He was laid up for several weeks, and the company, claiming that the accident was due to his own stupidity and carelessness, refused even to pay his wages while he was idle.

Well, the family had to live somehow, and the woman and the daughter--"she was a little thing," he said, "and frail"-- the woman and the daughter went into the mill.

But even with this new source of income they began to fall behind.

Money which should have gone toward making the last payments on their home (already long delayed by the strike) had now to go to the doctor and the grocer.
"We had to live," said Bill Hahn.
Again and again he used this same phrase, "We had to live!" as a sort of bedrock explanation for all the woes of life.
After a time, with one finger gone and a frightfully scarred hand--he held it up for me to see--he went back into the mill.
"But it kept getting worse and worse," said he, "and finally I couldn't stand it any longer." He and a group of friends got together secretly and tried to organize a union, tried to get the workmen together to improve their own condition; but in some way ("they had spies everywhere," he said) the manager learned of the attempt and one morning when he reported at the mill he was handed a slip asking him to call for his wages, that his help was no longer required.
"I'd been with that one company for twenty years and four months," he said bitterly, "I'd helped in my small way to build it up, make it a big concern payin' 28 per cent.

dividends every year; I'd given part of my right hand in doin' it--and they threw me out like an old shoe." He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job.