§2. Luke drove to the factory in a taxicab that he insisted should be open. As he neared his destination through rows of grimy buildings and vacant lots in which goats grazed among ash-heaps and tin cans and "For Sale" signs, the streets began to look as if a heavy skirmish had been fought through them. Knots of idle sightseers already lined the uneven sidewalks and pointed to the relics of the conflict; at corners the former workers were gathered in low-speaking groups—shrunken figures; slouching forms in poor clothing, whose business was the making of better clothes for luckier beings; faces angry and sullen, faces savage, debased, hungry; women’s faces as sexless as the men’s—and everywhere, furtive and sinister, those other faces, the faces most to be feared, of the gathered condors of the underworld, the feeders on economic carrion, who had slunk here from the darkest corners of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, rising from a hundred alleys and pot-houses, and circling toward the factory as birds of prey come from the four quarters of the compass toward a battlefield; he saw them crouched at the shadowy thresholds of tumble-down dwellings, leering from fetid passageways, peering from the swinging doors of stinking saloons, stealthy, determined. Overhead the sky was clear sapphire. A strong breeze came in from the Sound, laden with health. It fanned the memories of yesterday out of his brain and for a moment made the present seem a picture from the remote past. It was unreal: he felt himself an unimportant spectator of some unconvincing play. Then, rising above rows of rickety houses, the mill came into sight, blocking the street-end, and restored his appreciation of the imminent. A wrecked coal-wagon lay horseless in the middle of the street opposite a bent lamp-post, the coal heaped where it had fallen. Battered hats were in the gutter, and on the pavement was a coat, torn and muddy. No smoke curled to-day from the chimney of the mill’s engine-room, and in front of its shattered main-door, rudely repaired by unpainted planks of fresh pine, two policemen lounged, facing a string of mute pickets. Luke passed the door unmolested and entered the office. The superintendent, a whiskered man named Whitaker, was there, and one or two pasty and frightened clerks. "Mr. Forbes down yet?" asked Luke briskly. "No, sir," said Whitaker. "He just sent word he was sick." "Sick? What’s the matter with him?" "I don’t know exactly, Mr. Huber. It was Miss Forbes telephoned, and she said he’d had a kind of fainting fit right after breakfast." Luke sat down at the desk and called up the Forbes house. "Mr. Forbes there?" he asked of the maid that answered him. "No, sir. Mr. Forbes is in bed." "Ill?" "Not very well." "Ask Miss Forbes to come to the ’phone. This is Mr. Huber talking. I’m at the factory, and I must know something about Mr. Forbes’ condition."