opened, awaited
him at the deserted study. To the officials of the American Railway
Union he represented himself as deep in the confidence of the officials
at military head-quarters, personally intimate with most of the staff,
and a man to whose warnings the general himself ever lent attentive ear.
To the adjutant-general and others in authority, the chief being still
away, he declared himself the envoy of the leaders of the strike, a man
empowered to levy war or compass peace. In both assumptions he was
impudent, yet not without support. What he craved was prominence,
notoriety, the fame, if not the fact, of being an arbiter in the
destinies of Chicago in this crisis of her history. From the Pullman to
the Leland, from inner depot to outlying freight-yards, from meetings to
municipal offices, he sped, never stopping for rest or refreshment.
Irascible officers at Springfield, receiving despatches signed
Elmendorf, put an H to his name and lopped it off at the neck. There
were two precincts he left unpenetrated,--the head-quarters of the
railway managers and those of the National Guard. Allison had made him
known at the one, his public utterances and persistent sneers at "the
militia boys," "our tin soldier boys," at the other. His appearance in
the armory of any regiment in the city would have been the signal for a
demonstration he had no desire to face. Through the newspaper offices,
too, he flitted, shedding oracular statement and prophecy, claiming to
speak "by the card" when he had news to tell, and preserving
mysterious, suggestive silence when questioned on matters whereof he
knew nothing.

Two days had the strike been in force. Switchmen, yardmen, firemen, had
quit their posts, and they or sympathizing gangs of toughs stoned and
cursed the men who took their places. Yard-masters and master-mechanics
leaped into the cabs and handled the levers of switch-engines;
white-handed clerks and electricians swung lanterns and coupled cars;
conductors turned switchmen, superintendents became conductors, and
managers stepped down to yard-masters; and still the mob, gaining in
numbers and wrath and villany with every hour, blackguarded the
trainmen, blockaded the trains, and bombarded with sticks and stones and
coupling-pins the few shrinking and terrified passengers. Trains
reaching the city were towed in with every pane smashed and their
inmates a mass of cuts and bruises. Trains due in the city and seized by
the strikers