a bloody-minded nihilist of
the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order of
things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of
the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the
economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I happen
to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the backwater, and
you know what the backwater of a big city will do to a man."

"I couldn't hold my job if I didn't," was the reply.

"That means that you know only half of it," Bainbridge asserted with
cheerful dogmatism. "You're thinking of the crooks it turns out, 'which
it is your nature to.' But Griswold wasn't looking for the crooks; he
was eternally and everlastingly breaking his heart over the sodden
miseries. One night he stumbled into a cellar somewhere down in the East
Side lower levels, looking for a fellow he had been trying to find work
for; a crippled 'longshoreman. When he got into the place he found the
man stiff and cold, the woman with the death rattle in her throat, and a
two-year-old baby creeping back and forth between the dead father and
the dying mother--starvation, you know, straight from the shoulder. They
say it doesn't happen; but it does."

"Of course it does!" growled the listener. "_I_ know."

"We all know; and most of us drop a little something into the hat and
pass on. But Griswold isn't built that way. He jumped into the breach
like a man and tried to save the mother. It was too late, and when the
woman died he took the child to his own eight-by-ten attic and nursed
and fed it until the missionary people took it off his hands. He did
that, mind you, when he was living on two meals a day, himself; and I'm
putting it up that he went shy on one of them to buy milk for that kid."

"Holy Smoke!--and he calls himself an anarchist?" was the gruff comment.
"It's a howling pity there ain't a lot more just like him--what?"

"That is what I say," Bainbridge agreed. Then, with a sudden twinge of
remorse for having told Griswold's story to a stranger, he changed the
subject with an abrupt question.

"Where are you headed for, Broffin?"

The man who might have passed for a steamboat captain or a plantation
overseer, and was neither, chuckled dryly.

"You don't expect me to give it away to you, and you a newspaper man, do
you? But I will--seeing you can't get it on the wires. I'm going down to
Guatemala after Mortsen."

"The Crescent