Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/189



N the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.

The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.

Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the "boom spirit." The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.

The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.

Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing. During the day while Irene was absent Lily, clad