He must be a strange kind of a person," she said.

CHAPTER IV

I slept little that night, and my work the next morning went badly. So,
after wasting an hour or two, I decided to stop. I would go and see Joe
and be done with it.

What was he doing with my harbor? The address Sue had given me was down
on the North River, my old hunting ground. The weather had turned cold
over-night, and when I came to the waterfront I felt the big raw breath
of the sea. I had hardly been near the harbor in years. It had become
for me a deep invisible corner-stone upon which my vigorous world was
built. I had climbed up into the airy heights, I had been writing of
millionaires. And coming so abruptly now from my story of life in rich
hotels, the place I had once glorified looked bleak and naked,
elemental. Down to the roots of things again.

I came to a bare wooden building, climbed some stairs and entered a
large, low-ceilinged room which was evidently a meeting hall. Chairs
were stacked along the walls and there was a low platform at one end. As
I lingered there a moment, by habit my eyes took in the details. The
local color was lurid enough. On the walls were foreign pictures, one of
the anarchist Ferrer being executed in Spain, and another of an Italian
mob shaking their fists and yelling like demons at a bloated hideous
priest. There were posters in which flaming torches, blood-red flags and
barricades and cannon belching clouds of smoke stood out in heavy blacks
and reds. And all this foreign violence was made grimly real in its
purpose here by the way these pictures centered around the largest
poster, which was of an ocean liner with all its different kinds of
workers gathered together in one mass and staring fixedly up at the
ship.

Through a door in a board partition I went into a narrow room from which
two dirty windows looked out upon the docks below. This room was cramped
and crowded. Newspapers and pamphlets lay heaped on the floor, and in
the corners were four desks, at one of which three men, whom I learned
later to be an Italian, an Englishman and a Spaniard, were talking
together intensely. They took no notice of my entrance, for many other
visitors, burly, sooty creatures, were constantly straggling in and out.

I saw Joe at a desk in one corner. Looking doubly tall and lean and
stooped, and with a tired frown on his face, he sat there with his
sleeves rolled up slowly pounding out a letter on the typewriter