ange cheers and songs brought from all over the ocean world.
Bright-colored turbans bobbed up here and there, for there was no
separation of races, all walked together in dense crowds, the whole
strike family was here. And listening and watching I felt myself a
member now. Behind me came a long line of trucks packed with sick or
crippled men. At their head was a black banner on which was painted,
"Our Wounded." Behind the wagons a small cheap band came blaring forth a
funeral dirge, and behind the band, upon men's shoulders, came eleven
coffins, in which were those dock victims who had died in the last few
days. This section had its banner too, and it was marked, "Our Dead."

But at one point, late in the afternoon, some marcher just ahead of me
suddenly started to laugh. At first I thought he was simply in fun. But
he kept on. Those near him then caught the look on his face and they all
began to laugh with him. Each moment louder, uglier, it swept up the
Avenue. And as it swelled in volume, like the menace of some furious
beast, the uncontrollable passion I heard filled me again with a sharp
foreboding of violence in the crisis ahead.

"Why are you here?" I asked myself. "You can't join in a laugh like
that--you're no real member of this crowd--their world is not where you
belong!"

But from somewhere deep inside me a voice rose up in answer:

"If the crowd is growing blind--is this the time to leave it? Wait."

CHAPTER XVI

Five more vessels sailed that day. And in the evening Eleanore said:

"The women who came to our station to-day kept asking, 'Why can't they
close up the saloons? They're just the places for trouble to start.'"

"We'll try," I said, and that same night Marsh sent word through a
friend to the mayor asking him to close all barrooms on the waterfront
during the strike. The mayor sent back a refusal. He said he had no
power.

Late that night I went down the line and found each barroom packed with
men who were talking of those ships that had sailed. And they talked of
"scabs." Speakers I had not heard before were now shouting and pounding
the bar with their fists. The papers the next morning ran lurid accounts
of these saloons and the open threats of violence there. They censured
the mayor for his weakness and called for the militia. Why wait for mobs
and bloodshed?

To that challenge I heard the reply of the crowd, on the Farm that
afternoon, in their applause of the fiery speech of