The windows of the office building became vociferous with applause.  A fresh shower of office chairs and filing cabinets descended.  The mob had broken through on one side the line of waggons, and was advancing, each segregated policeman the centre of a fighting group.  The scabs were torn from their seats, the traces of the horses cut, and the frightened animals put in flight.  Many policemen crawled under the coal waggon for safety, while the loose horses, with here and there a policeman on their backs or struggling at their heads to hold them, surged across the sidewalk opposite the jam and broke into Market Street.

Catherine Van Vorst heard the woman’s voice calling in warning.  She was back on the curb again, and crying out—­

“Beat it, Bill!  Now’s your time!  Beat it!”

The police for the moment had been swept away.  Bill Totts leaped to the pavement and made his way to the woman on the sidewalk.  Catherine Van Vorst saw her throw her arms around him and kiss him on the lips; and Catherine Van Vorst watched him curiously as he went on down the sidewalk, one arm around the woman, both talking and laughing, and he with a volubility and abandon she could never have dreamed possible.

The police were back again and clearing the jam while waiting for reinforcements and new drivers and horses.  The mob had done its work and was scattering, and Catherine Van Vorst, still watching, could see the man she had known as Freddie Drummond.  He towered a head above the crowd.  His arm was still about the woman.  And she in the motor-car, watching, saw the pair cross Market Street, cross the Slot, and disappear down Third Street into the labour ghetto.

In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the University of California by one Freddie Drummond, and no more books on economics and the labour question appeared over the name of Frederick A. Drummond.  On the other hand there arose a new labour leader, William Totts by name.  He it was who married Mary Condon, President of the International Glove Workers’ Union No. 974; and he it was who called the notorious Cooks and Waiters’ Strike, which, before its successful termination, brought out with it scores of other unions, among which, of the more remotely allied, were the Chicken Pickers and the Undertakers.

THE UNPARALLELED INVASION

It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China reached its culmination.  It was because of this that the celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred.  Many other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason.  The world awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.