“Perhaps,” was the reply. “We’ll only have to start another. That’s what the labour movement is like.” Jim Moylan was young, and saw Hal’s mood. “Don’t misunderstand us!” he cried. “It’s heartbreaking--but it’s not in our power to help. We are charged with building up the union, and we know that if we supported everything that looked like a strike, we’d be bankrupt the first year. You can’t imagine how often this same thing happens--hardly a month we’re not called on to handle such a situation.” “I can see what you mean,” said Hal. “But I thought that in this case, right after the disaster, with the men so stirred--” The young Irishman smiled, rather sadly. “You’re new at this game,” he said. “If a mine-disaster was enough to win a strike, God knows our job would be easy. In Barela, just down the canyon from you, they’ve had three big explosions--they’ve killed over five hundred men in the past year!” Hal began to see how, in his inexperience, he had lost his sense of proportion. He looked at the two labour leaders, and recalled the picture of such a person which he had brought with him to North Valley--a hot headed and fiery agitator, luring honest workingmen from their jobs. But here was the situation exactly reversed! Here was he in a blaze of excitement--and two labour leaders turning the fire-hose on him! They sat quiet and business-like, pronouncing a doom upon the slaves of North Valley. Back to their black dungeons with them! “What can we tell the men?” he asked, making an effort to repress his chagrin. “We can only tell them what I’m telling you--that we’re helpless, till we’ve got the whole district organised. Meantime, they have to stand the gaff; they must do what they can to keep an organisation.” “But all the active men will be fired!” “No, not quite all--they seldom get them all.” Here the stolid old German put in. In the last year the company had turned out more than six thousand men because of union activity or suspicion of it. “_Six thousand!_” echoed Hal. “You mean from this one district?” “That’s what I mean.” “But there aren’t more than twelve or fifteen thousand men in the district!” “I know that.” “Then how can you ever keep an organisation?” The other answered, quietly, “They treat the new men the same as they treated the old.”