The Walking Delegate Part 28

They took another step, several of them--but backward steps. Tom kept them covered for a minute, then moved toward the light, walking backward, his eyes never leaving them. On gaining the door he slipped the revolver into his vest pocket and stepped quickly into the blinding street.

When Tom, entering the union hall that evening, pa.s.sed Jake at his place at the door, the latter scowled fiercely, but the presence of several of Tom's friends, who had been acquainted with the afternoon's encounter, pacified his fists.

"Why, what's the matter with your eyes, Jake?" asked Pig Iron Pete sympathetically.

Jake consigned Pete to the usual place, and whispered in Tom's ear: "Youse just wait! I'll git youse yet!"

That night Tom sat his first time in the president's chair. His situation was painfully grotesque,--instead of being the result of the chances of election, it might well have been an ironic jest of Foley: there was Connelly, two tables away, at his right; Brown, the vice-president, at the table next him; Snyder, the corresponding secretary, at his left; Jake Henderson, sergeant-at-arms, at the door;--every man of them an intimate friend of Foley. And it was not long before Tom felt the farce-tragedy of his position. Shortly after he rapped the meeting to order a man in the rear of the hall became persistently obstreperous. After two censured outbreaks he rose unsteadily amid the discussion upon a motion. "I objec'," he said.

"What's your objection?" Tom asked, repressing his wrath.

The man swore. "Ain't it 'nough I objec'!"

"If the member is out of order again he'll have to leave the hall." Tom guessed this to be a scheme of Foley to annoy him.

"Put me out, you----" And the man offered some remarks upon Tom's character.

Tom pounded the table with his gavel. "Sergeant-at-arms, put that man out!"

Jake, who stood at the door whispering to a man, did not even turn about.

"Sergeant-at-arms!"

Jake went on with his conversation.

"Sergeant-at-arms!" thundered Tom, springing to his feet.

Jake looked slowly around.

"Put that man out!" Tom ordered.

"Can't youse see I'm busy?" said Jake; and turned his broad back.

Several of Tom's friends sprang up, but all in the room waited to see what he would do. For a moment he stood motionless, a statue of controlled fury, and for that moment there was stillness in the hall.

Then he tossed the gavel upon the table and strode down the center aisle. He seized the offending member, who was in an end seat, one hand on his collar and one on his wrist. The man struck out, but a fierce turn of his wrist brought from him a submissive cry of pain. Tom pushed him, swearing, toward the door. No one offered interference, and his ejection was easy, for he was small and half drunken.

Tom strode back to his table, brought the gavel down with a blow that broke its handle and looked about with blazing eyes. Again the union waited his action in suspense. His chest heaved; he swallowed mightily.

Then he asked steadily: "Are you ready for the question?"

This is but one sample of the many annoyances Tom suffered during the meeting, and of the annoyances he was to suffer for many meetings to come. A man less obstinately strong would have yielded his resignation within an hour--to force which was half the purpose of the hara.s.sment; and a man more violent would have broken into a fury of words, which, answering the other half of the purpose, would have been to Foley's crew what the tirade of a beggar is to teasing schoolboys.

When "new business" was reached Tom yielded the chair to Brown, the vice-president, and rose to make the protest on which he had determined.

He had no great hope of winning the union to the action he desired; but it had become a part of his nature never to give up and to try every chance.

The union knew what was coming. There were cheers and hisses, but Tom stood waiting minute after minute till both had died away. "Mr.

Chairman, I move we set aside last week's election of walking delegate,"

he began, and went on to make his charges against Foley. Cries of "Good boy, Tom!" "Right there!" came from his friends, and various and variously decorated synonyms for liar came from Foley's crowd; but Tom, raising his voice to a shout, spoke without pause through the cries of friends and foes.

When he ended half the crowd was on foot demanding the right to the floor. Brown dutifully recognized Foley.

Foley did not speak from where he stood in the front row, but sauntered angularly, hands in trousers pockets, to the platform and mounted it.

With a couple of kicks he sent a chair from its place against the wall to the platform's edge, leisurely swung his right foot upon the chair's seat, rested his right elbow upon his knee, and with cigar in the left corner of his mouth, and his side to his audience, he began to speak.

"When I was a kid about as big as a rivet I used to play marbles for keeps," he drawled, looking at the side wall. "When I won, I didn't make no kick. When I lost, a deaf man could 'a' heard me a mile. I said the other kid didn't play fair, an' I went cryin' around to make him give 'em up."

He paused to puff at his cigar. "Our honorable president, it seems he's still a kid. Me an' him played a little game o' marbles last week. He lost. An' now he's been givin' youse the earache. It's the same old holler. He says I didn't play fair. He says I tried to stuff the box at the start. But that was just a game on his part, as I said then, to throw suspicion on me; an' anyhow, no ballots got in. He says I stuffed it by a trick at the last. What's his proof? He says so.

Convincin'--hey? Gents, if youse want to stop his bawlin', give him back his marbles. Turn me down, an' youse'll have about what's comin' to youse--a cry baby sport."

He kicked his chair back against the wall and sat down; and amidst all the talk that followed he did not once rise or turn his face direct to the crowd. But when, finally, Brown said, "Everybody in favor of the motion stand up," Foley rose to his full height with his back against the wall, and his withheld gaze now struck upon the crowd with startling effect. It was a phenomenon of his close-set eyes that each man in a crowd thought them fixed upon himself. Upon every face that gaze seemed bent--lean, sarcastic, menacing.

"Everybody that likes a cry baby sport, stand up!" he shouted.

Men sprang up all over the hall, and stood so till the count was made.

"Those opposed," Brown called out.

A number equally great rose noisily. A glance showed Tom the motion was lost, since a two-thirds' vote was necessary to rescind an action. But as his hope had been small, his disappointment was now not great.

Foley's supporters broke into cheers when they saw their leader was safe, but Foley himself walked with up-tilted cigar back to his first seat in an indifferent silence.

Chapter XVII

THE ENTERTAINMENT COMMITTEE

During the three weeks that followed Tom kept busy day and night,--by day looking for work and talking to chance-met members, by night stirring the members to appear on the first Wednesday of April to vote for the demand for higher wages. He was much of the time dogged by part of the entertainment committee, but he had become watchful, and the knowledge that he was armed made them wary, so day after day pa.s.sed without another conflict. At first his committee's delay in the discharge of their duty stirred Foley's wrath. "Youse're as slow as fat angels!" he informed them in disgust. Later the delay stirred his anxiety, and he raised his offer from twenty-five dollars a man to one hundred.

Every night Tom was met at his street door by Petersen and left there by him a few hours later. His frequent appearance with Tom brought Petersen into some prominence; and he was promptly nicknamed "Babe" by a facetious member who had been struck by his size, and "Rosie" by a man who saw only his awkwardness. Both names stuck. His relation to Tom had a more unpleasant result: it made the story of his discomfiture by a man of half his size, while on the fire-house job, decidedly worth the telling; and so it rapidly came into general circulation, and the sight of Petersen was the signal for jeers, even among Tom's own friends.

Petersen flushed at the taunts, but bore them dumbly and kept his arms at his side.

All this while Ruth was much in Tom's mind. Had it not been that he kept himself busy he could have done little else but think of her. As it was, he lay awake long hours at night, very quietly that he might not rouse his wife, in wide-eyed dreams of her; and several times by day he caught himself out of thoughts of her to find himself in a street far out of his way. And once, in the evening, he had puzzled the faithful Petersen by walking back and forth through an uptown block and gazing at a house in which no member of the Iron Workers' Union could possibly be living.

But he held firmly to the course he had recognized as his only course.

For three weeks he maintained his determination, against desire scarcely less strong than his strength, till the evening of the first Tuesday of April, the night before the vote upon the strike. Then, either he was weaker, or desire was stronger. He was overwhelmed. His resolve to keep away from her, his intention to spend this last evening in work, were nothing before his wish to see her again. He was fairly swept up to her door, not heeding Petersen, and not giving a thought to Jake, whom he glimpsed once in the street car behind when a brief blockade let it gain the tail of his own.

"You needn't wait for me," he said mechanically to Petersen as he rang the bell. Again the maid brought back word for him to come up. This time Ruth was not waiting him at the head of the stairs. He stood before her door a moment, with burning brain, striving for mastery over himself, before he could knock. She called to him to enter, and he found her leaning against her little case of books, unusually pale, but with eyes brighter than he had ever seen them.

She took a step toward him, and held out her hand. "I'm so glad you called, Mr. Keating."

Tom, for his part, could make no answer; his throat had suddenly gone cracking dry. He took her hand; his grip was as loose as an unconscious man's.

As was the first minute, so were the two hours that followed. In answer to her questions he told her of his new plans, without a vestige of enthusiasm; and presently, to save the situation, she began to talk volubly about nothing at all. They were hours of mutual constraint. Tom hardly had knowledge of what he said, and he hardly heard her words. His very nearness to her made more ruthlessly clear the wideness that lay between them. He felt with its first keenness the utter hopelessness of his love. Every moment that he sat with his hot eyes upon her he realized that he should forthwith go. But still he sat on in a silence of blissful agony.

At length there came an interruption--a knock at the door. Ruth answered it, and when she turned about she held out an envelope to Tom. "A letter for you," she said, with a faint show of surprise. "A messenger brought it."

Tom tore it open, looking first to the signature. It was from Pete. "I have got a bunch of the fellows in the hall over the saloon at--Third Avenue," read the awkward scramble of words. "On the third floor. Can't you come in and help me with the spieling?"