A gleam of light came, when Billy got a job driving a grading team for the of the big bridge then building at Niles. Before he went he made certain that it was a union job. And a union job it was for two days, when the concrete workers threw down their tools. The contractors, evidently prepared for such happening, immediately filled the places of the concrete men with nonunion Italians. Whereupon the carpenters, ironworkers and teamsters walked out; and Billy, lacking train fare, spent the rest of the day in walking home.  
“I couldn't work as a scab,” he concluded his tale.
 
“No,” Saxon said; “you couldn't work as a scab.”
 
But she wondered why it was that when men wanted to work, and there was work to do, yet they were unable to work because their unions said no. Why were there unions? And, if unions had to be, why were not all workingmen in them? Then there would be no scabs, and Billy could work every day. Also, she wondered where she was to get a sack of flour, for she had long since ceased the extravagance of 's bread. And so many other of the neighborhood women had done this, that the little Welsh baker had closed up shop and gone away, taking his wife and two little daughters with him. Look where she would, everybody was being hurt by the industrial .
 
One afternoon came a caller at her door, and that evening came Billy with news. He had been approached that day. All he had to do, he told Saxon, was to say the word, and he could go into the stable as foreman at one hundred dollars a month.
 
The nearness of such a sum, the possibility of it, was almost to Saxon, sitting at a supper which consisted of boiled potatoes, warmed-over beans, and a small dry onion which they were eating raw. There was neither bread, coffee, nor butter. The onion Billy had pulled from his pocket, having picked it up in the street. One hundred dollars a month! She moistened her lips and fought for control.
 
“What made them offer it to you?” she questioned.
 
“That's easy,” was his answer. “They got a dozen reasons. The guy the boss has had exercisin' Prince and King is a . King has gone in the shoulders. Then they're guessin' pretty strong that I'm the party that's put a lot of their scabs outa commission. Macklin's ben their foreman for years an' years—why I was in knee pants when he was foreman. Well, he's sick an' all in. They gotta have somebody to take his place. Then, too, I've been with 'em a long time. An' on top of that, I'm the man for the job. They know I know horses from the ground up. Hell, it's all I'm good for, except sluggin'.”
 
“Think of it, Billy!” she breathed. “A hundred dollars a month! A hundred dollars a month!”
 
“An' throw the fellows down,” he said.
 
It was not a question. Nor was it a statement. It was anything Saxon chose to make of it. They looked at each other. She waited for him to speak; but he continued merely to look. It came to her that she was facing one of the decisive moments of her life, and she gripped herself to face it in all coolness. Nor would Billy her the slightest help. Whatever his own might be, he masked it with an expressionless face. His eyes betrayed nothing. He looked and waited.
 
“You... you can't do that, Billy,” she said finally. “You can't throw the fellows down.”
 
His hand shot out to hers, and his face was a sudden, radiant dawn.
 
“Put her there!” he cried, their hands meeting and clasping. “You're the truest true blue wife a man ever had. If all the other fellows' wives was like you, we could win any strike we tackled.”
 
“What would you have done if you weren't married, Billy?”
 
“Seen 'em in hell first.”
 
“Than it doesn't make any difference being married. I've got to stand by you in everything you stand for. I'd be a nice wife if I didn't.”
 
She remembered her caller of the afternoon, and knew the moment was too to let pass.
 
“There was a man here this afternoon, Billy. He wanted a room. I told him I'd speak to you. He said he would pay six dollars a month for the back bedroom. That would pay half a month's on the furniture and buy a sack of flour, and we're all out of flour.”
 
Billy's old to the idea was instantly uppermost, and Saxon watched him anxiously.
 
“Some scab in the shops, I suppose?”
 
“No; he's firing on the freight run to San Jose. Harmon, he said his name was, James Harmon. They've just transferred him from the Truckee division. He'll sleep days mostly, he said; and that's why he wanted a quiet house without children in it.”
 
In the end, with much , and only after Saxon had out how little work it on her, Billy consented, though he continued to protest, as an afterthought:
 
“But I don't want you makin' beds for any man. It ain't right, Saxon. I oughta take care of you.”
 
“And you would,” she flashed back at him, “if you'd take the foremanship. Only you can't. It wouldn't be right. And if I'm to stand by you it's only fair to let me do what I can.”
 
James Harmon proved even less a bother than Saxon had anticipated. For a fireman he was clean, always washing up in the roundhouse before he came home. He used the key to the kitchen door, coming and going by the back steps. To Saxon he barely said how-do-you-do or good day; and, sleeping in the day time and working at night, he was in the house a week before Billy laid eyes on him.
 
Billy had taken to coming home later and later, and to going out after supper by himself. He did not offer to tell Saxon where he went. Nor did she ask. For that matter it required little shrewdness on her part to guess. The of whisky were on his lips at such times. His slow, deliberate ways were even slower, even more deliberate. Liquor did not affect his legs. He walked as soberly as any man. There was no hesitancy, no , in his muscular movements. The whisky went to his brain, making his eyes heavy-lidded and the cloudiness of them more cloudy. Not that he was flighty, nor quick, nor . On the contrary, the liquor imparted to his mental processes a deep gravity and brooding solemnity. He talked little, but that little was and oracular. At such times there was no appeal from his judgment, no discussion. He knew, as God knew. And when he chose to speak a harsh thought, it was ten-fold harsher than ordinarily, because it seemed to proceed out of such of , because it was as deliberate in its incubation as it was in its .
 
It was not a nice side he was showing to Saxon. It was, almost, as if a stranger had come to live with her. Despite herself, she found herself beginning to shrink from him. And little could she comfort herself with the thought that it was not his real self, for she remembered his gentleness and considerateness, all his finenesses of the past. Then he had made a continual effort to avoid trouble and fighting. Now he enjoyed it, in it, went looking for it. All this showed in his face. No longer was he the smiling, pleasant-faced boy. He smiled infrequently now. His face was a man's face. The lips, the eyes, the lines were harsh as his thoughts were harsh.
 
He was rarely unkind to Saxon; but, on the other hand he was rarely kind. His attitude toward her was growing negative. He was . Despite the fight for the union she was enduring with him, putting up with him shoulder to shoulder, she occupied but little space in his mind. When he acted toward her gently, she could see that it was merely mechanical, just as she was well aware that the endearing terms he used, the endearing he gave, were only . The spontaneity and warmth had gone out. Often, when he was not in liquor, flashes of the old Billy came back, but even such flashes in frequency. He was growing , . Hard times and the bitter stresses of industrial conflict strained him. Especially was this apparent in his sleep, when he suffered paroxysms of lawless dreams, and muttering, his fists, grinding his teeth, twisting with muscular tensions, his face with passions and violences, his throat with terrible curses that rasped and on his lips. And Saxon, lying beside him, afraid of this visitor to her bed whom she did not know, remembered what Mary had told her of Bert. He, too, had cursed and his fists, in his nights fought out the battles of his days.
 
One thing, however, Saxon saw clearly. By no deliberate act of Billy's was he becoming this other and unlovely Billy. Were there no strike, no and over jobs, there would be only the old Billy she had loved in all absoluteness. This sleeping terror in him would have lain asleep. It was something that was being in him, an image of outward conditions, as cruel, as ugly, as maleficent as were those outward conditions. But if the strike continued, then, she feared, with reason, would this other and grisly self of Billy strengthen to fuller and more forbidding . And this, she knew, would mean the of their love-life. Such a Billy she could not love; in its nature such a Billy was not lovable nor capable of love. And then, at the thought of offspring, she . It was too terrible. And at such moments of contemplation, from her soul the plaint of the human went up: WHY? WHY? WHY?
 
Billy, too, had his unanswerable .
 
“Why won't the building trades come out?” he demanded wrathfuly of the obscurity that veiled the ways of living and the world. “But no; O'Brien won't stand for a strike, and he has the Building Trades Council under his ............