However much the Hatch people may have wanted to avoid publicity regarding the change of ownership and policies in the Storage & Warehouse reorganization, the prompt announcement of a general strike of the employees was enough to make every newspaper in the State sit up and take notice.

We had the Mountaineer at the breakfast-table in the club grill-room on the morning of the day when the strike was advertised to go into effect. There was a news story, with big headlines in red ink, and also an editorial. Cantrell didn't say anything against the railroad company. His comments were those of an observer who wished to be straight-forward and fair to all concerned, but his editorial did not spare the silly local stockholders whose swapping and selling had made the coup possible.

Cantrell himself, mild-eyed and looking as if he'd got out of bed about three hours too early, drifted into the grill-room and took a seat at our table before we were through.

"I wanted to be decent about it, Norcross," he said, forestalling anything that the boss might be going to say about the editorial in the Mountaineer. "I'm trying to believe that the men higher up in your railroad councils haven't fathered this Hatch scheme of consolidation—which is more than some of the other pencil-pushers will do for you, I'm afraid. Thanks to your publicity measures, everybody believes that you still hold the whip-hand over the combination with your ground leases. I'm not asking what you propose to do; I am merely taking it for granted that you are going to stick to your policy, and hoping that you will come and tell me about it when you are ready to talk."

"I shall do just that," the boss promised; and I guess he would have been glad to let the matter drop at this, only Cantrell wouldn't.

"I lost three good hours' sleep this morning on the chance of catching you here at table," the editor went on. "A little whisper leaked in over the wires last night, or, rather, early this morning, that set me to thinking. You haven't been having any trouble with your own employees lately, have you, Norcross?"

"Not a bit in the world. Why?"

"There is some little excitement, with the public taking a hand in it. There were indignation meetings held last night in a number of the towns along your lines, and resolutions were passed protesting against the action of the new combination in cutting wages, and asserting that public sentiment would be with the C. S. & W. employees if they are forced to carry out their threat of striking at noon to-day. The whisper that I spoke of intimated that the protest might extend to the railroad employees."

"There's nothing in it," said the boss decisively. "I suppose you mean in the way of a sympathetic strike, and that is entirely improbable. I imagine very few of the C. S. & W. employees belong to any of the labor unions."

"A strike on the railroad would hit you pretty hard just now, wouldn't it?" Cantrell asked.

Mr. Norcross dodged the question. "We're not going to have a strike," he averred; and since we had finished our breakfast, he made a business excuse and we slid out.

When we reached the office we found Fred May already there and at work, and in the middle room Mr. Van Britt was on hand, reading the morning paper.

"You don't get around as early as you might," was the little millionaire's comment when the boss walked in and opened up his desk. "I've been waiting nearly a half-hour for you to show up. Seen the paper?"

The boss nodded.

"I don't mean the strike business; I mean the market quotations."

"No; I didn't look at them."

"They are interesting. P. S. L. Common went up another three points yesterday. It closed at 38 and a fraction. Do you know what that means, Graham?"

"No."

"It means that Uncle Breckenridge and his crowd are already joyfully discounting your coming resignation. Somebody has given them a wire tip that you are as good as down and out, and unless a miracle of some sort can be pulled off, I guess the tip is a straight one. Strong as he is, Chadwick can't carry you alone."

"Drop it," snapped the boss irritably. And then: "Have you come to tell me that you have reconsidered that fool letter you wrote me last night?"

"Not in a million years," returned the escaped captive airily. "I am here this morning as a paying patron of the Pioneer Short Line. I want to hire a special train to go—well, anywhere I please on your jerkwater railroad."

"You don't mean it?"

"Oh, yes, I do. I want a car and a good, smart engine. The Eight-Fifteen will do, with Buck Chandler to run it."

"Pshaw! take your own car and any crew you please. We are not selling transportation to you."

"Yes you are; I'm going to pay for that train, and what's more, I want your written receipt for the money. I need it in my business. Then, if Chandler should happen to get gay and dump me into the ditch somewhere, I can sue you for damages."

"All right; if you will persist in joking with me it's going to cost you something. How far do you want your train to run?"

"Oh, I don't know; anywhere the notion prods me—say to the west end and back, with as many stops as I see fit to make, and perhaps a run over the branches."

I saw the boss make a few figures on a pad under his hand.

"It would cost anybody else, roughly, something like five hundred dollars. On account of your little joke it's going to cost you a cold thousand."

Mr. Van Britt took out his check-book and a fountain pen and solemnly made out the check.

"Here you are," he said, flipping the check over to the boss's desk. "Now shell out that receipt, so that I'll have it to show if anybody wants to know how much you've gouged me. Since you're making the accommodation cost me a dollar a minute, how long have I got to wait?"

The chief's answer was a push at Fred May's call button, and when Frederic of Pittsburgh came in:

"Have Mr. Perkins order out my private car for Mr. Van Britt, with the Eight-Fifteen and Chandler, engineer. Tell Mr. Perkins to give Chandler and his conductor orders to run as Mr. Van Britt may direct, giving the special right-of-way over everything except first-class trains in the opposite direction." Then to Van Britt: "Will that do?"

"Admirably; only I'm waiting for that receipt."

Mr. Norcross said something that sounded like "damn," scribbled a memorandum of the thousand-dollar payment on a sheet of the scratch-pad and handed it over, saying: "The order for the car includes my cook and porter, and something to eat; we'll throw these in with the transportation, and if the car is ditched and you sue for damages, we'll file a cross-bill for hotel accommodations. Now go away and work off your little attack of lunacy. I'm busy."

We had an easier day in the office than I had dared hope for, whatever the boss thought about it, though it was an exceedingly busy one. With the strike news in the papers, it seemed as if everybody in town wanted to interview the general manager of the railroad, and to ask him what he was going to do about it.

Following his hard-and-fast rule, Mr. Norcross didn't deny himself to anybody. Patiently he told each fresh batch of callers that the railroad company had nothing whatever to do with the change in ownership of C. S. & W.; that the railroad's attitude was unaltered; and that, so far as it could be done legally, the Pioneer Short Line would stand firmly between its patrons and any extortion which might grow out of the new conditions.

The C. S. & W. strike—as our wires told us—went into effect promptly on the stroke of noon, and a train from the west, arriving late in the afternoon, brought Ripley. For the first time that day, Mr. Norcross told me to snap the catch on the office door for privacy and then he told Ripley to talk. Our neat little general counsel was fresh from the actual fighting line, and his news amply confirmed the wire reports which had been trickling in.

"The conditions all along the line are almost revolutionary," was Ripley's summing-up of the situation. "Generally speaking, the public is not holding us responsible as yet, though of course there are croakers who are saying that it is entirely a railroad move, and predicting that we won't do anything to interfere with the new graft."

"Cantrell says that public sentiment is altogether on the side of the C. S. & W. strikers," the boss put in.

"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."

"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"

"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life," was the confident rejoinder.

"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it. Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the railroad management.

Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but also less hopeful.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl out of."

"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a chance to sleep on it—as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those papers——"

"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.

"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by Bullock for his vote."

"Well, what then?"

"Then I should make every mother's son of them come across with the full amount of the bribe, on pain of an exposure which the dirtiest politician in this State couldn't afford to face. That would settle it. Hatch couldn't work the same game a second time."

Ripley let it go at that and spoke of something else.

"I suppose you have seen how our stock is climbing. Has the new situation here anything to do with it?"

Mr. Norcross said he thought not, and rather lamented that we didn't have better information about what was going on at the New York end of things. Also, he told Ripley something that I hadn't known; that he had wired Mr. Chadwick asking the wheat king to give him a line on what the stock-kiting meant. Then Ripley asked for orders.

"There is nothing to be done until Hatch begins to raise his prices," he was told. "But I wanted to have you here in case anything should break loose suddenly." And at that Ripley went away.

We were closing our desks to go to dinner when Fred May came in to say that a delegation of the pay-roll men was outside and wanting to have a word with the "Big Boss." Mr. Norcross stopped with his desk curtain half drawn down.

"What is it, Fred?" he asked.

"I don't know," said the Pittsburgher. "I should call it a grievance committee, if it wasn't so big. And they don't seem to be mad about anything. Bart Hoskins is doing the talking for them."

"Send them in," was the curt command, and a minute later the inner office was about three-fourths filled up with a shuffling crowd of P. S. L. men.

The chief looked the crowd over. There was a bunch of train- and engine-men, a squad from the shops, and a bigger one from the yards. Also, the wire service had turned out a gang of linemen and half a dozen operators.

"Well, men, let's have it," said Mr. Norcross, not too sharply. "My dinner's getting cold."

"We'll not be keepin' you above the hollow half of a minute, Mister Norcross," said the big, bearded freight conductor who acted as spokesman. "About this C. S. & W. strike that went on to-day: we'd like to know, straight from you, if it's anything in the railroad company's pocket to have all these old men fired out and a lot of scabs put in on starvation wages to ball us all up when we try to work with 'em."

"It's nothing to us; or rather, I should say, we are on the other side," was the short reply. "You probably all know that C. S. & W. has changed hands, and the old Red Tower syndicate, with Mr. Rufus Hatch at its head, is now in control."

Hoskins nodded. "That's about what we allowed, and we've come up here to say that we're almighty sorry for these poor cusses that have been dumped out o' their jobs. We ain't got no kick comin' with you, n'r with the company, Mister Norcross, but it looks like it's up to us to do somethin', and we didn't want to do it without hittin' square out from the shoulder."

"I'm listening," said the chief.

"The union locals have called a meetin' f'r to-night. There ain't nobody knows yet what's goin' to be done, but whatever it is, we want you to know that it ain't done ag'inst you n'r the railroad company."

The boss had handled wage earners too long not to be able to suspect what was in the wind.

"You men don't want to let your sympathies carry you too far," he cautioned. "When you take up another fellow's quarrel you want to be pretty sure that you're not going to hit your friends in the scrap."

Hoskins grinned understandingly, and I guess the boss was a little puzzled by the nods and winks that went around among the silent members of the delegation; at least, I know I was.

"That's all right," Hoskins said. "Bein' the Big Boss, you've got to talk that way. They might reach out and grab you fr'm New York if you didn't. But what I was aimin' to say is that there'll be a train-load 'r two of strike-breakers a-careerin' along here in a day 'r so, and we ain't figurin' on lettin' 'em get past Portal City, if that far."

"That's up to you," said Mr. Norcross brusquely. "If you start anything in the way of a riot——"

"Excuse me. There ain't goin' to be no riotin', and no company property mashed up. Mr. Van Britt, he——"

It was right here that an odd thing happened. Con Corrigan, a big two-fisted freight engineer standing directly behind Hoskins, reached an arm around the speaker's neck and choked him so suddenly that Hoskins's sentence ended in a gasping chuckle. When the garroting arm was withdrawn the conductor looked around sort of foolishly and said: "I'm thinking that's about all we wanted to say, ain't it, boys?" and the deputation filed out as solemnly as it had come in.

I guess Mr. Norcross wasn't left wholly in the dark when the tramping footfalls of the committee died away in the corridor. That unintentional mention of Mr. Van Britt's name looked as if it might open up some more possibilities, though what they were I couldn't imagine, and I don't believe the general manager could, either.

After that, things rocked along pretty easy until after dinner. Instead of going right back to the office from the club, Mr. Norcross drifted into the smoking-room and filled a pipe. In the course of a few minutes, Major Kendrick dropped in and pulled up a chair. I don't know what they talked about, but after a little while, when the boss got up to go, I heard him say something that gave the key to the most of what had gone before, I guess.

"Have you seen or heard anything of Collingwood since yesterday?"

The good old major shook his head. "I haven't seen, but I have heard," he said, sort of soberly. "They're tellin' me that he's oveh in his rooms at the Bullard, drinkin' himself to death. If he wasn't altogetheh past redemption, suh, he would have had the decency to get out of town befo' he turned loose all holts that way; he would, for a fact, Graham."

At that, Mr. Norcross explained in just a few words why Collingwood hadn't gone—why he couldn't go. Whereupon the old Kentuckian looked graver than ever.

"That thah spells trouble, Graham. Hatch is simply invitin' the unde'takeh. Howie isn't what you'd call a dangerous man, but he is totally irresponsible, even when he's sobeh."

"We ought to get him away from here," was the boss's decision. "He is an added menace while he stays."

I didn't hear what the major said to that, because little Rags, Mr. Perkins's office boy, had just come in with a note which he was asking me to give to Mr. Norcross. I did it; and after the note had been glanced at, the chief said, kind of bitterly, to the major:

"You can never fall so far that you can't fall a little farther; have you ever remarked that, major?" And then he want on to explain: "I have a note here from Perkins, our Desert Division superintendent. He says that the 'locals' of the various railroad labor unions have just notified him of the unanimous passage of a strike vote—the strike to go into effect at midnight."

"A strike?—on the railroad? Why, Graham, son, you don't mean it!"

"The men seem to mean it—which is much more to the purpose. They are striking in sympathy with the C. S. & W. employees. I fancy that settles our little experiment in good railroading definitely, major. We'll go out of business as a common carrier at midnight, and it's the final straw that will break the camel's back. Dunton doesn't want a receivership, but he'll have to take one now."

"Oh, my deah fellow!" protested the major. "Let's hope it isn't going to be so bad as that!"

"It will. The bottom will drop out of the stock and break the market when this strike news gets on the wire, and that will end it. I wish to God there were some way in which I could save Mr. Chadwick: he has trusted me, major, and I—I've failed him!"