To the Swede and Polander there was no suggestion of achievement in the vast buildings in which they labored. It was only the place where they earned their living. They worked amongst giant mechanisms beside which they were puny, but theirs was a life of force and strength which took from them the fear of anything that was merely human. Thus surprise changed to resentment, and resentment began to resolve itself into a slow and consuming anger. The works were dead, but in the main office the accounting staff was bending desperately over statements imperatively demanded by Philadelphia. The black browed Hungarians saw the lights at night, and felt that they were being played with by those more powerful than themselves. If a furnace man was discharged, why keep on these scribblers? Outside St. Marys the news ran apace. Toronto papers dwelt on it, and the Board of Trade read it with regret mingled with thankfulness that Clark had embarked on no financial campaigns in their own city. Thorpe went carefully over the Philadelphia acceptances in his vault, and wondered what they were worth. To St. Marys set out a stream of representatives of various creditor companies, that filled the local hotels and journeyed out to the works and came back unsatisfied. Philadelphia dispatches were devoured, and the word "reorganization" was one to charm with. One by one, the Company's steamers slid up to the long docks, made fast and drew their fires, till it seemed that the works, like a great octopus, was withdrawing every arm and filament it ever had radiated, and was coiling them endlessly at its cold and clammy side. Yet, for all of this, it did not seem possible that the whole structure was tumbling, the structure on which so many years of labor--so much genius and enthusiasm--so many millions--had been lavished, until one afternoon a drunken Swede threw a stone into a butcher's window in Ironville and, putting forth a horny hand, seized a side of bacon and set forth, reeling, down the street. Two hours later the startled chief accountant, from a window in his office, saw a swarm of a thousand men surge through the big gates of the works and, trampling the guard, flow irregularly forward. The mob spilt on, a river of big strong men, unaware of its own strength. They were not bent on willful destruction, but the whole mass was animated by an inchoate desire to find out something for itself. At the door of the rail mill stood the superintendent and his firemen, with drawn revolvers. The rioters liked these men because they worked with and understood them. They were not associated with the present trouble. So on to the administration building, where the office staff looked out, petrified with fear. Here, the mob decided, was another breed, so there commenced a hammering on the big oaken door and stones showered through the windows.