Free Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner Page A

left the hall, and though he could have had a choice of companions he went alone. He did not go immediately back to the shack, but under the push of a vague restless desire to stretch his legs drifted off Beacon and into a side street that led up the hill. The night was dry, swept clean by a gusty wind, and the stars were like stars at sea, but there was none of the loneliness of the sea here. All around him as he walked under the steady night-sound of trees there was the sense of human crowding. It was a pleasure to him to walk quietly in the dark, past lighted houses and dark, and feel the people inside and know that he was utterly strange to all of them. Nevertheless, here he walked, with strength and speed and brains in him that they never suspected, and fingers that could play a piano or a violin, and a mind that could set words to rhyme and an eye and a hand that could make pictures. He felt like a lion that walks disdainfully through a sleeping camp of hunters.
    At an intersection he paused, seeing the chip of moon through the leaves of a tall eucalyptus. It looked inexpressibly far-off, vanishing, and he was reminded of a time in his boyhood when he had carelessly left a skiff untied after he stepped out of it, and the tide had run it out, bobbing and dancing and hopelessly out of reach, into the bay.
    What are you after, a fellow like you? he asked himself, and smiled to himself like an actor. He discussed himself with the wind,sitting on a gravel hill and looking down over the lights of the harbor. You are no usual Swede immigrant, no ordinary workingman, the night assured him. If you were, you’d be down at the Forecastle with John, or shooting pool in some joint, or sponging a bed and a cup of coffee down at the mission. People see something in you. What are you after, a fellow like you? Moe Dreyfuss asks. What have you got talents for? the missionary says, scolding you. You’re one we really wanted, Davis says, pinning a button on you and making you out a card. That one song is better than the whole damn picket line, says McGibbeney.
    The wind comes across the Pedro Hills and whines in the thin grass, and out over the harbor the channel lights and the starlike line along the breakwater are splintered by the wind.
    It is a fine warm dream, this dream of the self. It moves as freely as the wind from triumph to triumph. There are shouts in it, and the respectful faces of workers and bosses and politicians. There is a kind of march in this dream, a slow purposeful surge, and an anger that like a fire loose in a city spreads over everything in its path.
    And faces: the stiff-lipped Bible-reading captain of the first ship he ever worked on, between Stockholm and Hull; the suspicious, snoopy, County-Galway phiz of Joyce, the proprietor of the Bowery saloon where he first landed work in America; the furious twisted face—the face of a man with an unbearable pain inside him, or a fury that he cannot satisfy—of the third engineer on the
Sarah Cleghorn
. Others too: the worried, beet-red face of a Norske farmer in Dakota, a man who kept glancing at the fading daylight and loped like a clumsy bear, trying to get in another fifteen minutes, another fifty bundles, another ten sacks. Faceless figures of men in cutaway coats and big watch chains—they swim and swarm in his mind while the wind tugs at him and the lights of the harbor splinter and re-form and shine with diamond brilliance in the wind-split night. He feels his lean strength like a cat stretching; when he stands erect above the wind-tormented grass he is as tall as Moses lifting his hand over the Red Sea and crying for the waters to divide.
    More than an hour later he came in the faint moon-and-star light along the path through the salt grass and up to the doorof the shack. Somebody was home; he saw a shadow stoop and move against the light of the window. When he opened the door he found Otto at the table rolling something in a newspaper. For an instant he had