I had liked him tremendously. A short stocky fellow with a shock of upstanding red hair. A laughing freckled face usually red with sunburn. A jolly companion, who saw a joke in everything--all of life with its grim struggle to be taken as a joke. And now he was dead, lost in one of those disasters last year which it seemed now would never be explained. There was a dream in which I saw Tad very clearly. He was laughing; he seemed alive and healthy and laughing, and beckoning me to come and join him. Then water came rushing at us; his face went solemn; it went white and solemn and faded away as I struggled to get to him. Thus I was, in August ’91, nothing of the Jeff Grant I had been the year before. A moody fellow now, churlish and sullen, almost estranged from Polly and her father. I liked best to be alone. And so the momentous night of August 15 found me, with my shore leave beginning, seeking solitary diversion in New York City. I had been to a theater. I was returning to my hotel along one of the upper pedestrian levels. Broadway was thronged. It was just about midnight. Down on the street level the vehicles went by in a stream; above them, to the sides, the moving sidewalks swung past with all their seats packed. The green-white trellised vacuums cast their glare upon the busy scene--half a million people hurrying off to their homes, or to eating and dancing places for further midnight diversion. Gay scenes of shifting, scurrying movement and tumultuous sound. At the crossings the directors roared their orders with electrical voices; loud speakers shouted their advertisements from every point of vantage; huge news-mirrors showed images of the current world-happenings, flashing on and off with advertisements interspersed. A gay scene; but I was in no mood to join with it. That sense of inward depression, chronic with me now, sat heavily upon my spirit. I walked the crowded upper level alone, following its outer balcony rail. It was a rainy, blustery night. The street-roof overhead was wet with the falling sheets of rain; I could see the water through the glassite, running off in rivulets. At a crossing, where in the side streets there was no roof, the rain beat down in a torrent upon glistening pavements. The valley of the Hudson was off there, only a few blocks away--frowning Palisades; an empty cañon where last year the stately river had been. The muddy slope down to its center was caking solid now under the sun of these hot summer days. With the tide-water gone, there was only a narrow, swift-flowing fresh-water stream down there at the bottom. The side-slopes were already being built upon. I stood there for a moment gazing moodily. And suddenly it seemed that Tad Megan was there with me; something of him--standing at my elbow. Plucking at me? I turned swiftly. A man and woman had brushed against me as they passed.