A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
“Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage? What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs.”
He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
“We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly.
Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
“There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me.”
In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.
“I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.
Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.
“She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”
He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.
The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.
