.. Our
little girl, Billy. Think of it! And I never saw her!"

She was still lying on her bed, when, one evening, Mary saw fit to break
out in bitter thanksgiving that she had escaped, and was destined to
escape, what Saxon had gone through.

"Aw, what are you talkin' about?" Billy demanded. "You'll get married
some time again as sure as beans is beans."

"Not to the best man living," she proclaimed. "And there ain't no call
for it. There's too many people in the world now, else why are there
two or three men for every job? And, besides, havin' children is too
terrible."

Saxon, with a look of patient wisdom in her face that became glorified
as she spoke, made answer:

"I ought to know what it means. I've been through it, and I'm still in
the thick of it, and I want to say to you right now, out of all the pain
and the ache and the sorrow, that it is the most beautiful, wonderful
thing in the world."

As Saxon's strength came back to her (and when Doctor Hentley had
privily assured Billy that she was sound as a dollar), she herself took
up the matter of the industrial tragedy that had taken place before her
door. The militia had been called out immediately, Billy informed her,
and was encamped then at the foot of Pine street on the waste ground
next to the railroad yards. As for the strikers, fifteen of them were in
jail. A house to house search had been made in the neighborhood by the
police, and in this way nearly the whole fifteen, all wounded, had been
captured. It would go hard with them, Billy foreboded gloomily. The
newspapers were demanding blood for blood, and all the ministers in
Oakland had preached fierce sermons against the strikers. The railroad
had filled every place, and it was well known that the striking shopmen
not only would never get their old jobs back but were blacklisted in
every railroad in the United States. Already they were beginning to
scatter. A number had gone to Panama, and four were talking of going to
Ecuador to work in the shops of the railroad that ran over the Andes to
Quito.

With anxiety keenly concealed, she tried to feel out Billy's opinion on
what had happened.

"That shows what Bert's violent methods come to," she said.

He shook his head slowly and gravely.

"They'll hang Chester Johnson, anyway," he answered indirectly.
"You know him. You told me you used to dance with him. He was caught
red-handed, lyin' on the body of a scab he beat to death. Old Jelly
Bell