rom
having even to write that detested name. And then speedily came the
long-threatened outbreak, the demand of the American Railway Union that
the public cease to patronize or the railway companies to run, no matter
what their contracts, the cars of the Pullman Company. "We've got 'em by
the throat at last," screamed Mart Wallen at Donnelly's Shades that
night. "This means that the people, the people of the whole nation, have
risen to down that damned old miser, and we'll make a clean sweep of
other misers while we're about it."

"We've got 'em foul," echoed with drunken hiccoughs the graceless nephew
Mrs. Mac and her sobered sergeant were dragging home between them, deaf
to the eloquence of Elmendorf haranguing the crowd in the open square
beyond. What was he saying?--"Stand firm, and the blood of the innocent
victims of the glorious appeal of seven years ago, the martyred lives
of the innocent men who died upon the scaffold, strangled in their
effort to speak for you and your children, not only will not have been
lost in vain, but soon shall be magnificently avenged. Oh, that it had
been my lot to lead you here in '86! God be thanked, it is my lot to
lead you now!"

"Oh, that ye had been here to lead in '86, ye howling lunatic," echoed
Mrs. Mac, shaking her one unoccupied fist at the glorified but luckily
distant face of the speaker; "yer only lot this night would have been in
the graveyard, for ye never would have lived to lead anything, barrin'
yer own funeral."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XII.

Then came a few days in which Elmendorf was in his glory. To be in a
position where he could command attention, where he could practically
compel people of all classes and conditions to be his listeners, to hang
upon his words and regard him as clothed with power backed by authority,
this was indeed joy and triumph new to him, though still far below the
dreams he had dreamed. Though not even a member of the great railway
union, not even possessing the confidence of its leaders, the fervor of
his speeches had won him favor and admitted him to their councils. Not
even tolerated for days at head-quarters, he suddenly reappeared there
with all the assurance of the past, and during the first forty-eight
hours of the memorable strike no one man in all Chicago seemed to carry
on his shoulders the weight of information, authority, and influence of
John Allison's whilom tutor, whose note of dismissal, un