The old man guffawed. “Hell, like as not you fellas will have to hide behind me. I never run from a fight in my life.”

“I know you didn’t, Gunny. That’s why you don’t have to fight this time, but you’re welcome aboard. Comes to a scrap, we’ll need all hands on deck.”

Tatro assumed the scabs would attack at daybreak. He had the men up and ready as the first light filtered through the fog and drizzle, but the strikebreakers did not appear. The millworkers fidgeted and shivered, cursed the cold and the damp, and flexed wet fingers cramped from holding on to axe handles, crowbars, baseball bats, and three-foot lengths of concrete rebar. The men milled around, huddled under their rain slickers. They talked in tight little knots, disappeared into the shed for endless cups of coffee, gnawed at soggy sandwiches.

By eight o’clock the trucks had not appeared. The pea-soup fog did not lift. They could see down the hill only as far as the first curve in the road, the wet asphalt shining in the rain until it vanished between thick-trunked Douglas firs a hundred feet tall. Tatro toyed with a set of brass knuckles, moving them from his left hand to his right and back again like an uncertain, married man toying with his wedding ring.

“Let the bastards come, by God. Sonofabitch scabs. I’ve been fightin them since the war. They’re the same as us, workin men, but they take the jobs of other men and make it worse for everybody. They can’t get it through their damned heads that the only way to win this thing and get a better life for all of us is to stick together. If we do that, there’s no bosses anywhere can beat us.”

Tatro knew he was preaching to the converted, but he felt he had to say something. It was a lesson he had learned in the Great War. It was hard to keep men geared up for a fight for more than an hour or two. After that, they started to lose their nerve.

By ten o’clock, Jake felt the men were at the point where their nerves were going to break. They were so tense that little scraps were breaking out, men swinging at each other because one had stepped on another’s toes or taken the last cup of coffee from the pot. At last, a murmur went up and down the line. “Hush, what’s that? You hear that, boys? Somethin out there. Listen close.”