was making a mess of it. It was all the fault of
domineering labor--so ran the editorials, column by column, day by day;
and Saxon was convinced, yet remained unconvinced. The social puzzle of
living was too intricate.

The teamsters' strike, backed financially by the teamsters of San
Francisco and by the allied unions of the San Francisco Water Front
Confederation, promised to be long-drawn, whether or not it was
successful. The Oakland harness-washers and stablemen, with few
exceptions, had gone out with the teamsters. The teaming firm's were not
half-filling their contracts, but the employers' association was helping
them. In fact, half the employers' associations of the Pacific Coast
were helping the Oakland Employers' Association.

Saxon was behind a month's rent, which, when it is considered that rent
was paid in advance, was equivalent to two months. Likewise, she was
two months behind in the installments on the furniture. Yet she was not
pressed very hard by Salinger's, the furniture dealers.

"We're givin' you all the rope we can," said their collector. "My orders
is to make you dig up every cent I can and at the same time not to be
too hard. Salinger's are trying to do the right thing, but they're up
against it, too. You've no idea how many accounts like yours they're
carrying along. Sooner or later they'll have to call a halt or get it in
the neck themselves. And in the meantime just see if you can't scrape up
five dollars by next week--just to cheer them along, you know."

One of the stablemen who had not gone out, Henderson by name, worked at
Billy's stables. Despite the urging of the bosses to eat and sleep in
the stable like the other men, Henderson had persisted in coming home
each morning to his little house around the corner from Saxon's on Fifth
street. Several times she had seen him swinging along defiantly, his
dinner pail in his hand, while the neighborhood boys dogged his heels
at a safe distance and informed him in yapping chorus that he was a scab
and no good. But one evening, on his way to work, in a spirit of bravado
he went into the Pile-Drivers' Home, the saloon at Seventh and Pine.
There it was his mortal mischance to encounter Otto Frank, a striker
who drove from the same stable. Not many minutes later an ambulance was
hurrying Henderson to the receiving hospital with a fractured skull,
while a patrol wagon was no less swiftly carrying Otto Frank to the city
prison.

Maggie Donahue i