But Ralph broke in with a bitter harangue. Sabinsport, he declared, thought only of herself, her comfort, her pleasures. She had no real interest in human betterment, no concern that the men and women who did the work of her industries were well or happy. If her business men worried about having no work to give now it was simply because, as Dick himself admitted, that they would have no income if the fires were out. Did they concern themselves about the worker when things were going well? Not for a moment. Did they study a proper division of the returns of labor? Not on your life, they studied how to get the lion's share. Ralph's ordinary dissatisfaction with affairs in Sabinsport was intensified by his disgust at the incredible turn things had taken in his world and by his helplessness to change them or to escape them. He might rail at the war in the _Argus_, but nobody listened. He might beg and implore that they put their house in order instead of keeping their eyes turned overseas, but it was so useless that even he sensed it was silly. Sabinsport was concerned only with figuring where she was going to get bed and board for 15,000 people through the coming winter. The first relief from threatening idleness and bankruptcy that came was an order for barbed wire for England. Reuben Cowder had gone East and brought it back. It looked easy enough to Ralph, but Cowder himself had put in two as hard and anxious weeks as he had ever known, landing the contract. The "big ones" were after all there was and they got most of it. Moderate-sized, independent plants, like the Sabinsport wire mill, had to compete with companies which as yet were only names--but they were names backed by the great bankers that controlled the orders. Companies long ago launched by financiers for making rubber shoes or tin cans or vacuum cleaners--anything and everything except what was needed for war--landed huge contracts, and the orders waited while they converted and manned the plants and sold at high prices stock that had long lain untouched in the tens or twenties or thirties. This was happening when men like Cowder, ready at once to go to work, begged and threatened to get what they felt was their share.