Workers had been attempting to secure recruits from the ranks of the
strikers, and had secretly offered the millowners a scale of demands in
the hope that a sufficient number of operatives would return to work, and
so break the strike; a serious riot was barely averted. "Scab-hunting
agencies," the unions were called. One morning when it was learned that
the loom-fixers, almost to a man, had gone back to the mills, a streetcar
was stopped near the power house at the end of Faber Street, and in a
twinkling, before the militia or police could interfere, motorman,
conductor, and passengers were dragged from it and the trolley pole
removed. This and a number of similar aggressive acts aroused the
mill-owners and their agents to appeal with renewed vigour to the public
through the newspapers, which it was claimed they owned or subsidized.
Then followed a series of arraignments of the strike leaders calculated
to stir the wildest prejudices and fears of the citizens of Hampton.
Antonelli and Jastro--so rumour had it--in various nightly speeches had
advised their followers to "sleep in the daytime and prowl like wild
animals at night"; urged the power house employees to desert and leave
the city in darkness; made the declaration, "We will win if we raise
scaffolds on every street!" insisted that the strikers, too, should have
"gun permits," since the police hirelings carried arms. And the fact that
the mill-owners replied with pamphlets whose object was proclaimed to be
one of discrediting their leaders in the eyes of the public still further
infuriated the strikers. Such charges, of course, had to be vehemently
refuted, the motives behind them made clear, and counter-accusations laid
at the door of the mill-owners.

The atmosphere at Headquarters daily grew more tense. At any moment the
spark might be supplied to precipitate an explosion that would shake the
earth. The hungry, made more desperate by their own sufferings or the
spectacle of starving families, were increasingly difficult to control: