Finally the food supply began to dwindle, he was idle, and his wife was unable to do hard work; they had other small children who now began to cry for milk, and the father's heart ached for them and he went over the fence one night prepared to bring all he could get. That day all the children had milk, but it was soon gone and then came the friendly night and the performance at the back fence was repeated.
Emboldened by success the man had come to regard it as a part of his daily or nightly duty to milk his neighbor's cow, but alas! for the wrong-doer there comes a day of reckoning, and it had come at last to the freight handler. The freight agent who was called as a witness testified as to the good character of the man previously, but he was a thief. Put to the test it had been proven that he would steal from his neighbor simply to keep his baby from starving, so he went to the workhouse, his family went to the poor-house, and the strike went on.
"If you were to ask who is responsible for this strike," said the philosophic tramp to Patsy, "which has left in its wake only waste, want, misery, and even murder, the strikers would answer 'the company'; the company, 'the strikers'; and if Congress came in a private car to investigate, the men on either side would hide behind one another, like cattle in a storm, and the guilty would escape. The law intends to punish, but the law finds it so hard to locate the real criminals in a great soulless corporation, or in a conglomeration of organizations whose aggregate membership reaches into the hundreds of thousands, that the blind goddess grows weary, groping in the dark, and finally falls asleep with the cry of starving children still ringing in her ears."
Now an officer brought engineer Dan Moran, the alleged dynamiter, into court for a special hearing. He wore no manacles, but stood erect in the awful presence of the judge, unfettered and unafraid.
Mr. Alexander, the lawyer for the strikers, having had a hint from Billy Watchem, the detective, asked that the prisoner be discharged, but the young man who had been sent down from the office of the prosecuting attorney, being behind the procession, protested vigorously. In the midst of a burning argument, in which the old engineer was unmercifully abused, the youthful attorney was interrupted to receive a message from the general manager of the Burlington route. Pausing only long enough to read the signature, the orator continued to pour his argument into the court until a second messenger arrived with a note from his chief. It was brief and he read it: "Let go; the house is falling in on you"; and he let go. It was a long, hard fall, so he thought he would drop a little at a time. The court was surprised to see the attorney stop short in what he doubtless considered the effort of his life, and ask that the prisoner be released on bail. Now the prosecuting attorney glanced at Mr. Alexander, but that gentleman was looking the other way. "Does that proposition meet with the approval of the eminent counsel on the other side?"