“The Silk-Sockers? You know’s well as me. Thirty-eight hundred in round numbers.”
“And over there?” pointing east.
“Th’ business districk? An easy 12,000.”
“Say 16,000 in both. S’pose they are all for the young Standish. Now look here.”
He crossed the long room and ran up the shade of one of the south windows. The great marble house stood on the edge of a hill-crest, overlooking a distant vista of mean, winding streets, dirty, interminable rows of tenements, factories and small shops. Through the centre, like a huge snake, the tracks of the C. G. & X. wound their way, and over all a smeared pall of reek and coal smoke brooded like some vast bird of prey. Coal yards, docks, freight houses, elevators, shanties—and once more that interminable sea of dingy, squalid domiciles.
“What’s the population down there, Billy?”
“Hundred’n ten thousand, six hundred an’—” began Shevlin glibly. “An’ every soul of them solid for you, Boss. Sixteen thousand to hundred-’n’-ten-thous——”
“That’s right. So as long as the youngster’s content to speak his little pieces here in Granite, I’ve stood by and let him talk. It would be time enough to put in a spoke when he started across country. But this blowout to-night is different. The stories of it will get in the Boston and Philadelphia and New York papers. So——”
“Well?”
“So there won’t be any meeting?”