I saw that it was not going to be possible to drive through the jam, so I put my car in a parking place, and set out for the City Hall on foot. On the way I observed that the invitation of the “Times” had been accepted; the Brigade had taken possession of the town. It was just about possible to walk on the down-town streets; there were solid masses of noisy, pushing people, every other man in uniform. Evidently there had been a tacit agreement to repeal the Eighteenth amendment to the Constitution for the next three days; bootleggers had drawn up their trucks and automobiles along the curbs, and corn-whiskey, otherwise known as “white lightnin',” was freely sold. You would meet a man with a bottle in his hand, and the effects of other bottles in his face, who would embrace you and offer you a drink; in the same block you would meet another man who would invite you to buy drinks for everybody in sight. The town had apparently agreed that no invitation should be declined. If the great Republic of Mobland had been unable to make for its returned war-heroes the new world which it had promised them--if it could not even give them back the jobs they had had before they left--surely the least it could do was to get them drunk! And several times in each block you would have to get off the sidewalk for a group of ten or twenty flushed, dishevelled men, playing the great national game of craps. “Roll the bones!” they would shout, completely ignoring the throngs which surged about them. Each had his pile of bills and silver laid out on the pavement, and his bottle of “white lightnin';” now and then one would take a swig, and now and then one would start singing: All we do is sign the pay-roll-- And we don't get a goddam cent. You would go a little farther, and find a couple of automobiles trying to get past, and a merry crowd amusing itself throwing large waste cans in front of them. Some one would shout: “Who won the war?” And the answer would come booming: “The goddam slackers;” or maybe it would be, “The goddam officers.” The crowd would move along, starting to chant the favorite refrain: You're in the army now, You're not behind the plow--; You son-of-a---, You'll never get rich-- You're in the army now! And from farther down the street would come a chorus from another crowd of marchers: I got a girl in Baltimore, The street-car runs right by her door. Every now and then you would come on a fist-fight, or maybe a fight with bottles, and a crowd, laughing and whooping, engaged in pulling the warriors apart and sitting on them. Through a mile or two of this kind of thing I made my way, my heart sinking deeper with misgiving. I got within a couple of blocks of the City Hall, and then suddenly I came upon the thing I dreaded--my friend Carpenter in the hands of the mob! LXI