estlessly pacing the sidewalk before the doors of their
neglected stores informed Phil of the meeting at the court-room, and of
the panicky rumors. No good reason occurred to Phil for absenting
herself from a mass meeting at which her Uncle Alec was to speak. Phil
liked meetings. From the crest of a stack of chicken crates near the
freight depot she had heard Albert Jeremiah Beveridge speak when that
statesman had vouchsafed ten minutes to the people of Montgomery the
preceding autumn. She had heard such redoubtable orators as William
Jennings Bryan, Charles Warren Fairbanks, and "Tom" Marshall, and when a
Socialist had spoken from the court-house steps on a rainy evening,
Phil, then in her last year in high school, had been the sole
representative of her sex in the audience.

Waterman was laboriously approaching his peroration when she reached the
packed court-room. Men were wedged tightly into the space reserved for
the court officials and the bar, and a number stood on the clerk's desk.
She climbed upon a chair at the back of the room, the better to see and
hear. There were other women and girls present--employees of the
furniture factory--but it must be confessed that even without their
support Phil would not have been embarrassed.

Waterman was in fine fettle, and cheers and applause punctuated his
discourse.

"I am not here to arouse class hatred, or to set one man against
another. We of Montgomery are all friends and neighbors. Many of you
have lived here, just as I have, throughout your lives. It is for us to
help each other in a neighborly spirit. Factories may close their doors,
banks may fail, and credit be shaken, but so long as we may appeal to
each other in the old terms of neighborliness and comradeship, nothing
can seriously disturb our peace and prosperity.

"It grieves me, however, to be obliged to confess that there are men
among us who have not felt the responsibility imposed upon them as
trustees for the less fortunate. I have already touched on the immediate
plight of those of you who are thrown out of employment, with your just
labor claims unpaid. There are others--and some of them are perhaps in
this room--who entrusted their savings to the Sycamore Traction Company,
and who are now at the mercy of the malevolent powers that invariably
control and manipulate such corporations. I shall not be personal; I
have no feelings against any of those men. But I say to you, men and
women of Montgomery,