It happened one evening at the Keystone Hotel. He had come in after dinner and found Miss M'Gann in his room, calling upon Alves. She had brought Dresser with her. He was well dressed, his hair was cut to a conventional length, and he carried a silk hat—altogether a different person from the slouchy, beery man who had grumbled at McNamara and Hills. Sommers's glance must have said something of this, for Dresser began to explain,
"I've given up agitating—doesn't go, what with the courts granting injunctions and the railroads throwing money about."
"Do you mean that was why the strike collapsed?" Sommers asked eagerly.
"Sure!" Dresser thundered heartily. "I KNOW IT. Do you know where the leaders are? Well, one of 'em has got the finest little ranch you ever saw out in Montana. And another," he winked slowly and put his hand to his pocket. "They were poor men when the strike began, and they aren't working now for any dollar and a half a day."
"I don't believe it," Sommers replied promptly. "The managers had the affair in hand, anyway."
Dresser protested loudly, and irritated by the doctor's scepticism began to leak, to tell things he had seen, to show a little of the inside of the labor counsels. He had evidently seen more than Sommers had believed possible, and his active, ferreting mind had imagined still more. The two women listened open-mouthed to his story of the strike, and feeling where the sympathy lay Dresser spoke largely to them.
"You seem to have found something to do?" Sommers remarked significantly at the close.
"I'm assistant editor of a paper," Dresser explained.
Sommers laughed. "Herr Most's old sheet?"
"The Investor's Monthly."