Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo, that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal, trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy. And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered over with a huge mustache, come out and hang a sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," on the saloon door. As he slouched away to join the bread-line, a black deuce in the world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while waiting in the bread-line, so occupied was he in hating two collegians who watched the line with that open curiosity which nice, clean, respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his desire to go over and quote Greek at them, because they were ignorant and not to blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to any one in a bread-line. And partly because he had forgotten his Greek. He came back to the Bowery briskly, alone, with the manhood of a loaf of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped the sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," from its nail and hid it beneath his coat. He tramped the block all night and, as suspicious characters always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and missions. At 5 A.M. Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender opened it Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of mud on his fraying trouser-ends. The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark-brown wood, so worn that semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled with cigar-ends and puddles of beer and bits of free-lunch cheese. "I want that job as porter," said Carl. "Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it." "Nobody else is going to come." "How do you know they ain't?" Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the bar. "That's why."