"setting-up" system of the regular army, had been wisely added to the daily course of instruction; and while Jim's burly form was a trifle bowed and heavy, Fred's slender frame was erect, sinewy, and, in every motion, quick and elastic. "Jim could hug the breath out of you, Fred, like a thundering big bear if he once got his arms around you, and Fred could dance all around and hammer you into pulp, Jim, while you were trying to grip him," was the way the father expressed it, and old Wallace knew young men in general and his own boys in particular as well as might be expected of the clear-eyed, shrewd-headed veteran that he was. He himself had served the Great Western railway faithfully from the days when it was only the struggling Lake Shore, and now as a first-class mechanic in the repair shops he was a foreman whom officials and operators alike respected. He had lived a sober, honest, industrious life, had reared his family on the principle of mind your own business and pay as you go, and was looking forward to retiring within a year or two, and giving his aching old bones the rest they deserved, and enjoying the fruits of his life of toil, when the long-predicted irruption began with the strike ordered by the Switchmen's Union.

With anxious face Mr. Wallace was reading the newspaper accounts of the stormy meetings held the previous night and well along into the dawning day. Some of the men involved were his life-long friends, others of them he had known many years. Their names were not among those of the speakers whose fiery oratory had finally prevailed. They were of the silent, almost passive element, which, largely in the majority at first, found itself little by little swinging over under the lash of the more aggressive, and at last giving reluctant "aye" or sitting in moody silence rather than face the furious denunciation of the agitators that followed sharp on every "no." At two o'clock in the morning the members of the union, three-fourths of whom were originally bitterly opposed to the project, had passed a resolution that unless certain men discharged by the management of one of the five roads using the yards were reinstated by twelve o'clock that day they would quit work to a man, and tie up the business of that and all the others. At nine in the morning the committee had waited on the division superintendent with their ultimatum. The superintendent replied that the three men discharged were freight handlers who had refused to touch the contents of certain cars of the Air Line because of some unsettled disagreement between the officials of that line and their employees. "We know nothing of that matter," said the superintendent. "It is none of our business. We employed these men to handle any and all freight run into these yards, and we have no use for men who refuse to do so. They not only flatly refused to handle that Air Line stuff, but said they'd see to it that no one else did. That ended the matter so far as we're concerned. Now you come and demand that men be restored to work who not only will not work themselves, but will not let others work. You and I have grown up together, some of you, at least, in the employment of this road. You, Morton, and you, Toohey, were switchmen here under me when I was yard-master six years ago. You know and I know that what you ask is utterly absurd. No road can do business on any such principles as that. Even if these discharged men did not richly deserve their discharge, what affair is it of yours? You are switchmen. You've never had a grievance that I know of. You never would have come to me with such a demand in this world but that you had been bamboozled or bulldozed into it by fellows who have no earthly connection with you, and whose only business in life is to go round stirring up trouble among honest men, living on their contributions, and taking precious good care to keep out of the way when the clash comes. No, lads. I've been your friend, and you know it. Between you and injustice of any kind I'm as ready to stand to-day as ever before, but I'd be no friend of yours. I'd deserve your contempt as well as that of our employers and the whole people, if I allowed my freight handlers to dictate to me whose freight they should handle. Those men courted discharge and they got it. Out they went and out they stay if I have to handle every pound of freight myself."

There was dead silence a moment in the office. The committeemen stood uneasily before their old friend and chief; three of them looked as though they wished they hadn't come and wanted to quit, two were more determined. It was one of these who spoke.

"Then, Mr. Williams, you refuse to listen to our appeal for justice!"

Mr. Williams whirled around in his chair, sharply confronting the speaker; his clear blue eyes seemed to look him through and through, a flush almost of anger swept over his face a moment, and he waited before he spoke. He had picked up a ruler, and was lightly tapping the edge of the desk as he tilted back in his chair.

"Your name is Stoltz, I believe. I refuse nothing of the kind, and you know it. I have listened with more patience than it deserved. None of these, the old hands, would have hinted at such a thing, and if they and their fellows will take the advice of a man they've known ten years to your ten months they'll not again be led by a word-juggler. Now if there's any other matter any of the rest of you wish to bring up," and here the Superintendent looked frankly around upon the anxious, almost crest-fallen faces of the other men, "I'll listen to you gladly, but you, Stoltz, have been far too short a time an employé of the road to presume to speak for those who have served it almost as long as I have."

"Yes, and what have they got for it? Do they sit in a swell office, ride in parlor cars, drive fast horses, sport handsome clothes—" began Stoltz, sneeringly.

"That's enough, Stoltz. They know that with a railway as with an army the men can't all be generals and colonels. Say to your friends, boys," he continued, in kindly tone, "that when they want anything of the road hereafter they'll be far more apt to get it by coming themselves than by sending Stoltz. That's all, then."

"No, it isn't all!" declaimed Stoltz, angrily. "You haven't heard our side. If those three men ain't back in their places at twelve o'clock, we of the Switchmen's Union go out to a man," and the spokesman paused to let this announcement have its due effect. It had.

"So far as one of the Union is concerned he goes out here and now, and that one," said Mr. Williams, "is yourself. The others will, I hope, think twice before they act."

"You mean I'm discharged?"

"On the spot," said Mr. Williams, "and there is the door."

For hours that hot June day had the story of that interview sped from tongue to tongue. The managers of the Switchmen's Union had been shrewd and wise in naming as members of their committee three of the oldest, stanchest, and most faithful hands in the employ of the company. They were sure of a hearing. Then to do the aggressive, this comparatively new man, Stoltz, was named, together with a kindred spirit of less ability, and these two men were the backbone, so said the managers, of the first attack. Stoltz was a German-American of good education, though deeply imbued with socialistic theories, and a seductive, plausible speaker on the theme of the wrongs of the laboring man. It was he who, under the guidance of shrewd agitators and "walking delegates," had been most active and denunciatory at the switchmen's meetings. Honest laboring men are slow of speech, as a rule, and fluency often impresses them where logic would have no effect. The committee came away, two of them exultant and eager for the fray. They had been disdainfully treated, said they, sneered at, reviled, and one of them summarily "fired" as the result of this visit to the magnate. The others were gloomily silent. It was too late to recede. The javelin was already thrown. At the stroke of five every