Reuben shook his head. "I'll think about it, Jake, and we'll talk it over again to-morrow." There were few people in Sabinsport who credited Reuben Cowder with having a sense of humor, but deep down in his stern, suppressed nature there was considerable, and it came to the top now. To call a shop meeting appealed to him as effective repartee. I am quite sure, however, that if he had not been convinced that the men would vote to go on with the work, he would not have risked it. What he did want to do was to prove to Ralph and the shop agitators, whoever they might be, that ninety-five per cent. of the laboring body in the wire mill would not strike against making wire to sell to the Allies. They might strike for other reasons, but not for that. He was willing to try them out. And so it happened, one morning in January, that the men coming to work found in conspicuous places around the yards and through the mills, a notice calling for a floor meeting at one o'clock the next day (you will note that Cowder and Mulligan were not taking the time for the gathering out of the men's noon hour), to discuss a question which concerned both the executive and laboring ends of the mill, preparatory to taking a vote. There was not an inkling in the broadside of what the question to be discussed was; and when one o'clock of the day set came there was not a man of all the 1800 in the wire mill that could be spared from his post, who did not appear on the floor of the main building of the plant. They were a sight for sculptors and painters, gathered there around the great machines in the dusky light which filled the immense building--labor in all of its virile strength, men from a dozen nations, in greasy, daubed garb lifted their strong, set faces to Jake Mulligan, who, from a cage dropped to a proper level by a great crane, addressed them. He put it direct. "Boys," he said, "you know as well as I do that there's a lot of talk going up and down this mill about the wickedness of making things for war. Now, I never did, and never will, ask a man to do a thing that is against his conscience; and Mr. Cowder and I have concluded that we would like to know whether this is just talk or whether there is some of you fellows that really are doing something that you think is wrong. We have decided to take a vote on it, to find out how many of you think we ought to give up this contract.