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.
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.”
