There was something admirable, even heroic, in the action of the owners in standing calmly by while the officials melted down millions of gold. As often as a directors' meeting was called the strikers would take heart. "Surely," they would say, "when they see what it costs to fight us they will surrender." The men seem never to have understood that all this was known to the directors long before the sad news reached the public. And then, when the directors would meet and vote to stand by the president, and the president would approve and endorse all that the general manager had done, the disheartened striker would turn sadly away to break the melancholy news to a sorrowing wife, who was keeping lonely vigil in a cheerless home. CHAPTER TWENTIETH Dan Moran had not applied for re-employment when the strike was off, but chose rather to look for work elsewhere, and he had looked long and faithfully, and found no place. First of all he had gone west, away to the coast, but with no success. Then he swung around the southern route, up the Atlantic coast and home again. Three years,--one year with the strikers,--four years in all of idleness, and he was discouraged. "It's the curse of the prison," he used to say to his most intimate friends; "the damp of that dungeon clings to me like a plague. It's a blight from which I can't escape. Every one seems to know that I was arrested as a dynamiter, and even my old friends shun me." He had been saying something like that to Patsy Daly the very day he returned to Chicago. They were walking down through the yards, for Patsy, who was close to the officials, had insisted upon going personally to the master-mechanic, and interceding for the old engineer who had carried him thousands of miles while the world slept, and the wild storm raged around them. Patsy had been telling the old engineer the news of the road, but was surprised that Moran should seem to know all that had taken place, the changes and promotions, the vast improvements that had been made by the company, and the rapidly growing traffic. Patsy stopped short, and looking his companion in the eye, began to laugh. "Now what in thunder are you laughing at?" asked Moran. "At Patsy Daly, the luny," said the conductor (Patsy had been promoted); "why, of course you know everything. I've been rooming at the house, and I remember now that _she_ always knew just where you were at all times. Ah! ye sly old rogue--" "Patsy," said Moran, seriously, putting up his hand as a signal for silence. "That's all right, old man. She deserves a decent husband, but it'll be something new to her. Say, Dan, a fool has less sense than anybody, an' Patsy Daly's a fool. Here have I been at the point of making love to her myself, and only her tears and that big boy of hers have kept me from it. And all the time I thought she was wastin' water on that blatherskite of a Cowels, but I think better of her now."