He wanted room and board."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him we had never kept roomers or boarders, but he said he liked
the place--for me to speak to you, and he would call again."

"Huh! he must like the place. Well, I guess we can get along some way,"
said Cowels, and then he sat and looked into the fire for a while
without saying anything. When Mrs. Cowels had put the baby down she came
and sat near her husband and they began to discuss the future. They had
bought their little home a year and a half ago for twelve hundred
dollars. They had lived economically and had been able to reduce the
debt to six hundred dollars. But when the strike came they were unable
to keep up the payments and now the association had begun to push them.
If they did not pay within the next thirty days the real estate company
with the soft sounding title would foreclose the mortgage. When they had
talked this all over, Mrs. Cowels proposed that they take the stranger
in, but her husband objected. "I didn't want to tell you, George," said
the brave little woman, "but there was another caller. The grocer and
butcher was here this morning and we can get no more meat or groceries
until we pay. He is a poor man, you know, and he can't keep up the
families of all the strikers. I didn't want to worry you with this,
George, but since you are opposed to me helping by taking a lodger I
will tell you that something must be done."

Cowels lighted a fresh cigar. That was the third one since supper. They
cost all the way from two to five cents apiece, but Mrs. Cowels knew
that he was worried about lodge matters and if she thought anything
about it at all, she probably reasoned that it was a good thing to be
able to smoke and forget.

"I made the speech of my life to-day," said the striker, brushing the
ashes lightly from his cigar. "The hall was packed and the fellows stood
up on their chairs and yelled. One fellow shouted, 'Three cheers for the
next Grand Master,' and the gang threw up their hats and hollered till I
thought they'd gone wild. Nora, if there was a convention to-morrow I'd
win, hands down."

Mrs. Cowels smiled faintly, for to her way of thinking there were other
things as important as her husband's election to the position of Grand
Master of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and she changed the
subject. Presently the door-bell sounded, so loud and piercing that the
sound of it waked the baby. The man who had pulled the bell