Those oily velvet eddies, apparently, were too much for him. I saw him cover his face with his hands and sway back with a tragically helpless mutter of "I can't do it!" And both the gesture and the words made my mind go back to the man from Medicine Hat. A thousand crawling little tendrils of curiosity over-ran resentment at being thus disturbed in my quest for solitude. I continued my overt watch of the incredibly thin stranger who was still peering down at the slip-water. I was startled, a minute or two later, to hear him emit a throat-chuckle that was as defiant as it was disagreeable. Then with an oddly nervous gesture of repudiation he caught up his hat and coat, turned on his heel, and passed like a shadow down the quietness of the deserted wharf. I turned and followed him. The tragedy recorded on that pallid face was above all pretense. He could never be taken for a "dummy-chucker"; the thing was genuine. Any man who could squeeze life so dry that he thought of tossing it away like an orange-skin was worth following. He seemed a contradiction to everything in the city that surrounded us, in that mad city where every mortal appeared so intent on living, where the forlornest wrecks clung so feverishly to life, and where life itself, on that murmurous and moonlit night, seemed so full of whispered promises. I followed him back to the city, speculating, as idle minds will, on who and what he was and by what mischance he had been cast into this lowest pit of indifferency. More things than his mere apparel assured me he was not a "crust-thrower." I kept close at his heels until we came to Broadway, startling myself with the sudden wonder if he, too, were a victim of those relentless hounds of wakefulness that turn night into a never-ending inquisition. Then all speculation suddenly ended, for I saw that he had come to a stop and was gazing perplexedly up and down the light-strewn channel of Broadway. I noticed his eye waver on a passing figure or two, whom he seemed about to accost. Then, as though from that passing throng he beheld something kindred and common in my face, he touched me lightly on the arm. I came to a stop, looking him full in the face. There seemed almost a touch of the supernatural in that encounter, as though two wondering ghosts stood gazing at each other on the loneliest edges of a No-man's Land. He did not speak, as I was afraid he might, and send a mallet of banality crashing down on that crystal of wonderment. He merely waved one thin hand toward the façade of a mirrored and pillared caravansary wherein, I knew, it was the wont of the homeless New Yorker to purchase a three-hour lease on three feet of damask and thereby dream he was probing the innermost depths of life. His gesture, I saw, was an invitation. It was also a challenge.