Then a miner had resisted an officer who tried to arrest him, the officer fired, and Jeffro had the bullet in his shoulder, and had been locked up for being "implicated"--"I don't know yet vat they mean by that long vord," Jeffro said--and had been taken to the courthouse and later to the hospital. On his discharge, eight days ago, he had started to walk home to Friendship Village. "To-morrow," Jeffro said, "I vill get out from the bank my money--I have not touched that--and send to her vat I have. It may be she has saved a little bit. Somehow she vill come. To-morrow I vill get it, as soon as the bank is open." I knew I had to tell him--I knew I had to tell him right then. "Mr. Jeffro--Mr. Jeffro," I said, "you can't. You can't get your money. The bank's failed." He looked at me, not understanding. "Vat is that?" he said. "'Failed'--for a bank?" "I don't know what it is," I told him. "It's something banks can do. You never can tell when. And this one has done it." "But," he cried, "vat do you mean? It vas the _National_ Bank! This nation can not fail!" "This much of it has," I says. "The bank's shut up tight. Everybody that had money in it has lost it--unless maybe they pay back to each one just a little bit." He stood up then and looked at me as if I were strange. "Then this too," he says, "can happen in America. And the things I see all winter--the soldiers to shoot you down?" "No, no," I says. "You mustn't think--" "I do not think," says Jeffro. "I know. I have seen. I am there ven it happens. And more that I did not tell. In March a man came to me ven I was hungry, and tried to buy my vote. Ven I understood, I struck him in his face, just the same as if I have von. But I saw men sell their vote, and laugh at it. And now I understand. You throw dust in our eyes, free fire-engines, free letter-carriers, free this and free that, and all the time somebody must be laughing somewhere at how it makes us fools. I hate America. Being free here, it is a lie!" And me, I set still, trying to think. I set looking at the bright-colored poster that Jeffro had found on his cow-shed in the old country, and I was trying to think. I knew that a great deal of what he'd said was true. I knew that folks all over the country were waking up and getting to know that it was true. And yet I knew that it wasn't all the truth. That there was more, and that something had got to make him know. But what was going to do that? Faint and high and quite a ways off, I heard a little call. It wasn't much of a call, but when another came and then another, it set my heart to beating and the blood to rushing through me as though it was trying to tell me something.