"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two days at the hospital." He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair, and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal." She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain that the accident was due to his own care[p 11]lessness; but the hands say that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later." [p 11] Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do you say?" "That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon hasn't been in it long—he worked his way up at the mills from being a bobbin-boy—and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch." "But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?" "To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and then." "I see. Go on," she murmured. "That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would present him with an artificial finger or two." Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst—who gave you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?" "The manager himself."[p 12] [p 12] "Verbally?"
Prev.
Back
Top