Dinosaur Wars

Chapter six - Factory

Anthony Masters rode down the city street, looking every inch the cavalry man. His riding boots glistened almost as brightly as the buttons on his tunic. He could easily have been taken for the lord of the roadway, of the immigrant workers around him crowding to factories in the tall stone buildings, of the carriages and horse-drawn streetcars rattling beside him.  

He cantered up to his five-story brick factory, and dismounted at the large wooden doors of the adjoining stable. He passed the reins to a waiting stablehand who walked the horse to the gloom and the straw covered floor within. Masters followed. He patted the horse before he stepped through the door in the side of the stable that entered the factory. A satisfying blast of heat hit him, thrown up from a stairwell on the other side of the door.  

The steam boilers in the basement below were already well stoked to power the machines for the factory's morning shift. 

Smoke billowed out of the chimney on the factory roof. There it mingled with all the other smoke-stacks and flues on the skyline, chugging their energetic industry into the choking cloud above the city.

                                                                                   *****

The noise was like a physical assault when Adam stepped through the door of Masters' weaving factory. The power looms cranked, whirred, slapped, and spun. The air was thick with dust. A hot smell like dry summer grass filled his nose.  

This was the second of Masters' factories that Adam had visited that day. The first had been a place that made garments. Row upon row of seamstresses before clattering sewing machines making gowns out of lush silks and bright cottons. That place had been quiet in comparison. This was a metallic cacophony. Pulleys and driveshafts pushed and slammed the frames that lifted thread so that the women operating them could the pull cord that sent the shuttle flying between these threads to form the weave.  

Children darted about, 'nippers' they were called, crawling under machines to haul out hanks of lint. Their small faces were grimy with sweat and dust and their eyes were empty with weariness, dead as buttons. 

Adam scanned the factory floor. A young woman in a fashionably elaborate dress, with bows, a lace collar and long skirts gathered at the back of her waist was speaking to two women workers who were refilling their shuttles with thread. Adam approached her and through the racket of machines introduced himself as a State Bureau of Statistics factory inspector. He wondered if she could give him a proper tour of the facility.  

As the young woman glared at him with hard, dark eyes, the two workers began to giggle. At this unexpected amusement, he felt his his new-found official powers fall from him to reveal the awkward young man underneath. Adam straightened and began to speak with what, to him, sounded like thin authority.  

"I'm here to stop accidents. This may be amusing to you, but my mission is for the care and health of American workers." 

To Adam, the dark eyes seemed to ignite with an even blacker fire.  

"That's a high and mighty aim, Sir. All the states of the union must be saluting your grand cause!" 

The two young women workers could hold back no longer. Their laughter was loud and unrestrained and clearly audible over the top of the surrounding din. 

Adam's face flushed. Against his will, and in the factory of his uncle's rival, a man whose reputation he despised, his face glowed with humiliation. He was aware that this was only his second inspection, and already he felt resistence, and from female factory workers! He tried to recall the the rundown of his tasks for each premises.