the tank got a free ride, accompanied by endless groaning and scraping of rusty machinery; also it meant that nobody got any consecutive sleep.  The tank was dark, too dark to read, even if they had had books or papers.  There was nothing to do save to smoke cigarettes and shoot craps, and listen to the smutty stories of the criminals, and plot revenge against society when they got out again.  But up in the new wing of the jail were some cells which were clean and bright and airy, being only three or four feet from a row of windows.  In these cells they generally put the higher class of criminals—­women who had cut the throats of their sweethearts, and burglars who had got I away with the swag, and bankers who had plundered whole communities.  But now, to the great surprise of five out of the six anti-militarists, the entire party was put in one of these big cells, and allowed the privilege of having reading matter and of paying for their own food.  Under these circumstances martyrdom became a joke, and the little party settled down to enjoy life.  It never once occurred to them to think of Peter Gudge as the source of this bounty.  They attributed it, as the French say, “to their beautiful eyes.”

There was Donald Gordon, who was the son of a well-to-do business man, and had been to college, until he was expelled for taking the doctrines of Christianity too literally and expounding them too persistently on the college campus.  There was a big, brawny lumber-jack from the North, Jim Henderson by name, who had been driven out of the camps for the same reason, and had appalling stories to tell of the cruelties and hardships of the life of a logger.  There was a Swedish sailor by the name of Gus, who had visited every port in the world, and a young Jewish cigar-worker who had never been outside of American City, but had travelled even more widely in his mind.

The sixth man was the strangest character of all to Peter; a shy, dreamy fellow with eyes so full of pain and a face so altogether mournful that it hurt to look at him.  Duggan was his name, and he was known in the movement as the “hobo poet.”  He wrote verses, endless verses about the lives of society’s outcasts; he would get himself a pencil and paper and sit off in the corner of the cell by the hour, and the rest of the fellows, respecting his work, would talk in whispers so as not to disturb him.  He wrote all the time while the others slept, it seemed to Peter.  He wrote verses about the adventures of his fellow-prisoners, and presently he was writing verses about the jailers, and about other prisoners in this part of the jail.  He would have moods of inspiration, and would make up topical verses as he went along; then again he would sink back into his despair, and say that life was hell, and making rhymes about it was childishness.