Fred drew back.  “You’ve got me wrong,” he said.  “I’m not a radical.”

“Not yet, of course.  Your kind take a lot of punishment before they see the light.  But you’re a good prospect—­a damned good prospect.  You’re a good deal like a young fellow I met last fall when I was working over in the shipyards in Oakland.  He—­”

“Shipyards?” interrupted Fred.  “Not Hilmer’s shipyards, by any chance?”

Storch leaned forward, drawing his shaggy eyebrows together.  “Why?”

“I know Hilmer, that’s all.”

Storch continued his searching scrutiny.  Fred felt uneasy—­it seemed as if this man opposite him was drawing the innermost secret of his soul to the surface.  Finally Storch rubbed his hands together with an air of satisfaction as he said: 

“So you know Hilmer!...  That makes you all the more interesting...  Well, well, let’s be moving.  I’ll put you up for the night.  I’ve got a shelter, such as it is.”

Fred rose.  He had an impulse to refuse.  There was something uncanny about the power of Storch.  He was at once fascinating and repulsive.  But, on second thought, any shelter was better than a night spent on the streets.  He had had two months of buffeting and he was ready for even an indifferent comfort.

He ended by going with his new-found friend.  They trotted south along the Embarcadero, hugging the shadows close.  This street, once noisy with a coarse, guzzling gayety, was silent.  A few disconsolate men hung about the emasculated bars trying to rouse their sluggish spirits on colicky draughts of near beer and grape juice, but the effect was dismal and forbidding.  Fred felt a great depression overwhelm him.

He had grown accustomed to the silence of the open spaces, but this silence of the city had a portentous quality which frightened him.  It reminded him of that ominous quiet that had settled down on Fairview after that heartbreaking celebration on Christmas Eve.  What were men doing with their idle moments?  How were they escaping from the drab to-day?  Did the crowded lobbies of the sailors’ lodging houses spell the final word in the bleak entertainment that intolerance had left them?  Upon one of the street corners a Salvation Army lassie harangued an indifferent handful.  But there seemed nothing now from which to save these men except monotony, and religion of the fife-and-drum order was offering only a very dreary escape.  Did the moral values of negative virtue make men any more admirable? he found himself wondering.

Storch led the way in silence.  Finally they turned up toward the slopes of Rincon Hill.  A cluster of shacks, clinging crazily to the tawny banks, loomed ahead in the darkness.  Storch clambered along a beaten trail and presently he leaped toward the broader confines of a street which opened its arms abruptly to receive them.  Fred followed.  The thoroughfare upon which he found himself standing was little more than a lane, hedged on either side