noon
`` The managers have played their last card , made their last bluff . The State and the city virtually tell them that it is their own fight , with their own men , men whom they have systematically browbeaten , bullied , swindled , and starved until now the worm has turned . At last you see the beginning of the end , the dawn of the glorious future , the rise of labor against capital , and your friends the magnates have the option of ruin or surrender . I tell you , gentlemen , three hundred thousand freemen will line those tracks at noon to-morrow , and if their -- '' But the officers to whom he addressed himself turned impatiently away . Clerks were passing to and fro along the hall between the office of the adjutant-general and their desks . Some powerful but subdued excitement pervaded the building . Watchers of the strikers had noted the increasing number of officers in civilian dress long after the usual business hours , and Elmendorf , quick to take the alarm , had hastened thither to ferret out the cause .