during the trouble they thought was past and hoped had been forgotten. In some instances it seemed as if Sartwell had deliberately marked the contrast by bringing the degraded and the elevated into purposeful juxtaposition, so that his design in showing that he held the future of each man in his hand could not be misunderstood by even the most stupid of his employees. It was a grim object lesson, apparently intended to convey Sartwell’s determination to stick by the men who, even remotely, had sympathized with him in the late struggle; for not a word was spoken, and when a man protested humbly against debasement, the manager made no reply, and the workman knew he had either to submit or to apply for his wages at the office.