they all
framed up ahead? They needed the riot to get in the troops."

"The troops are here."

"Rather damnable. Do you think the people on the docks will just sit
back and take it all?"

"They'll have to," he said gently. "The world's work has been clogged up
a little. It's to go on again now."

On the street outside he took my hand:

"My boy, when this is over we'll get together, you and I."

"All right--when it's over," I said.

* * * * *

The Farm that night again changed to my eyes. It was now an orderly
village of tents, two regiments of militia were here, and their sentries
reached for a mile to the north watching the big companies' docks.

I walked up along the line and had talks with some of the sentries. I
remember one in particular, a thin, nervous little man, a shoe-clerk in
a department store. Every work-day for six years he had fitted shoes on
ladies' feet; he had been doing it all that morning. And now here he was
down on the waterfront with only the stars above him and great shadowy
spaces all around, out of which at any moment he expected rushes by
strikers. These strikers to him were not human, they were "foreigners,"
for the moment gone mad, to be treated very much as mad dogs. And here
he was all by himself, his nerves on edge, with a gun in his hands. The
absurdity of that gun in his hands! And the serious danger.

I went into many tenements, into homes I had come to know in the strike.
And they, too, were different now. Their principal leaders taken away
and their headquarters closed by the police, the disorganization was
complete. That spirit they had relied upon, that strange new spirit of
the mass which they had created by coming together, was now dead--and
each one felt the weakness of being alone, the weakness of his separate
self. Blindly they fought against their despair. I found them packing
tenement rooms, gathering instinctively in search of their great friend,
the crowd.

But from such gatherings as these, the weaker, the more timid and the
wiser kept away. Rash spirits led these meetings, and here was the same
hot passion that I had felt back in the jail. These people did not want
to think, the time for thinking had gone by. They wanted to act, to do
something quick. Their minds were fiercely set on the "scabs," the
police and the militia.

Their strike was not yet lost. Their friends and sympathizers were
working hard that very night to get