There were no more gang fights, to the relief of the residents and the police, and the enemies tried to avoid meeting; but when it was unavoidable they passed with quick, defiant, and sullen glances into each other's eyes. Once an involuntary raising of a hand by one was construed into a menace by the other, but he got no farther than to duplicate the gesture. Some intangible power seemed to paralyze his tongue and his muscles. Yet neither boy was a coward in the ordinary sense, nor lacking in the qualities of generosity and forgiveness. Young Smith, while bathing with other boys in the East River at Eighty-sixth Street, swam out into the swift current after a drowning lad, larger than himself, and who had lately bullied him on land, and, by diving again and again, secured him, only to find himself too exhausted to bring him in. A passing tug rescued them, the bully unconscious and Smith at his last gasp. The newspapers made him a hero, and the grateful bully, knowing Smith's enemy, offered to thrash him; but the same paralyzing inhibition prevented Smith from sanctioning this. Jones, employed as elevator boy in a high building, emulated the feat a little later. Cool, and steady of nerve, he ran his car up and down through the smoke of a fire that gutted the building, and brought down to safety a half-hundred people, being rescued himself on the last trip, suffocating on the floor of his car. He, too, was made a hero, but bore his honors as modestly as Smith. These experiences seemed to have a marked effect upon their future development. The qualities of courage, endurance, and masculine virility seemed of more importance than the intellectual and moral attributes. Jones declined a clerical position in the office of the skyscraper; and Smith, who could have been educated at college by the father of the bully, chose to ship in the navy as seaman apprentice. Shortly after, young Jones, unaware of Smith's step, yet influenced by the fate that was guiding their paths in parallel lines, joined the schoolship _St. Mary_, and on graduation entered the merchant marine as able seaman, with a scholar's knowledge of navigation. Smith served his time as apprentice, was honorably discharged as petty officer; and as to reach this rating he must master the study of navigation, he faced the world at twenty-one as well equipped in this as was Jones; then, as under the existing laws he could never obtain a commission in the navy, he chose a field where his knowledge was of use. About the same time as Jones he, too, shipped before the mast, and the Seven Seas engulfed them. But each learned of the other through letters from home.