“What can I do more than I have done?” he was saying.  “There are no orders from Washington.  If you gentlemen will get a wire through I’ll do anything I am commanded to do.  But I don’t see what can be done.  The first thing I did this morning, as soon as I learned of the strike, was to order in the troops from the Presidio—­three thousand of them.  They’re guarding the banks, the Mint, the post office, and all the public buildings.  There is no disorder whatever.  The strikers are keeping the peace perfectly.  You can’t expect me to shoot them down as they walk along the streets with wives and children all in their best bib and tucker.”

“I’d like to know what’s happening on Wall Street,” I heard Jimmy Wombold say as I passed along.  I could imagine his anxiety, for I knew that he was deep in the big Consolidated-Western deal.

“Say, Corf,” Atkinson bustled up to me, “is your machine running?”

“Yes,” I answered, “but what’s the matter with your own?”

“Broken down, and the garages are all closed.  And my wife’s somewhere around Truckee, I think, stalled on the overland.  Can’t get a wire to her for love or money.  She should have arrived this evening.  She may be starving.  Lend me your machine.”

“Can’t get it across the bay,” Halstead spoke up.  “The ferries aren’t running.  But I tell you what you can do.  There’s Rollinson—­oh, Rollinson, come here a moment.  Atkinson wants to get a machine across the bay.  His wife is stuck on the overland at Truckee.  Can’t you bring the Lurlette across from Tiburon and carry the machine over for him?”

The Lurlette was a two-hundred-ton, ocean-going schooner-yacht.

Rollinson shook his head.  “You couldn’t get a longshoreman to land the machine on board, even if I could get the Lurlette over, which I can’t, for the crew are members of the Coast Seamen’s Union, and they’re on strike along with the rest.”

“But my wife may be starving,” I could hear Atkinson wailing as I moved on.

At the other end of the smoking-room I ran into a group of men bunched excitedly and angrily around Bertie Messener.  And Bertie was stirring them up and prodding them in his cool, cynical way.  Bertie didn’t care about the strike.  He didn’t care much about anything.  He was blase—­at least in all the clean things of life; the nasty things had no attraction for him.  He was worth twenty millions, all of it in safe investments, and he had never done a tap of productive work in his life—­inherited it all from his father and two uncles.  He had been everywhere, seen everything, and done everything but get married, and this last in the face of the grim and determined attack of a few hundred ambitious mammas.  For years he had been the greatest catch, and as yet he had avoided being caught.  He was disgracefully eligible.  On top of his wealth he was young, handsome, and, as I said before, clean.  He was a great athlete, a young blond god that did everything perfectly and admirably with the solitary exception of matrimony.  And he didn’t care about anything, had no ambitions, no passions, no desire to do the very things he did so much better than other men.