his lips. And Saxon, lying beside him, afraid of this visitor
to her bed whom she did not know, remembered what Mary had told her of
Bert. He, too, had cursed and clenched his fists, in his nights fought
out the battles of his days.

One thing, however, Saxon saw clearly. By no deliberate act of Billy's
was he becoming this other and unlovely Billy. Were there no strike, no
snarling and wrangling over jobs, there would be only the old Billy she
had loved in all absoluteness. This sleeping terror in him would have
lain asleep. It was something that was being awakened in him, an image
incarnate of outward conditions, as cruel, as ugly, as maleficent as
were those outward conditions. But if the strike continued, then,
she feared, with reason, would this other and grisly self of Billy
strengthen to fuller and more forbidding stature. And this, she knew,
would mean the wreck of their love-life. Such a Billy she could not
love; in its nature such a Billy was not lovable nor capable of love.
And then, at the thought of offspring, she shuddered. It was too
terrible. And at such moments of contemplation, from her soul the
inevitable plaint of the human went up: WHY? WHY? WHY?

Billy, too, had his unanswerable queries.

"Why won't the building trades come out?" he demanded wrathfuly of the
obscurity that veiled the ways of living and the world. "But no; O'Brien
won't stand for a strike, and he has the Building Trades Council under
his thumb. But why don't they chuck him and come out anyway? We'd win
hands down all along the line. But no, O'Brien's got their goat, an' him
up to his dirty neck in politics an' graft! An' damn the Federation of
Labor! If all the railroad boys had come out, wouldn't the shop men have
won instead of bein' licked to a frazzle? Lord, I ain't had a smoke of
decent tobacco or a cup of decent coffee in a coon's age. I've forgotten
what a square meal tastes like. I weighed myself yesterday. Fifteen
pounds lighter than when the strike begun. If it keeps on much more I
can fight middleweight. An' this is what I get after payin' dues into
the union for years and years. I can't get a square meal, an' my wife
has to make other men's beds. It makes my tired ache. Some day I'll get
real huffy an' chuck that lodger out."

"But it's not his fault, Billy," Saxon protested.

"Who said it was?" Billy snapped roughly. "Can't I kick in general if
I want to? Just the same it makes me sick. What's the good of organized