Silence settled down over the docks. Walking now down the waterfront I met only a figure here and there. A taxi came tearing and screeching by, and later down the long empty space came a single wagon slowly. A smoky lantern swung under its wheels, and its old white horse with his shaggy head down came plodding wearily along. He alone had no strike feeling.
Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for she had come to dock too late. Smoke still drifted from her stout funnel, steam puffed now and then from her side. Behind her, reaching a mile to the North, were ships by the dozen, coasters and great ocean liners, loaded and waiting to discharge or empty and waiting to reload. And to the South were miles of railroad sheds already packed to bursting. I thought of the trains from all over the land still rushing a nation's produce here, and of the starlit ocean roads, of ships coming from all over the world, the men in their fiery caverns below feeding faster the fires to quicken their speed, all bringing cargoes to this port. More barrels, boxes, crates and bags to be piled high up on the waterfront. For the workers had gone away from their work, and the great white ships were still.
There came into my mind the picture of a little man I had seen that day, a suburban commuter by his looks, frowning from a ferryboat upon a cheering crowd of strikers. I laughed to myself as I thought of him. He had seemed so ludicrously small.
"Yes, my friend," I thought, "you and I are a couple of two-spots here, swallowed up in the scenery."
I thought of what Joe had said that day: "When you see the crowd, in a strike like this, loosen up and show all it could be if it had the chance--that sight is so big it blots you out--you sink--you melt into the crowd."