Mrs. Moore never was really strong again. Their keeping a servant dated from that summer and so did a little electric car, the first one in Eagle's Wing. Yes, perhaps this was as memorable a summer as Roger's seventh. Yet it lacked the magic and the beauty that made imperishable the joy of the swimming pool summer.
And then came his fourteenth summer.
Roger was a strapping big lad at fourteen. He was as tall as his father, who was five feet ten, and was still growing rapidly. He was thin but hard-muscled, with good shoulders that were not as awkward as they looked. After a year of pleading, his father agreed to let him spend his vacation in the plow factory; and Roger in overalls, his dinner pail in hand, was his father's pride and his mother's despair. She did like to see her only child well dressed.
Ernest's father wanted Ernie to come into the store that summer. But after his years under Roger's tutelage, Ernie was all for mechanics, so he too acquired overalls and a dinner pail and went into the plow factory. Elschen was broken hearted because there was no way in which she also could become a wage earner.
The university lay at the south end of the little town. The plow factory, now employing two hundred men, lay at the north end. Jim Hale, the chief engineer, blew the whistle every morning at seven o'clock and again at five o'clock. There was an hour off for dinner pails at twelve. A nine hour day, a few years ago, was not considered a long day, that is, not by employers of labor. That the employees were beginning to feel differently, Roger was to learn that summer in a manner that was to shape his whole life.
The workmen were of a type little known now in our big industrial centers. Without exception they were North Europeans: Germans, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes. About fifty per cent. of them were foreign born. The rest of them were American born. A good many of the German born had not taken out first citizenship papers, but the Norwegians and Swedes had done so, so had the Danes. Enough of them had a certain amount of pride in their work to make the factory an interesting and profitable place for a boy to serve his first apprenticeship in. Practically all married men in the factory wanted to settle permanently in Eagle's Wing and send their children through the town's splendid schools. A majority of them planned to send their sons through the State University.
John Moore had a good eye for men. He had built up an apparently solid and permanent organization. Yet for all his keen eye, the more successful he became, and the larger his business, the more incapable he grew of winning his men's liking. He had worked unbelievably hard from his boyhood up. He had given himself to his work without stint. He had no sympathy with any of his employees who would do less. His wage, as a mechanic, had never exceeded two seventy-five a day. He bitterly resented any man's wanting more.