and cold herself, hours at a time, like any man among them;
that she had, in her husband's early days, helped him feed and bed their
one horse, often currying him herself; that when she and her Tom had
moved to Rockville with their savings and there were three horses to
care for and her husband needed more help than he could hire, she had
brought her little baby Patsy to the stable while she worked there like
a man; that during all this time she had cooked and washed and kept the
house tidy for four people; that she had done all these things she
felt would not count now with the Union, though each member of it was a
bread-winner like herself.

She knew what power it wielded. There had been the Martin family,
honest, hardworking people, who had come down from Haverstraw--the man
and wife and their three children--and moved into the new tenement with
all their nice furniture and new carpets. Tom had helped them unload
these things from the brick-sloop that brought them. A few weeks after,
poor Martin, still almost a stranger, had been brought home from the
gas-house with his head laid open, because he had taken the place of a
Union man discharged for drunkenness, and lingered for weeks until he
died. Then the widow, with her children about her, had been put aboard
another sloop that was going back to her old home. Tom remembered, as
if it were yesterday, the heap of furniture and little pile of kitchen
things sold under the red flag outside the store near the post-office.

She had seen, too, the suffering and misery of her neighbors during the
long strike at the brewery two years before, and the moving in and out
from house to tenement and tenement to shanty, with never a day's work
afterward for any man who left his job. She had helped many of the men
who, three years before, had been driven out of work by the majority
vote of the Carpenters' Union, and who dared not go back and face the
terrible excommunication, the social boycott, with all its insults and
cruelties. She shuddered as she thought again of her suspicions years
ago when the bucket had fallen that crushed in her husband's chest, and
sent him to bed for months, only to leave it a wrecked man. The rope
that held the bucket had been burned by acid, Dr. Mason said. Some
grudge of the Union, she had always felt, was paid off then.

She knew what the present trouble meant, now that it was started, and
she knew in what it might end. But her courage never wavered.