run away from it now?"

"No," she said quickly. "I don't want that. I've told you that I'm not
afraid----"

"Then we'll have to wait and see, won't we, dear? We can't help
ourselves now. I've got to keep on writing, you know--we depend on that
for our living. And I can't write what I did before--I don't seem to
have it in me. So I'm going into this strike as hard as I can--I'm going
to watch it as hard as I can and think it out as clearly. I know I'll
never be like Joe--but I do feel now I'm going to change. I've got
to--after what I've been shown. The harbor is so different now. Don't
you understand?"

I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine.

"Yes, dear," she said, "I understand----"

CHAPTER XII

The events of that day dropped out of my mind in the turbulent weeks
that followed. For day by day I felt myself sink deeper and deeper into
the crowd, into surging multitudes of men--till something that I found
down there lifted me up and swept me on--into a strange new harbor.

Of the strike I can give only one man's view, what I could see with my
one pair of eyes in that swiftly spreading confusion that soon embraced
the whole port of New York and other ports both here and abroad. War
correspondents, I suppose, must feel the same chaos around them, but in
my case it rose from within me as well. I was like a war correspondent
who is trying to make up his mind about war. What was good in this labor
rebellion? What was bad? Where was it taking me?

From the beginning I could feel that it meant for me a breaking of ties
with the safe strong world that had been my life. I felt this first
before the strike, when I went to my magazine editor. He had taken my
story about Jim Marsh, but when I came to him now and told him that I
wanted to cover the strike,

"Go ahead if you like," he answered, a weary indulgence in his tone, "I
don't want to interfere in your work. But I can't promise you now that
we'll buy it. If you feel you must write up this strike you'll have to
do it at your own risk."

"Why?" I asked. For years my work had been ordered ahead. I thought of
that small apartment of ours, of my father sick at home--and I felt
myself suddenly insecure.

"Because," he answered coolly, "I'm not quite sure that what you write
will be a fair unbiassed presentation of the facts. I've seen so many
good reporters utterly spoiled in strikes like this. They lose their
whole sense of proportion and never seem to get