le" against whom they had
struck in 1894 were not to blame!

"I tell you," said he, "we found when we got started that them black
people--we used to call 'em dagoes--were just workin' people like
us--and in hell with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and
Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end."

I shall not soon forget the intensely dramatic but perfectly simple way
in which he told me how he came, as he said, "to see the true light."
Holding up his maimed right hand (that trembled a little), he pointed
one finger upward.

"I seen the big hand in the sky," he said, "I seen it as clear as
daylight."

He said he saw at last what Socialism meant. One day he went home from a
strikers' meeting--one of the last, for the men were worn out with
their long struggle. It was a bitter cold day, and he was completely
discouraged. When he reached his own street he saw a pile of household
goods on the sidewalk in front of his home. He saw his wife there
wringing her hands and crying. He said he could not take a step further,
but sat down on a neighbour's porch and looked and looked. "It was
curious," he said, "but the only thing I could see or think about was
our old family clock which they had stuck on top of the pile, half
tipped over. It looked odd and I wanted to set it up straight. It was
the clock we bought when we were married, and we'd had it about twenty
years on the mantel in the livin'-room. It was a good clock," he said.

He paused and then smiled a little.

"I never have figured it out why I should have been able to think of
nothing but that clock," he said, "but so it was."

When he got home, he found his frail daughter just coming out of the
empty house, "coughing as though she was dyin'." Something, he said,
seemed to stop inside him. Those were his words: "Something seemed to
stop inside 'o me."

He turned away without saying a word, walked back to strike
headquarters, borrowed a revolver from a friend, and started out along
the main road which led into the better part of the town.

"Did you ever hear o' Robert Winter?" he asked.

"No," said I.

"Well, Robert Winter was the biggest gun of 'em all. He owned the mills
there and the largest store and the newspaper--he pretty nearly owned
the town."

He told me much more about Robert Winter which betrayed still a curious
sort of feudal admiration for him, and for his great place and power;
but I need not dwell on it here. He told me h