The old man resumed his monotonous tramp up and down the room.  The hardness in Tom’s voice unnerved him.  After another interval of silence he spoke again.

“I wish you hadn’t done it, son.  It’s a dirty job, any way you look at it.”

Tom shrugged.

“Norman says it’s a condition, not a theory; and he is right.  We are living under a new order of things, and if we want to stay alive, we’ve got to conform to it.  It gagged me at first:  I reckon there are some traces of the Christian tradition left.  But, pappy, I’m going to win.  That is what I’m here for.”

Caleb Gordon shook his head as one who deprecates helplessly, but he sat down again and asked Tom what the programme was to be.

“There is nothing for us to do but to sit tight and wait.  If we get a telegram from Indiana before these idiots of ours lose their heads and go to rioting and burning, we shall still have a fighting chance.  If not, we’re smashed.”

“You mustn’t be too hard on the men, Buddy.  They’ve been mighty patient.”

The scowl deepened between the level gray eyes.

“If I could do what I’d like to, I’d fire the last man of them.  It makes me savage to have them turn up and knock us on the head after we’ve been sweating blood to pull through.  Have you seen Ludlow?”

“Yes; I saw him last night.  He’s right ugly; swore he wouldn’t raise a hand even if the boys took kerosene and dynamite to us.”

“Well, if they do, he’ll be the first man to pay for it,” said Tom; and he left the office and the house to make the round of the guarded gates.

Ludlow was as good as his word.  On the night following the day of suspense an attempt was made to wreck the inclined railway running from the mines on Lebanon to the coke yard.  It was happily frustrated; but when Tom and his handful of guards got back to the foot of the hill they found a fire started in a pile of wooden flasks heaped against the end of the foundry building.

The fire was easily extinguishable by a willing hand or two, but Tom tried an experiment.  Steam had been kept up in a single battery of boilers against emergencies, and he directed Helgerson to throw open the great gates while he ran to the boiler room and sent the fire call of the huge siren whistle shrieking out on the night.

The experiment was only meagerly successful.  Less than a score of the strikers answered the call, but these worked with a will, and the fire was quickly put out.

Tom was under the arc-light at the gates when the volunteers straggled out.  He had a word for each man,—­a word of appreciation and a plea for suspended judgment.  Most of the men shook their heads despondently, but a few of them promised to stand on the side of law and order.  Tom took the names of the few, and went back to his guard duty with the burden a little lightened.  But the succeeding night there were more attempts at violence, three of them so determined as to leave no doubt that the crisis was at hand.  This was Tom’s discouraged admission when his father came to relieve him in the morning.