The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at Hewintown. "None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest. "A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main office. It's been a morgue afore." The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make us all swing?" "We could manage a get-away----" Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing, fiercely resentful. "God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter. Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun----" "No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last thing.... They'd call out their soldiers--where'd we be then? Oh hell! If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin' to us----" "Can you?" whispered Pelham. "I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try." Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams. The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty. The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow. Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me," said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head. This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the _Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville. "They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."