Left to himself, you understand that J. Arnold Ross would probably never have taken this advanced position. His mind was on his money—or on the things he wanted to do, and that his money enabled him to do; he would probably have gone with his crowd, as he had done hitherto. But there was Bunny, a “little idealist”; Bunny liked the men, and the men liked him, and Dad was proud of that mutual liking, and could be sentimental for Bunny, where he would never have dreamed of being for himself. Furthermore, there was Paul, who knew the men’s side at first hand; and Bunny persisted in bringing Paul into their life, in plying Paul with questions, and making him say, right out, the things he might not otherwise have felt free to say. So Paul had become a force in Dad’s consciousness; and so Dad promised to try to help the men. He attended for the first time a meeting of his own trade union. It was at night, and lasted till one o’clock in the morning; and the next day being Saturday, Bunny came up to town and met his father at the hotel, and heard the story of what had happened. Most of the oil employers, it appeared, were exactly like J. Arnold Ross, in that they left the running of their union to others; there had been not more than forty men at this critical meeting, and the dominant group consisted of representatives of the “Big Five.” The chairman, and obviously the man who ran the organization, was an attorney for Excelsior Pete, who owned a small well, presumably to give him standing. He had a group which took the cue from him and voted with him. It had been rather a steam-roller affair, said Dad. Bunny wanted all the particulars, and plied his father with questions. Dad had pleaded the men’s side, as tactfully as he could, and had found exactly two operators in the gathering who were willing to agree, ever so timidly, with his point of view. To the ruling group he had seemed something of a renegade, and they had hinted as much. “You know how it is, son,” Dad explained, “this is an ‘open shop’ town; that’s the way the crowd feels, and you might jist as well butt your head against a stone wall as argue with them about unions. There’s everything to be said for them—they’ve had trouble with organized labor, and it’s made them bitter. They say”—and Dad went on to detail the arguments that had been hurled at him; unions meant graft, unions meant “hold-ups,” unions meant disorder, unions meant strikes, unions meant Socialism. “What are they going to do, Dad?” “They’re jist not a-goin’ to let the men have a union—that’s all. I said, ‘It looks as if the Federation has turned into a strike-breaking organization.’ And Fred Naumann—that’s the chairman—snapped back at me, ‘You said it!’ They’ll be a strike-breaking organization, if and when and so long as there’s strikes in their field—that’s the way Raymond put it, the vice-president of Victor. And then Ben Skutt put in an oar—” “Ben _Skutt_?”