"Very true," he said with a shrug. But his steady footstep told me that he had no thought of turning back. We fell into silence, and so continued until we reached the Plaza.
"What's this?" I exclaimed, for at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a crowd was gathered, and a cheer, or rather a confusion of vocal applause, broke out as we approached.
A man mounted on a cart was shouting fiercely to several hundred men who had gathered about him, and I could hear such words as "leprous heathen," "cursed Mongols," and other phrases of denunciation roll from his lips.
I looked at him more closely. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his coarse, florid features brought in a flash of memory the scene in the House of Blazes when the bleeding policeman had been rescued from his hoodlum assailants.
"Why, that's Kearney!" I cried.
"A friend of yours?" asked Mr. Baldwin sarcastically.
"I met him once."
"Perhaps you'd like to renew your acquaintance," said Mr. Baldwin, as we paused in curiosity on the edge of the crowd. "He seems to have an education in classical history."
We caught some reference to the labor troubles of Rome, and the fate of the freeman under the slave system that destroyed the ancient republic.
"I hadn't suspected it from a moment's speech with him," I said. "He has a good voice for this sort of work."