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 employés, 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 quit that militia business at once, and if he don't, he won't be the only one to suffer."