As he moved on his restless course, he thought of Porter and Carson, of Polot, and then of many others, whose faces came out of the memories of the past year. How many of them were "good fellows," human and kind and strong! They fought the world's fight, and fought it fairly. Could more be expected of man? Could he be made to curb his passion for gain, to efface himself, to refuse to take what his strong right hand had the power to grasp? Perhaps the world was arranged merely to get the best out of strong animals.
He turned into a restaurant, where usually he could find a dozen people of his acquaintance in the prosperous world. The place was crowded, but he spied no one he had ever seen. Evidently the people who knew how to make themselves comfortable had contrived to get out of this besieged city. They were at the various country clubs, at Wheaton, Lake Forest, Lake Geneva, Oconomowoc, keeping cool, while the general managers, the strikers, and the troops fought out their differences. The menu was curtailed this evening.
"'Twon't be long, sir," the waiter explained, "'fore we'll have to kill them cab horses as they done in Paris. Game and fruit and milk can't be had."
But for the present the food was not of the famine order, and the noisy crowd eat joyously, as if sure of enough, somehow, as long as they needed it and had the money to pay. As Sommers was idling over his coffee, Swift, a young fellow whom he had seen at the University Club, a college man connected with one of the papers, sat down at his table, and chatted busily.
"They telephoned from the stock yards that there was a big mob down there," he told Sommers. "I thought I'd go over and see if I couldn't get an extra story out of it. Want to come along? It's about the last round of the fight. The managers have got five thousand new men here already or on the way. That will be the knock-out," he chatted briskly.
Sommers drifted along to the scene of the riot with the reporter, happier in finding himself with some one, no matter who he might be. Swift talked about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over the roadbed like insects. A sweltering, fetid air veiled the distances. Like a filthy kettle, the place stewed in its heat and dirt. Here lived the men who had engaged in the foolish fight!
At a cross street the officers dropped off the car, and Swift and Sommers followed them.
"Where's the fun?" the reporter asked the sergeant.
The officer pointed languidly toward a tangle of railroad tracks at one end of the vast enclosure of the stock yards. They trudged on among the lines of deserted cars in the fading glare of the July heat. The broad sides of the packing houses, the lofty chimneys surrounded by thin grayish clouds, the great warehouses of this slaughter yard of the world, drew nearer. All at once a roar burst on their ears, and they came out from behind a line of cars upon a stretch of track where a handful of soldiers were engaged in pressing back a rabble of boys, women, and men. The rabble were teasing the soldiers, as a mob of boys might tease a cat. Suddenly, as the officers and deputies appeared, some one hurled a stone. In a moment the air was thick with missiles, revolver shots followed, and then the handful of soldiers formed in line with fixed bayonets.
Sommers heard in the midst of all the roar the piteous bellowing of cattle, penned up in the cars. He saw a dark form stealing around the end of a car; in a moment a light spurted out as if a match had been touched to kerosene; there was a gleam of light, and the stock-car with its load of cattle was wrapped in flames. The dark figure disappeared among the cars; Sommers followed it. The chase was long and hot. From time to time the fleeing man dodged behind a car, applied his torch, and hurried on. At last Sommers overtook him, kneeling down beside a box car, and pouring oil upon a bunch of rags. Sommers kicked the can out of reach and seized the man by the collar. They struggled in the dark for a few moments. Then the man put his hand to his pocket, saying,—