Tatro had been up all night, trying to get some information he could rely on. He had four or five men out scouting around, but the three who had reported back hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the scabs. Everyone knew they would be coming. No one seemed to know where they were coming from, how many there would be or when they were likely to arrive. There was no way they could surprise the strikers anyway. There were only two ways in, by the long, twisting road up the hill or down the river and they weren’t going to come rafting down the Columbia. The trees were so thick an army could get lost in there, so that left the road. They would have to come up the road, truckloads of strikebreakers moving single file, and then they would have to get out of the trucks and assemble before they could get into a fight. Tatro was not going to give them that opportunity. The strikers were sure to be outnumbered and the company men would expect them to wait for the usual parley before they started swinging the axe handles. But if the strikers jumped the scabs as soon as they started climbing down from the trucks, they’d have the element of surprise on their side. They could isolate the strikebreakers and beat them up in twos or threes before they got organized.

There was one false alarm around five o’clock when a single old truck labored up the hill. Jake was trying to see who it was when shouts went up from the men in front.

“Why, it’s Gunny!”

“It’s old Gunderson, come to join us.”

“Gunny, I’ll be damned. Did you bring the turkey dinner, Gunny?”

Gunderson pulled an ancient pickup over to the side of the road and got out. He was at least seventy years old, with long, stringy gray hair that looked like it hadn’t been cut in two years. He had the stoop of an old working man and two missing fingers on his left hand. Gunderson reached into the back of the truck, pulled out a crowbar, jogged over to join the rest of the pickets. The men lined up to shake his hand.

“Gunny was one of the reasons we got a union here,” Tatro told Jake. “He worked in this mill for thirty years. Then they fired him cause a foreman found him asleep on top of a pile of logs. Thirty years and you’re out because of a catnap. That’s the way them bastards used to operate. It’s dumb, because if they’d treat men like human beings, they wouldn’t have to deal with a union.”

Tatro introduced Gunderson to Jake. “Gunny, this here is Jake McCloskey, army buddy of mine. Used to be a top light-heavyweight. If things get nasty, you stick close to him. I don’t want you gettin hurt up here.”