"We'll have every laboring man in Chicago out on a strike in a week," Dresser added confidentially. "There hasn't been a car of beef shipped out of the stock yards, or of cattle shipped in. I guess when the country begins to feel hungry, it will know something's on here. The butchers haven't a three days' supply left for the city. We'll starve 'em out!"
Sommers knew there was some truth in this. The huge slaughter-houses that fed a good part of the world were silent and empty, for lack of animal material. The stock yards had nothing to fill their bloody maw, while trains of cars of hogs and steers stood unswitched on the hundreds of sidings about the city. The world would shortly feel this stoppage of its Chicago beef and Armour pork, and the world would grumble and know for once that Chicago fed it. Inside the city there was talk of a famine. The condition was like that of the beleaguered city of the Middle Ages, threatened with starvation while wheat and cattle rotted outside its grasp. But the enemy was within its walls, either rioting up and down the iron roadways, or sipping its cooling draughts and fanning itself with the garish pages of the morning paper at some comfortable club. It was a war of injunctions and court decrees. But the passions were the same as those that set Paris flaming a century before, and it was a war with but one end: the well-fed, well-equipped legions must always win.
"They're too strong for you," Sommers said at last. "You will save a good many people from a lot of misery, if you will sell out now quietly, and prevent the shooting."
"That's the cynicism of your crowd."
"You can't say my crowd any longer; they never were my crowd, I guess."
"Have you been fired?" Dresser asked, with childish interest.
"Not exactly, but I fancy Lindsay and I won't find each other's society healthy in the future."
"It isn't the same thing, though. Professional men like you can never get very far from the rich. It isn't like losing your bread and butter."
"Pretty much that, at present. And I think I shall get some distance from the rich—perhaps go out farther west into some small town." Dresser did not reply; he kept on with Sommers, as if to express his sympathy over a misfortune. The court that led to the Park Row station was full of people. Men wearing white ribbons were thickly sprinkled in the crowd. The badge fluttered even from the broad breasts of the few apathetic policemen.
The crowd was kept off the tracks and the station premises by an iron fence, defended by a few railway police and cowed deputy sheriffs. Every now and then, however, a man climbed the ugly fence and dropped down on the other side. Then he ran for the shelter of the long lines of cars standing on the siding. A crew of men recruited from the office force of the railroad was trying to make up a train. The rabble that had gained entrance to the yards were blocking their movements by throwing switches at the critical moment. As Sommers came up to the fence, the switching engine had been thrown into the wrong siding, and had bunted up at full speed against a milk car, sending the latter down the siding to the main track. It took the switch at a sharp pace, was derailed, and blocked the track. The crowd in the court gave a shout of delight. The switching engine had to be abandoned.