the papers keep
hammerin' away at them to give stiffer an' stiffer sentences. Just
the same, before this strike's over there'll be a whole lot of guys
a-wishin' they'd never gone scabbin'."

Very cautiously, in the next half hour, Saxon tried to feel out her
husband's attitude, to find if he doubted the rightness of the violence
he and his brother teamsters committed. But Billy's ethical sanction
was rock-bedded and profound. It never entered his head that he was
not absolutely right. It was the game. Caught in its tangled meshes, he
could see no other way to play it than the way all men played it. He did
not stand for dynamite and murder, however. But then the unions did not
stand for such. Quite naive was his explanation that dynamite and murder
did not pay; that such actions always brought down the condemnation of
the public and broke the strikes. But the healthy beating up of a scab,
he contended--the "throwing of the fear of God into a scab," as he
expressed it--was the only right and proper thing to do.

"Our folks never had to do such things," Saxon said finally. "They never
had strikes nor scabs in those times."

"You bet they didn't," Billy agreed "Them was the good old days. I'd
liked to a-lived then." He drew a long breath and sighed. "But them
times will never come again."

"Would you have liked living in the country?" Saxon asked.

"Sure thing."

"There's lots of men living in the country now," she suggested.

"Just the same I notice them a-hikin' to town to get our jobs," was his
reply.

CHAPTER XII

A gleam of light came, when Billy got a job driving a grading team for
the contractors of the big bridge then building at Niles. Before he went
he made certain that it was a union job. And a union job it was for two
days, when the concrete workers threw down their tools. The contractors,
evidently prepared for such happening, immediately filled the places
of the concrete men with nonunion Italians. Whereupon the carpenters,
structural ironworkers and teamsters walked out; and Billy, lacking
train fare, spent the rest of the day in walking home.

"I couldn't work as a scab," he concluded his tale.

"No," Saxon said; "you couldn't work as a scab."

But she wondered why it was that when men wanted to work, and there was
work to do, yet they were unable to work because their unions said
no. Why were there unions? And, if unions had to be, why were not all
workingmen in them? Then there would be