s cruelly unmoving.

Suddenly he was done with a desire for solitude and he went below. A
half score of men were idling upon the lower deck. He began his
restless pacings again, stroking his faded beard with a strangely
white hand. Finally he stopped, gazing wistfully at the dark beauty of
the ferry tower, sending its winsome shaft up into the quivering
night. A man at his elbow began to speak in the characteristically
Californian fashion about the weather.

"Yes," Fred assented, briefly, "it _is_ a fine night."

"Too fine," the stranger returned. "We need rain."

"Haven't you had much down this way, either?" Fred found himself
inquiring, glad of a chance to escape for the moment into the
commonplace.

"At the beginning of the season it came on a bit, but since Christmas
there has been scarcely a drop. How does the country look?"

Fred leaned against a water barrel and continued to stroke his beard.

"Pretty well burned up. But the fruit trees will soon be blossoming in
spite of everything... The worst of it is there isn't any snow in the
mountains."

"Ah, then you've been up into the Sierras."

"Yes, since December... I had to make my way through the northern
passes just after Christmas. Folks told me it couldn't be done... I
guess it would have been almost impossible in a wet season. But things
were the same way up north. No end of rain in the fall and none to
speak of since the holidays. But at that I've been through some tough
times... How are things in town?"

The stranger unbuttoned his shabby overcoat and took out a bag of
tobacco. His indifferent suit and thick blue-flannel shirt, which
ordinarily would have stamped him as an artisan, was belied by the
quality of his speech.

"Things are rotten. Everybody is striking. You can't get work anywhere
except you want to scab... You'd better have stayed where you came
from."

There was a tentative quality in this observation that roused in Fred
a vague speculation. He had a feeling that the stranger was leading up
cautiously to some subject. He looked again, this time sharply, at his
companion of the moment. There was nothing extraordinary in the face
except the eyes burning fitfully under the gloom of incredibly thick,
coarse, reddish eyebrows. His mouth was a curious mixture of softness
and cruelty, and his hands were broad, but not ungraceful.

"Well, if a man is starving he'll do almost anything, I guess," Fred
returned, significantly.

"Do you m