I heard a single peal of laughter. In an instant
scores joined in. Rising in outbursts here and there, deepening, rushing
out over the Farm, it gathered and rolled in wave on wave, rising,
always rising. And it swelled into such a laugh that I saw the police
feel for their clubs. Reporters scrambled for high places, turned their
kodaks on it all. Women snatched up their babies in terror and ran.
Marsh stepped forward, caught Joe by the arm and jerked him back to
where I was standing. I gripped Joe's hand, it was icy cold.

Marsh shouted to the chairman, and the piercing whistle for order was
heard. But it took a long time for that laugh to die. Long after the
meeting had broken up I saw groups gather together, and presently they
would begin to laugh, and their laughter would take on again that same
convulsive tensity. I heard small clusters laughing, and dense throngs
in hot saloons where the low rooms would echo and double the roar.

Late at night out on the waterfront, under the bow of that Morgan ship,
I found two strikers smoking their pipes, and I sat down and lighted
mine. One was a Lascar, the other a Pole. In the strike these wanderers
over the earth had met on the waterfront under a wagon where each had
come to sleep the night. Since then they had become good friends. Each
spoke a little English, each one had caught bits here and there from the
speeches made that afternoon--and they had been trying to pool what
they'd heard, trying to find why it was they had laughed. As now I tried
to give them the gist of what Joe Kramer had said, from time to time
they would glance up at the big ship they had paralyzed and chuckle
softly to themselves.

Then I went on to Marsh's speech. And out there in the darkness I could
feel their rough faces, one white and one brown, grow deeply, eagerly
intent, as these strike brothers listened to the voice that had spoken
the dream of the crowd:

"Other wars may come and go--but under them all on land and sea this war
of ours will go steadily on--will swallow up all other wars--will
swallow up in all your minds all hatred of your brother men. For you
they will be workers all. With them you will rise--and the world will be
free."

CHAPTER XV

To all this, from the buildings far downtown that loomed like tall grim
shadows, the big companies said nothing.

But that same night, while I sat talking to those two men, we heard a
sharp excited cry. We saw a man behind us runni