venient, of course. It meant slow work at the start, but so far
from being paralyzed, as the leaders predicted, the officials went to
work with a vim. Silk-hatted managers, kid-gloved superintendents, and
"dude-collated" clerks were down in the train-shed swinging lanterns and
handling switches, and so it had resulted that all the night express
trains of the five companies using the Great Western tracks, one after
another, slowly, cautiously, but surely had threaded the maze of green
and red lights, and safely steamed over the four miles of shining steel
rails between the Union depot in the heart of the city and these
outlying freight-yards, and, only an hour or so behind time, had haunted
their long rows of brilliantly lighted plate-glass windows in the sullen
faces of the striking operatives, and then gone whistling merrily away
to their several destinations over the dim, starlit prairies. The
managers were only spurred, not paralyzed.

"We'll win yet," said Stoltz, in a furious harangue to a thousand
hearers, one-tenth of them, only railway employes, the others being
recruited from the tramps, the ne'er-do-wells, the unemployed and the
criminal classes, ever lurking about a great city. "The managers cannot
play switchmen more than one night, and no men they hire dare attempt to
work in your places--if you're the men I take you to be. Now I'm going
to the trainmen's meeting to demand their aid." And go he did, with the
result already indicated.

Half an hour after midnight, despite the protests of the old and
experienced men, the resolution to strike went through with a yell, and
when the dawn came, faint and pallid in the eastern sky, and the myriad
switch-lights in the dark, silent yards began to grow blear and dim,
there stood the long rows of freight cars doubly fettered now, for not
only were there no switchmen to make up the trains, there were no crews
to man them and take them to their destination. Jim Wallace had struck
with the rest.

It was two o'clock when at last the father heard the heavy footfalls of
his first-born on the wooden walk without. There he seemed to pause for
some few words in low tone with a companion who had walked home with him
from the yards. Old Wallace, going to the door to meet his son, heard
these words as the other turned away. "And you tell Fred what I say. I'm
a friend of yours, and always have been, but the boys won't stand any
nonsense. It'll be the worst for him if he don't qu