id: "Ah,
well! the English poet was right when he wrote:

'_The world that knows itself too sad
Is proud to keep some faces glad!_'"

CHAPTER THIRD

Patsy, the postman and the newsgatherers, who left the headquarters of
the company and wandered over to the Grand Pacific where the strikers
held forth, must have been struck forcibly by the vast difference in the
appearance of the two places upon this particular morning. At the first
place all was neatness and order in spite of the deplorable condition of
affairs outside; and a single man handled the almost endless flood of
letters and telegrams that fell like autumn leaves upon his desk.

In fact, the office boy and the colored porter were the only people
about the company's headquarters who showed any real anxiety.

At the headquarters of the strikers all was confusion and disorder. The
outer offices and ante-rooms were filled with a vast crowd of men who
idled about, smoked, swapped stories and swore; and some of them, I'm
sorry to say, chewed tobacco and flooded the floor with inexcusable
filth. Even Mr. Hogan's private office was not private. Leading strikers
and men prominent in the Brotherhood loafed there as the others loafed
outside. Not more than half the men about the building had ever been
employed by the Burlington company. There were scores of "tramp"
switchmen and travelling trainmen, made reckless by idleness, as men are
sometimes made desperate by hunger, with an alarmingly large
representation of real criminals, who follow strikes as "grafters"
follow a circus. If a striker lost his temper and talked as he ought not
to talk, this latter specimen was always ready to encourage him; for
whatever promised trouble for others promised profitable pastime for the
criminal. If the real workers could keep clear of this class, as well as
the idle, loafing element in their own profession, ninety per cent. of
the alleged labor outrages would never be committed. Very likely there
were a number of detectives moving among the strikers, and they, too,
have been known to counsel violence in order to perpetuate a struggle
between labor and capital that they themselves might not be idle. It is
only in the best organized agencies that detectives can be relied upon
to take no undue advantage of those whom they are sent out to detect.
Over in another part of the same building, where the firemen held forth,
the scene was about the same, save that the men the