Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road. A group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestures with their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growing city, past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressing a crowd of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it had been in the moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson. The crowds of people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon by a crowd and hanged to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of voices in the street. “We've got to take power into our hands. We've got to carry on our own battle for power,” the voice declared. The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson. In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening's work. He was quite sure that had his wife been alive she would have understood what had happened. She had always understood everything he did or said. He remembered his courtship. His wife had been a country girl and on Sundays, after their marriage, they had gone together to spend the day in the wood. After Joe had brought his wife to Bidwell they continued the practice. One of his customers, a well-to-do farmer, lived five miles north of town, and on his farm there was a grove of beech trees. Almost every Sunday for several years he got a horse from the livery stable and took his wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for an hour, while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and went into the beech forest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches of the trees, and when the two people had remained silent for a time, hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them. Joe had brought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering little animals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered away. One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot one of the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from the farmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of a tree, and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leaned against him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quivering thing on the ground. When it lay still the boy came and picked it up. Still Joe said nothing. Taking his wife's arm he walked to where they were in the habit of sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts to scatter on the ground. The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman, had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and did not want his wife to see, and she pretended she had not seen.