The automobile was tearing through the tenderloin with its gaudily-painted saloons and second-hand stores sandwiched between. Old clothes fluttered above the sidewalk, and violins, revolvers, boxing-gloves and bits of jewelry, the trash and rubbish of wasted, feverish lives showed in the windows. Fat Jewish women sat in the doorways of pawn-shops, their swarthy children playing on the dirty sidewalk. In the swinging green doors of saloons stood bartenders; and everywhere groups of men and women, laughing, joking, haggling, scuffling and quarreling. Now and then girls with their tawdry finery tripped down from upper rooms, stood a moment in the dark, narrow doorways, looked up and down the street, and then suddenly went forth. In some of the cheap theaters, the miserable tunes that never ended, day or night, were jingling from metallic pianos. They passed on into the business district. Shops were closing, the tall office buildings, each a city in itself, were pouring forth their human contents; the sidewalks were thronged--everywhere life, swarming, seething life, spawned out upon the world. BOOK II I All day long Archie Koerner and Curly Jackson had ridden in the empty box-car. They had made themselves as comfortable as they could, and had beguiled the time with talk and stories and cigarettes. Now and then they had fallen asleep, but not for long, for their joints ached with the jolting of the train, and, more than all else, there was a constant concern in their minds that made them restless, furtive and uneasy. The day was warm, and toward noon the sun beat down, hotter and hotter; the car was stifling, its atmosphere charged with the reminiscent odors of all the cargoes it had ever hauled. Long before daylight that morning they had crawled into the car as it stood on a siding in a village a hundred miles away. Just before dawn the train came, and they heard the conductor and brakeman moving about outside; now and then they caught the twinkle of their lanterns. Then the car was shunted and jolted back and forth for half an hour; finally the train was made up, and pulled out of the sleeping village they were so glad to get away from. With the coming of the dawn, they peeped out to see the sun come up over the fields. They watched the old miracle in silence until they saw a farmer coming across the field with a team. The farmer stopped, watched the train go by, then turned and began to plow corn. "Pipe the Hoosier," Curly had said, the sight of a human being relieving the silence imposed by nature in her loneliness. "We call ’em suckers. He’ll be plowing all day, but next winter he’ll be sitting by a fire--and we’ll--we’ll be macing old women for lumps at the back doors." Archie was not much affected by Curly’s sarcastic philosophy; he had not yet attained to Curly’s point of view.