To oppose them, if the worst came, there were perhaps five thousand armed men, including the city and county police, the state constabulary, and the citizens who had signed the cards of the Vigilance Committee.  The local post of the American Legion stood ready for instant service, and a few national guard troops still remained in the vicinity.  “What they expect,” she said, looking up from her pillows with tragic eyes, “is that the police and the troops will join them.  You don’t think they will, do you?”

They reassured her, and after a time she slept again.  When she wakened, at midnight, the room was empty save for a nurse reading under a night lamp behind a screen.  Elinor was not in pain.  She lay there, listening to the night sounds of the hospital, the watchman shuffling along the corridor in slippers, the closing of a window, the wail of a newborn infant far away.

There was a shuffling of feet in the street below, the sound of many men, not marching but grimly walking, bent on some unknown errand.  The nurse opened the window and looked out.

“That’s queer!” she said.  “About thirty men, and not saying a word.  They walk like soldiers, but they’re not in uniform.”

Elinor pondered that, but it was not for some days that she knew that Pink Denslow and a picked number of volunteers from the American Legion had that night, quite silently and unemotionally, broken into the printing office where Doyle and Akers had met Cusick, and had, not so silently but still unemotionally, destroyed the presses and about a ton of inflammatory pamphlets.

CHAPTER XLVIII

There was a little city, and few men within it; And there came a great king against it, and besieged it, And built great bulwarks against it; Now there was found in it a Poor Wise Man, And he by his wisdom delivered the city. —­Ecclesiastes IX :14, 15.

The general strike occurred two days later, at mid-day.  During the interval a joint committee representing the workers, the employers and the public had held a protracted sitting, but without result, and by one o’clock the city was in the throes of a complete tie-up.  Laundry and delivery wagons were abandoned where they stood.  Some of the street cars had been returned to the barns, but others stood in the street where the crews had deserted them.

There was no disorder, however, and the city took its difficulties with a quiet patience and a certain sense of humor.  Bulletins similar to the ones used in Seattle began to appear.

“Strikers, the world is the workers’ for the taking, and the workers are the vast majority in society.  Your interests are paramount to those of a small, useless band of parasites who exploit you to their advantage.  You have nothing to lose but your chains and you have a world to gain.  The world for the workers.”