gone out as a green brakeman, but he had come back as a hero, with a
_Tribune_ reporter posing him against a furniture car for a two-column
photo. For the strikers had stoned his train, half killed the "scab"
fireman, stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds of his cars
and shot out the cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with an
Irish engine-driver named O'Hagan, Blake had backed down through the
yards again, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and along
the car tops, recoupled his cars, fought his way back to the engine,
and there, with the ecstatic O'Hagan at his side, had hurled back the
last of the strikers trying to storm his engine steps. He even fell to
"firing" as the yodeling O'Hagan got his train moving again, and then,
perched on the tender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver
at a last pair of strikers who were attempting to manipulate the
hand-brakes.

That had been the first train to get out of the yards in seven days.
Through a godlike disregard of signals, it is true, they had run into
an open switch, some twenty-eight miles up the line, but they had moved
their freight and won their point.

Blake, two weeks later, had made himself further valuable to that
hiring agency, not above subornation of perjury, by testifying in a
court of law to the sobriety of a passenger crew who had been carried
drunk from their scab-manned train. So naïvely dogged was he in his
stand, so quick was he in his retorts, that the agency, when the strike
ended by a compromise ten days later, took him on as one of their own
operatives.

Thus James Blake became a private detective. He was at first
disappointed in the work. It seemed, at first, little better than his