"Anybody call Riordan?"
"His phone home don't answer."
"Somebody must know where Riordan is," Tom said. "Let's go to the hall and make the watchman let us in.
After all, what do we pay dues for if we can't meet there?"
"That's a good idea, Tom.
We can't just let them replace us with fifty-five-centers, no matter what they say."
They began to walk to the union hall, about two blocks from the car barn.
Tom strode along silently. In a way, he still couldn't believe it.
Ten cents an hour couldn't mean that much to the company. Why, he'd have taken even another cut if they'd asked him.
It wasn't right, the way they were doing it.
They had to find Riordan. He'd know the answers. He was the union man.
The union hall was dark when they got there and they banged on the door until the old night watchman opened it.
"I tol' you fellers Riordan ain't here," he said in an aged, irritated voice.
"Where is Riordan?"
"I don't know," the watchman answered, starting to close the door. "You fellers go home."
Tom put his foot in the door and pushed. The old man went flying backward, stumbling, almost falling.
The men surged into the building behind Tom.
"You fellers stay outa here," the old man cried in his querulous voice.
They ignored him and pushed their way into the meeting hall, which was a large room at the end of the corridor.
By now, the crowd had swelled to close to thirty men.
Once they were in, they stood there uncertainly, not knowing what to do next. They milled around, looking at each other.
"Let's go into Riordan's office," Tom suggested. "Maybe we can find out where he is in there."
Riordan's office was a glass-enclosed partition at the end of the meeting hall.
They pushed down there but only a few of them were able to squeeze into the tiny cubbyhole.
Tom looked down at the organizer's desk. There was a calendar, a green blotter and some pencils on it.
He pulled open a drawer, then, one after another, all of them. The only thing he could find were more pencils, and dues blanks and receipts.
The watchman appeared at the back of the hall.
"If you fellers don't get outa here," he shouted, "I'm gonna call the cops."
"Go take a shit, old man," a blue-coated conductor shouted back at him.
"Yeah," shouted another. "This is our union.
We pay the dues and the rent. We can stay here if we want."
The watchman disappeared back into the corridor.
Some of the men looked at Tom.
"What do we do now?"
"Maybe we better come back Monday," one of them suggested. "We'll see what Riordan has to say then."
"No," Tom said sharply. "By Monday, nobody will be able to do nothing.
We got to get this settled today."
"How?" the man asked. Tom stood there for a moment, thinking. "The union's the only chance we got. We got to make the union do something for us." "How can we if Riordan ain't here?"
"Riordan isn't the union," Tom said. "We are. If we can't find him, we got to do it without him." He turned to one of the men. "Patrick, you're on the executive board.
What does Riordan usually do in a case like this?"
Patrick took off his cap and scratched at his gray hair.
"I dunno," he said thoughtfully. "But I reckon the first thing he'd do would be to call a meetin'."
"O.K." Tom nodded. "You take a bunch of the men back to the barns and tell the day shift to come down here to a meeting right away."
The men moved around excitedly and after a few minutes, several of them left to go back to the car barns.
The others stood around, waiting.
"If we're to have a meetin'," someone said, "we gotta have an agenda. They don't have no meetin's without they have an agenda."
"The agenda is, can the company lay us off like this," Tom said.
They nodded agreement.
"We got rights."
"This meetin' business is givin' me a awful thirst," another man said. "All this talkin' has dried out me throat somethin' terrible."