minutes beyond quitting-time.

Then Danny was discharged--and he laughed. Discharge _him_! Well, he'd
show them a thing or two.

"We'll arbitrate," he announced.

"Get out!" ordered the manager.

"You got to arbitrate," insisted Danny. "You got to confer with your men
or you're goin' to have a strike!" Danny had heard so much about
conferences that he felt he was on safe ground now. "We can't stand fer
no autycrats!" he added. "You got to meet your men fair an' talk it
over. A committee--"

"Get out!" repeated the manager, rising from his desk, near which the
waiting boys were seated.

"Men," yelled Danny, "I calls a strike an' a boycott!"

Two of the boys rose as if to follow him, but the manager was too quick.
He had Danny by the collar before Danny knew what had happened, and the
struggling boy was marched to the door and pushed out. The boys who had
risen promptly subsided.

Danny was too astonished for words. In all his extended hearsay
knowledge of strikes he never had heard of anything like this. There was
nothing heroic in it at all. He had expected a conference, and, instead,
he was ignominiously handled and thrust into the street.

Danny sat down on a pile of paving-stones to think it over. Without
reasoning the matter out, he now regarded himself as a union. The other
members had deserted him, but he was on a strike; and somehow he had
absorbed the idea that the men who were striking were always the union
men. So, this being a strike of one, he was an entire union. It did not
take him long to decide that the first thing to do was to "picket the
plant." That was a familiar phrase, and he knew the meaning of it.
Everything was nicely arranged for him, too. The street was being paved,
and he was sitting on some paving-stones, with a pile of gravel beside
him. He selected fifteen or twenty of the largest stones from the
gravel-pile.

A woman was the first victim. As she was about to enter the
messenger-office she was startled by a yell of warning from Danny.

"Hey, you!" he shouted. "Keep out!"

She backed away hastily, and looked up to see if anything were about to
fall on her.

"Why should I keep out?" she asked at last.

"'Cause you'll git hit with a rock if you don't," was the prompt reply.

"But, little boy--" she began.

"I ain't a little boy," asserted Danny. "I'm a union."

The woman looked puzzled, but she finally decided that this was some
boyish joke.

"You'd better run home,"