phrase that he would always "have United Decency behind him," as the
social purifiers fell into the habit of putting it.

At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had
learned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian,
from that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face
and correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and
petty authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more
profitable. Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no
transom-born thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker
he was at least the master of other men.

His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony
of night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an
Eastern firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a
Pennsylvania powder factory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ of
his kind. It was in Chicago, on a raw day of late November, with a
lake wind whipping the street dust into his eyes, that he had seen the
huge canvas sign of a hiring agency's office, slapping in the storm.
This sign had said:

"MEN WANTED."

Being twenty-six and adventurous and out of a job, he had drifted in
with the rest of earth's undesirables and asked for work.

After twenty minutes of private coaching in the mysteries of railway
signals, he had been "passed" by the desk examiner and sent out as one
of the "scab" train crew to move perishable freight, for the Wisconsin
Central was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he had