emember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian,
from that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face
and correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and
petty authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more
profitable. Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no
transom-born thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker
he was at least the master of other men.

His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony
of night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an
Eastern firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a
Pennsylvania powder factory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ of
his kind. It was in Chicago, on a raw day of late November, with a
lake wind whipping the street dust into his eyes, that he had seen the
huge canvas sign of a hiring agency's office, slapping in the storm.
This sign had said:

"MEN WANTED."

Being twenty-six and adventurous and out of a job, he had drifted in
with the rest of earth's undesirables and asked for work.

After twenty minutes of private coaching in the mysteries of railway
signals, he had been "passed" by the desk examiner and sent out as one
of the "scab" train crew to move perishable freight, for the Wisconsin
Central was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he had
gone out as a green brakeman, but he had come back as a hero, with a
_Tribune_ reporter posing him against a furniture car for a two-column
photo. For the strikers had stoned his train, half killed the "scab"
fireman, stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds of his cars
and shot out the cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with an
Irish engine-driver named O'Hagan, Blake had backed down through the
yards again, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and along
the car tops, recoupled his cars, fought his way back to the engine,
and there, with the ecstatic O'Hagan at his side, had hurled back the
last of the strikers trying to storm his engine steps. He even fell to
"firing" as the yodeling O'Hagan got his train moving again, and then,
perched on the tender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver
at a last pair of strikers who were attempting to manipulate the
hand-brakes.

That had been the first train to get out of the yards in seven days.
Through a godlike disregard of signals, it is true, they had run into
an open switch, some twenty-eigh