the local powers of government, and now, in the emergency, they had
brought in the state militia as well, and used it frankly to drive the
strikers back to work. They had seized the leaders and active men, and
thrown them into jail without trial or charges; when the jails would
hold no more, they kept some two hundred in an open stockade, called a
"bull-pen," and finally they loaded them into freight-cars, took them at
night out of the state, and dumped them off in the midst of the desert
without food or water.

John Edstrom had been one of these men. He told how one of his sons had
been beaten and severely injured in jail, and how another had been kept
for weeks in a damp cellar, so that he had come out crippled with
rheumatism for life. The officers of the state militia had done these
things; and when some of the local authorities were moved to protest,
the militia had arrested them--even the judges of the civil courts had
been forbidden to sit, under threat of imprisonment. "To hell with the
constitution!" had been the word of the general in command; his
subordinate had made famous the saying, "No habeas corpus; we'll give
them post-mortems!"

Tom Olson had impressed Hal with his self-control, but this old man made
an even deeper impression upon him. As he listened, he became humble,
touched with awe. Incredible as it might seem, when John Edstrom talked
about his cruel experiences, it was without bitterness in his voice, and
apparently without any in his heart. Here, in the midst of want and
desolation, with his family broken and scattered, and the wolf of
starvation at his door, he could look back upon the past without hatred
of those who had ruined him. Nor was this because he was old and feeble,
and had lost the spirit of revolt; it was because he had studied
economics, and convinced himself that it was an evil system which