ldren were hungry and you might as well know
now that I can never see my babies suffer for want of food, and you
need not be surprised at anything I may do to supply their wants."

Cowels had never seen his wife display so much spirit and it surprised
him. "It's all very well," she went on, "to prate about honor and
loyalty to the Brotherhood, but an obligation that entails the suffering
of innocent women and children is not an honorable obligation and ought
not to exist. A man's first duty is to his family. My advice to you
would be to miss a few meetings and go and try to find something to do.
Think how we have denied ourselves in order to have a place of our own,
and now it's all to be taken from us, and all because of this senseless
and profitless strike."

"By George, she's a cracker-jack!" said Hawkins, who had been listening
down the stove-pipe.

Cowels made no reply to his wife, but he was thinking. In fact, he had
been thinking all the way home. He had been interrupted twice that day
while addressing the meeting. One fellow had asked who the devil
Shakespeare was, and if he had ever done anything for the Union. Another
man had said "rats," and the orator was sore.

Now, when he had thought it all over, he surprised his wife as much as
she had surprised him. "They're all a lot of unliterate ingrates," said
Cowels, "and for two cents I'd shake the whole show and go to work. If
they turn me down at the convention, and this strike is not settled,
I'll take an engine."

Mr. Hawkins gave a low whistle.

"No, you must never do that, George, after all you've said against such
things; it would not do."

"Then they must not drive me to it," said Cowels. "I've tried to show
them the way to success, even to lead them, and they have the nerve to
guy me. I'll fool 'em yet if they trifle with me."

"That's what I thought all along," mused Hawkins. "It was not the
Brotherhood that Mr. Cowels was working so hard for, but Mr. Cowels.
Well, he will be just as eager to succeed in another direction--he's
ambitious."

CHAPTER SEVENTH

The great strike, like a receding sea, revealed heaps of queer wreckage.
Men who had once been respected by their fellows, but who had drifted
down the river of vice now came to claim the attention of the strikers
or the company. Most conspicuous among them was drunken Bill Greene.
Three months ago he would have been kicked out of a company section
house or passed by a Brotherhood