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