"You can't vin. If you go back it will be _choost_ the same hell-mill it vas be_fore_." "I suppose it would." "Vell then"--his hands spread themselves in protest--"vhy don't you _qvit_? A pretty, strong girl like you could make _loads_ of money fer herself." Carrie was leaning against the factory wall. She did not move. "How?" she asked. "Vell, you hafn't got no _od_der trade, eh?" "No." "Und you vouldn't vant to be a _ser_vant?" "Why not?" "Because that's vorse nor a _shirt_vaist-factory." "Then I wouldn't want to be a servant." Again the man extended his hands. "Vell?" he said. "But I knew one girl that went into a house," affirmed Carrie, "and I wouldn't do that for a fortune." Her practical manner might have disconcerted most men, but this man's business had accustomed him to all forms of rejoinder. He immediately began an endeavor to persuade her by economic arguments. But Carrie interrupted him. "No," she said, "if I do it, it will be only because I have to, and then I'll not do it that way. Thank you, just the same. Here comes my relief: I don't have to wait till the girls come out to-day. Good-by." He essayed to protest, but she walked quietly by him, made her brief report to the oncoming women, and started on her journey homeward. The man, whose trade imposed patience, said no more. He did not again approach her, and, though she knew that he was following her, through the growing crowd that rolled eastward, to mark her hiding-place, she did not attempt to elude him. She was very tired. This was the evening that preceded the early morning call of Angel the Italian and Mirka the Austrian to Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and it was about eight hours later that Hermann, having seen his assailants leave, turned his back to the bar-room door and, alone in the place, set about washing the discarded glasses. Except that he was sleepy, he was in his usual spirits and he was whistling "Die Wacht Am Rhein." He was whistling so loudly that he did not hear the door reopen. There was a flash as of a thousand blinding lights, a roar as if a train had fallen from the elevated road overhead, and Hermann, in the smoke-filled saloon, himself fell crashing behind the bar, and lay there, huddled and still. Mirka quietly reclosed the door and darted around the corner. XXII THE SERPENTS' DEN Poverty, which produces the slave, breeds, just as surely, the slaver. Take where you will the trail of the trafficker in women, this rule is proven. It is proven in puritan Boston and protected New Orleans, in Chicago and Washington, in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and on the heroic scale it is nowhere more plainly proven than in the heroic city of New York.