cil of the Wahoo Valley Trades Workers came together to vote on the
strike. Every unit of seven was asked to meet and vote. Grant sat in his
office with the executive committee a day and a night counting the
slowly returning votes. Grant had influence enough to make them declare
emphatically for a peaceful strike. But the voice of the Valley was for
a strike. The spring was at its full. The little garden plots were
blooming. The men felt confident. A conference of the officials of the
council was called to formulate the demands. Grant managed to put off
the strike until the hearing on the temporary injunction, June 16, was
held. But the men drew up their demands and were ready for the court
decision which they felt would be finally against them.

The Wahoo Valley was stirred deeply by the premonitions of the coming
strike. It was proud of its record for industrial peace, and the
prospect of war in the Valley overturned all its traditions.

Market Street had its profound reaction, too. Market Street and the
Valley, each in its own way, felt the dreaded turmoil coming, knew what
commercial disaster the struggle meant, but Market Street was timid and
powerless and panic-stricken. Yet life went on. In the Valley there were
births and deaths and marriages, and on the hill in Harvey, Mrs. Bedelia
Nesbit was working out her plans to make over the Nesbit house, while
Lila, her granddaughter, was fluttering about in the seventh Heaven, for
she was living under the same sky and sun and stars that bent over
Kenyon, her lover, home from Boston for the Morton-Adams wedding. He
might be hailed as a passing ship once or twice a day, if she managed to
time her visits to Market Street properly, or he might be seen from the
east veranda of her home at the proper hour, and there was a throb of
joy that blotted out all the rest of the pale world. There was one time;
two times indeed they were, and a hope of a third, when slipping out
from under the shadow of her grandmother's belligerent plumes, Lila had
known the actual fleeting touch of hands; the actual feasting of eyes
and the quick rapture of meeting lips at a tryst. And when Mrs. Nesbit
left for Minneapolis to consult an architect, and to be gone two
weeks--Harvey and the Valley and the strike slipped so far below the
sky-line of the two lovers that they were scarcely aware that such
things were in the universe.

Kenyon could not see even the grim cast of decision mantling Grant's