About thirty feet from the factory they passed a black touring car parked at the side of the road. A dark stocky man with high cheekbones was bending over the raised hood adjusting the motor. Lola Andrews saw another man sitting in the back of the car, a pale, sick-looking sort of fellow in a khaki overcoat. The men paid no attention to them and the women walked up the steps of Slater & Morrill. Once inside they could not locate the employment office. As they stood there undecided, a middle-aged man in a business suit came down the corridor and asked them what they wanted. “We want work, mister,” Lola Andrews said. The man said that three months ago he could have given them both jobs. Now they were not taking on any new help. She was not to be put off so easily, insisting she had heard in Quincy that the factory needed people. He told her she had heard wrong. “Isn’t this Rice and Hutchins?” she asked him finally. No, he told her, Rice & Hutchins was up the road. When the women again passed the touring car, the pale man in the overcoat was standing behind it and the dark man had crawled underneath and was working on the motor from below, his head and shoulders just visible through the spokes of the front wheel. Lola had almost to step over his feet to get by. He had a screwdriver in his hand, and just as she was opposite him he glanced up at her. “Pardon me,” she said, “could you tell me how to get to the factory office?” He crawled out from under the car, stood up, and asked her what factory she wanted. When she told him Rice & Hutchins, he pointed out the brick building and told her to take the driveway to the left; that was the office up there. Lola and old Julia went down the gravel walk along the side of the brick building, up the stairs, and through the double folding doors. They could see the Employment Office sign there plainly enough. Whenever William Tracey drove to the square on an errand, as he did two or three times a day, he liked to drive by his building, the wooden three-decker he had built in 1907 at the corner of Hancock and Pearl. Torrey’s Drugstore occupied the ground floor. That Thursday morning as he parked on Pearl to pick up his wife’s groceries at Dyer & Sullivan’s, just across from the drugstore, he noticed two strangers standing with their backs to Torrey’s window where the big glass vase of red water hung from its chains. The men were swarthy, about medium height, one just a little taller than the other. If it had been twelve o’clock the streets would have been full of factory hands and he probably would not have noticed them, but it was still half an hour before the noon whistle and the square was empty. He could not help but notice them. After Tracey reached home with the groceries he found he had forgotten bread, so he drove back again, past his building and left to Schrout’s Bakery on Pearl Street. The strange men were still leaning against the window as he went in. When he came out they were gone.