ived a sober, honest, industrious
life, had reared his family on the principle of mind your own business
and pay as you go, and was looking forward to retiring within a year or
two, and giving his aching old bones the rest they deserved, and
enjoying the fruits of his life of toil, when the long-predicted
irruption began with the strike ordered by the Switchmen's Union.

With anxious face Mr. Wallace was reading the newspaper accounts of the
stormy meetings held the previous night and well along into the dawning
day. Some of the men involved were his life-long friends, others of them
he had known many years. Their names were not among those of the
speakers whose fiery oratory had finally prevailed. They were of the
silent, almost passive element, which, largely in the majority at first,
found itself little by little swinging over under the lash of the more
aggressive, and at last giving reluctant "aye" or sitting in moody
silence rather than face the furious denunciation of the agitators that
followed sharp on every "no." At two o'clock in the morning the members
of the union, three-fourths of whom were originally bitterly opposed to
the project, had passed a resolution that unless certain men discharged
by the management of one of the five roads using the yards were
reinstated by twelve o'clock that day they would quit work to a man, and
tie up the business of that and all the others. At nine in the morning
the committee had waited on the division superintendent with their
ultimatum. The superintendent replied that the three men discharged were
freight handlers who had refused to touch the contents of certain cars
of the Air Line because of some unsettled disagreement between the
officials of that line and their employees. "We know nothing of that
matter," said the superintendent. "It is none of our business. We
employed these men to handle any and all freight run into these yards,
and we have no use for men who refuse to do so. They not only flatly
refused to handle that Air Line stuff, but said they'd see to it that no
one else did. That ended the matter so far as we're concerned. Now you
come and demand that men be restored to work who not only will not work
themselves, but will not let others work. You and I have grown up
together, some of you, at least, in the employment of this road. You,
Morton, and you, Toohey, were switchmen here under me when I was
yard-master six years ago. You know and I know that what you a