Before many days were out the strike had progressed so far that, instead of its being a small body of men engaged in cessation of work, with pacific methods of attempting to dissuade others who wished to continue their work from doing so, or, by some more positive form of argument known as picketing, of preventing newcomers from taking the places of those who had struck, it had developed into an active force whose frank object was to render it impossible for any man to take or hold a position as an employee of the railway company. It was not so much that meetings were frequently held and the measures advocated constantly grew more and more violent, nor that occasional outbreaks occurred, as that the whole temper of the people was becoming inflamed, and the conditions of life affected thereby were becoming almost intolerable. The call of the company on the mayor, as the representative of the public, to grant them protection, was promptly, if somewhat evasively, replied to. No man knew better than Coll McSheen how to express himself so that he might be understood differently by different men. It had been one of his strong cards in climbing to the altitude which he had reached. But the idea that the police would render efficient aid to the company was openly and generally scoffed at in the quarters where the strike prevailed. It was boldly declared that the police were in sympathy with the strikers. This report appeared to have some foundation, when one cold night, with the thermometer at zero, a fire broke out in the mills owned by Mr. Leigh's company, and they were gutted from foundation to roof. It was charged on the strikers; but an investigation showed that this charge, like many others, was unfounded; at least, as it alleged a direct and intentional act. The evidence proved conclusively to my mind that the fire, while of incendiary origin, was started by a gang of reckless and dissolute youths who had no relation whatever to the strikers, but whose purpose was to exhibit their enmity against a company which was held in such disfavor generally. This was the contention of Wolffert in his papers on the incident, and the view which Mr. Leigh afterward adopted. It was only an expression of the general feeling that had grown up in the city under the influence of the strike--one of the baleful offspring of the condition which McSheen and Wringman and their like had been able to produce from the conflict which they had projected and fostered. The wretched youths who were arrested, told under the sweating process a series of wholly conflicting and incredible lies, and in time two of them were convicted on their own confessions and sent to the State prison, and the strikers who had not yet resorted to extreme measures of violence got the credit of the crime.