"We don't know anything about the sinking of your lighter. But if you can't take our word for it----" "We have your word--the confession that you sank the lighter, signed by the men responsible," was the rejoinder. There was only one answer for the men at Union Headquarters to make, and they made it. "Then our only reply must come in the form of a strike. We are sorry." Then, throughout the city the word radiated, the word that the final breach had been reached between the 'longshoremen and the shipowners that a strike had been called and that within another twenty-four hours, the docks of the east would be silent, the trucks motionless, industry paralyzed! In a private room of the Hohenzollern Club, Von Rintelen, Albert von Papen and Boy-Ed received the information and rose to drink a toast to the success of the strike. Down at the docks, Harrison Grant paled at the news, then sent his men scurrying about in a last effort to gain some information that would give him a positive clue to work on. But there was none. And in her way, Dixie Mason also was working, for she had met Heinric von Lertz and had gone with him to the Ten Mile House, a fast roadhouse just outside the city where she might ply him with wine and seek to gain the secrets that she knew he carried concealed about him. At Union Headquarters, arrangements were being made for the strike meeting, while other officials were making a last effort to reach the shipowners and to seek to prove to them that the depredation committed against them had not been done by 'longshoremen. But the task was almost hopeless. Besides, Imperial Germany still lurked in the shadows with its greatest blow still unstruck, the blow that would cost the shipowners millions of dollars, that it hoped would end forever any conciliatory relations between the shipowners and 'longshoremen. And when that end came--it meant the stagnation of the industry of all Eastern America! CHAPTER VI THE PLOT AGAINST ORGANIZED LABOR