Izon clutched the back of a chair and leaned over. "Marrin is a dirty scoundrel!" His voice was hoarse with helplessness and passion. Joe rose. "Tell me about this! Put it in a word!" Tears sprang to Izon's eyes. "You know the cloak-makers' strike--well! Some manufacturer has asked Marrin to help him out--to fill an order of cloaks for him." "And Marrin--" Joe felt himself getting hot. "Has given the job to us men." "How many are there?" "Forty-five." "And the women?" "They're busy on shirtwaists." "And what did the men do?" "As they were told." "So you fellows are cutting under the strikers--you're scabs." Izon clutched the chair harder. "I told them so--I said, 'For God's sake, be men--strike, if this isn't stopped.'" "And what did they say?" "They'd think it over!" Sally arose and spoke quietly. "Make them meet here. _I'll_ talk to them!" Izon muttered darkly: "Marrin's a dirty scoundrel!" Joe smote his hands together. "We'll fix him. You get the men down here! You just get the men!" And then Joe understood that his work was not child's play; that the fight was man-size; that it had its dangers, its perils, its fierce struggles. He felt a new power rise within him--a warrior strength. He was ready to plunge in and give battle--ready for a hand-to-hand conflict. Now he was to be tested in the fires; now he was to meet and make or be broken by a great moment. An electricity of conflict filled the air, a foreboding of disaster. His theories at last were to meet the crucial test of reality, and he realized that up to that moment he had been hardly more than a dreamer. V FORTY-FIVE TREACHEROUS MEN Out of the white, frosty street the next night, when every lamp up and down shone like a starry jewel beneath the tingling stars, forty-five men emerged, crowding, pushing in the hall, wedging through the doorway, and filling the not-too-large editorial office. Joe had provided camp-stools, and the room was soon packed with sitting and standing men, circles of shadowy beings, carelessly clothed, with rough black cheeks and dark eyes--a bunch of jabbering aliens, excited, unfriendly, curious, absorbed in their problem--an ill-kempt lot and quite unlovely. At the center stove, a little way off from its red heart, sat Joe and Sally and Izon. The men began to smoke cigarettes and little cigars, and with the rank tobacco smell was mingled the sweaty human odor. The room grew densely hot, and a window had to be thrown open. A vapor of smoke filled the atmosphere, shot golden with the lights, and in the smoke the many heads, bent this way and that, leaning forward or tilted up, showed strange and a little unreal. Joe could see faces that fascinated him by their vivid lines, their starting dark eyes and the white eye-balls, their bulging noses and big mouths. Hands fluttered in lively gestures and a storm of Yiddish words broke loose.