The Victorious opposition

"About time!" Martin said, and turned the paper over to read more.

Just then, though, the trolley came clanging up. Chester threw another nickel in the fare box and found a seat. His was far from the only open copy of the Times as the streetcar rattled away.

A man of about Martin's age sitting across the aisle from him folded his newspaper and put it in his lap with an air of finality. "There's going to be trouble," he said gloomily.

The woman sitting behind him said, "There'd be worse trouble if we gave that Featherston so-and-so what he wants. How soon would he be back trying to squeeze something else out of us?"

"Lady, I spent three stinking years in the trenches," the man answered. "There isn't any trouble worse than that." He looked over at Chester for support. "Aren't I right? Were you there?"

"Yeah, I was there," Martin said. "I don't know what to tell you, though. Looks to me like that guy is spoiling for a fight. The longer we keep ducking, the harder he's going to hit us when he finally does."

"Yikes!" The man jerked in surprise. He sent Martin a betrayed look. "Who cares about those lousy little chunks of land?"

"Well, I don't, not much," Chester admitted. "But suppose we give them back to him and then he jumps on us anyway? We'd look like a bunch of boobs, and we'd be that much worse off, too."

"Why would he jump on us if he's got everything he wants?" the man demanded.

Before Chester could say anything, the woman who'd been arguing beat him to it: "Because somebody like that never has everything he wants. As soon as you give him something, he wants something else. When you see a little kid like that, you spank him so he behaves himself from then on."

"How do you spank somebody who'll shoot back if you try?" the man asked.

"If we don't spank him, he'll shoot first," Chester said. The woman in back of the other man nodded emphatically. They all kept on wrangling about it till first the woman and then the other man got off at their stops.

Chester kept on going down into the South Bay. The area was growing fast; builders wanted to run up lots of new houses. The construction workers' union was doing its best to stop them till they met its terms. This tract in Torrance had been carved from an orange grove. The trees had gone down. The houses weren't going up, or not very fast, anyway.

When Martin walked into the union tent across from the construction site, the organizer who kept an eye on things during the night, a tough little guy named Pete Mazzini, wore a worried expression. "What's up?" Chester asked, grabbing the coffee pot that perked lazily over the blue flame of ca

"I hear they really are go

"Shit," Chester said, and the other man nodded. "Pinkertons are bad news." Mazzini nodded again. Martin hadn't seen Pinkerton goons since the steel-mill strikes in Toledo after the Great War. In a way, fighting them was even worse than fighting cops. A fair number of cops were fundamentally decent guys. Anybody who'd sign up to use a club or a blackjack or a pistol for the Pinkertons had to be a son of a bitch.

"At least I found out." Mazzini jerked a thumb toward the building site. "Dumb night watchmen over there don't think about how voices carry once everything quiets down."

"Good." Martin had never got more than three stripes on his sleeve during the war, but he'd commanded a company for a while. Now he had to think not like a captain, but like a general. "We've got to let the pickets know as soon as they start showing up. They'll be ready, because we've had word the builders might pull this. We've got to bring in as many weapons as we can. Not just sticks for the signs, either. We'll need knives. Guns, too, if we can get 'em in a hurry."

"We start shooting, that gives the cops all the excuse they need to land on us with both feet," Mazzini said.

He wasn't wrong. All the same, Chester answered, "If we let the goons break us, we're screwed, too. If they break us, we might as well pack it in. You want that?"

"Hell, no," Mazzini said. "I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it."

"Oh, I am. Bet your ass I am." Martin scratched his chin. "I'm going to call somebody from the Daily Breeze. Torrance papers aren't down on unions the way the goddamn Times is. We ought to have an honest witness here. I think I'll talk to the Torrance cops, too. The builders don't have them in their pocket, like in L.A. If they know the Pinkertons are going to raise hell ahead of time, maybe they can step on 'em."

Pete Mazzini looked as if he would have laughed in anybody else's face. "Good luck," he said. His shrug declared that he washed his hands of dealing with all police anywhere. "I don't suppose it can make things any worse."

Yawning, he agreed to hang around and warn the incoming pickets of the trouble ahead while Chester went to talk with the man from the Daily Breeze and the police and make other arrangements. When Chester got back, he said, "Thanks, Pete. You can go home and get your forty winks now."

Mazzini gave him a look. "Hell, no. If there's go

The reporter from the Daily Breeze showed up an hour or so later. He had a photographer with him, which gladdened Chester's heart. Meanwhile, union backers came up to the men on the picket line, slipped them this or that, and then went on their way. Martin and Mazzini exchanged knowing glances. Neither said a word.

At twenty past eleven, half a dozen autos with Torrance cops in them pulled up by the building site. Martin wondered if they'd known what would go on before he told them. When a reporter from the Times showed up five minutes later, he stopped wondering. They had.

At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. "Here we go," Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time-half a lifetime-since he'd shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who'd been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.

Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who'd take anybody's money and do anything because they hadn't had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight. Knife men and shooters, Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.

"We don't want any trouble, now," said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front… He grimaced. That wouldn't be good at all.

As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, "I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don't think they've got the balls to keep coming."

Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Good. Thanks."

A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons' commander. "Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson," he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. "Go get 'em!"

Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.