Instinctively I looked up into the uncovered brown eyes, then dropped mine in confusion as I met his laughing gaze.
"Only when he reads," added the Bostonian, holding on to my fingers, as
I tried to withdraw my hand.
An angry voice broke the silence and we sprang to our feet to see an old man shaking his fist in the face of a young Irish policeman.
"You let me alone!" he shouted. "You let me alone!"
For a moment the officer hesitated. Then he seized the old man by the collar. "Come along quietly! There ain't no use making a howl. There's a vagrancy law in this city and I'll show you it ain't to be sniffed at. I've been watching you ever since I've been on this beat and you ain't done nothing but sit around this Plaza."
"And ain't I a right to sit 'round this Plaza?" The man pulled himself free and again defied the officer of the law with a clenched fist. "Didn't I help make it? When you were playing with a rattle in your crib over in Dublin, I was a-stringing up a man to the eaves of the old Custom House over there on the corner. And now you try to arrest me—me a Vigilante of '51—" His fury choked him, and with a quick turn of the hand, the officer again had him by the collar. But the old man wrenched himself loose.
"You keep your hands off me." He raised his angry voice in warning. Then drawing a bundle of papers from his pocket he thrust them into the officer's face. "Look at that—and that—and that—biggest business blocks in San Francisco. If I choose to wear a loose shirt and sit 'round the Plaza it isn't any business of yours. In the good old days of forty-nine—"
I touched the Bostonian on the arm. "Let's go to the Exposition," I suggested. "We've seen everything here."
"There's no need to hurry! We've all the afternoon before us." He edged a little closer to the old man, about whom a crowd was gathering.
"In the good old days of forty-nine," rang out again and I glanced nervously at my companion. "We didn't have any dipper-dapper policemen making mistakes." He snapped his fingers in the officer's face. "We had good red-shirted miners who knew their business."