He felt that, instead of browbeating or being browbeaten by a delicate woman, he ought to go over to Sing Sing and horsewhip Harry Chalender. But that also had its inconveniences, and he had no stomach for adding his own name to the list of knockabouts that accompanied the building of the aqueduct. For, all along the right of way, as the landholders had prophesied, there was drunken brawling. A river of alcohol paralleled the dry bed for the Croton. Farmers turned their homes into grog shops. Village tavern-owners and city saloon-keepers set up shanties under the dusty trees, whether the easily corrupted magistrates gave them licenses or not. Together with drink came every other form of dissipation. Gamblers and cheap tricksters abounded, and those burly harpies strangely miscalled “light women” came out of their overcrowded lairs in town until the innocent countryside was one sordid bacchanal. Whipped up with liquor and the mad eloquence it inspired, the laboring men began to talk of their rights and wrongs and, above all, of their right to organize. In England the first efforts of the lower classes to combine against the upper, and form a new Jacquerie had been dealt with sharply, but without permanent success. The laws of the United States were strict enough, but loose talk of democracy was undermining them, and the toilers were gaining a sense of unity. They called themselves “Workies” with an affectionate self-pity, and early in 1838 they achieved a turn-out (or, as they called it recently, “a strike”) for higher wages. This mutiny had a short life, for the hard times and the vast mobs of unemployed made it easy for the contractors to replace the strikers, and the magistrates were severe. The contractors caused a panic by agreeing never on any terms to re-employ the ringleaders, and there were soon no ringleaders. The others made haste to beg for mercy and to resume their picks and shovels with gratitude. One day Patty, to escape from the gloom of her parents, ordered Cuff to hitch up the carry-all and drive her over to see the construction camp. As she sat gossiping with Harry Chalender, who pointed out the rising walls of masonry, a quarrel arose between two laborers in a ditch. They bandied words like Hamlet and Laertes in the tomb of Ophelia, and then as if the first and second gravediggers had fallen afoul, they raised their picks and began a dreadful fencing match that set Patty to shrieking and swooning. Chalender was capable as any other carpet knight of prodigies of valor so long as a lady’s eyes were upon him. He left Patty’s carriage wheel and ran shouting commands to desist. When the battlers paid him no heed, he was foolhardy enough to leap down between them. One pick dealt him a glancing blow on the skull, while the other struck deep into the sinews across his shoulder blades.