The upshot of it was that Axton was invited to meet Bunny one morning in the reading-room; and that was the biggest sensation this Watkins tract had known since the discovery well had busted loose and caught fire. The men of the night-shift forgot to go to sleep; they waited round to see the sight, and you saw faces pass by doors and windows—and always turned inwards as they passed! The union organizer was supposed to be a mysterious and terrible person, who came onto the tract at night, and met you and your friends somewhere out in the hills; but here he was, being publicly entertained by the Old Man’s son! Great kid, that Bunny Ross, said the men—agreeing with Dad on this point! Tom Axton was a big fellow, slow spoken, soft of voice, with a trace of Southern accent; he looked powerful, and had need to be, considering the treatment he got. Of course, he couldn’t swear that it was the Employers’ Federation which sent thugs to beat him up and try to cripple him; but when the same thing happened to him in several different fields in Southern California, and didn’t happen to anybody else, he naturally drew his own conclusions. Bunny was aghast at this; he had never heard anything like it, and didn’t know what to answer—except that he hoped Mr. Axton knew that his father didn’t have anything to do with such dirty work. The organizer smiled; he had evidently had a talk with Paul, for he said, “Your father thinks that labor unions are run by grafters and parasites. Well, I wish you’d ask him how much he really knows about the Employers’ Federation, and the kind of men who run it, and what they’re doing to us. You may find that your father has been neglecting the affairs of his union, just as most of the workers neglect theirs.” Bunny had to admit that was a fair point, and when he asked Dad, and found that Dad had never attended a meeting of the Federation, but merely paid its assessments without question—why naturally, that made Bunny have more respect for Tom Axton, and believe what he said about conditions here in Paradise, and in the other fields, and how rapidly discontent was spreading among the men. Only yesterday the Victor Oil Company had fired fourteen who had signed up with the union; the bosses had a spy among them, and had waited to give everybody a chance to hang himself! “You’re surely going to have a strike before long,” said the organizer. “It will be a strike for the three-shift day, among other things; and when it comes, your father will have to consider whether to deal separately with his own men, or to stand by his employers’ union, and let a bunch of big business rowdies drag him into trouble.” You can imagine how much that gave Bunny to think about, and how many discussions he had with his father, and with Paul, and with the teacher of the class in “social ethics” at the Beach City High School! III