various stages of preparation, and the foreman was directing the feeble efforts of a score or two of clerks and stenographers and office-boys to finish up the job and get them into the chilling-rooms. Jurgis went straight up to him and announced, "I have come back to work, Mr. Murphy."
The boss's face lighted up. "Good man!" he cried. "Come ahead!"
"Just a moment," said Jurgis, checking his enthusiasm. "I think I ought to get a little more wages."
"Yes," replied the other, "of course. What do you want?"
Jurgis had debated on the way. His nerve almost failed him now, but he clenched his hands. "I think I ought to have three dollars a day," he said.
"All right," said the other, promptly; and before the day was out our friend discovered that the clerks and stenographers and office-boys were getting five dollars a day, and then he could have kicked himself!
So Jurgis became one of the new "American heroes," a man whose virtues merited comparison with those of the martyrs of Lexington and Valley Forge. The resemblance was not complete, of course, for Jurgis was generously paid and comfortably clad, and was provided with a spring-cot and a mattress and three substantial meals a day; also he was perfectly at ease, and safe from all peril of life and limb, save only in the case that a desire for beer should lead him to venture outside of the stockyards gates. And even in the exercise of this privilege he was not left unprotected; a good part of the inadequate police force of Chicago was suddenly diverted from its work of hunting criminals, and rushed out to serve him.
The police, and the strikers also, were determined that there should be no violence; but there was another party interested which was minded to the contrary—and that was the press. On the first day of his life as a strikebreaker Jurgis quit work early, and in a spirit of bravado he challenged three men of his acquaintance to go outside
