Ma Jarvis told Alexander that her own message was even simpler: The strikers would return to work on any terms.

Most of them were now being evicted from their homes and had no place to go.

"I am sorry," said Alexander. "I can only read my father's note again, if you would like me to."

Alexander McCone would say many years later that the confrontation did not bother him a bit at the time. He was in fact elated, he said, to find himself such a reliable " . . . muh-muh-muh-machine."

A police captain now stepped forward. He warned the women that they were in violation of the law, assembling in such great numbers as to impede traffic and constitute a threat to public safety. He ordered them to disperse at once, in the name of the law.

This they did. They retreated across the vast plaza before the main gate. The facade of the factory had been designed to remind cultivated persons of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. The factory's clocktower was a half-scale replica of San Marco's famous campanile.

It was from the belfry of that tower that Alexander and his father and his brother would watch the Cuyahoga Massacre on Christmas morning. Each would have his own binoculars. Each would have his own little revolver, too.

There were no bells in the belfry. Neither were there cafes and shops around the plaza below. The architect had justified the plaza on strictly utilitarian grounds. It provided any amount of room for wagons and buggies and horse-drawn streetcars as they came and went. The architect had also been matter-of-fact about the virtues of the factory as a fort. Any mob meaning to storm the front gate would first have to cross all that open ground.