Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks.  He looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe.  A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch.  He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill.  He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures.  That much at least the North had done for him—­fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows.  He could always go back to the woods.  Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.

When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer loneliness drove him out on the streets.  His room was a cheerless place, a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more.  Many a time, lacking any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco’s streets.  He sought out parks, beaches, public buildings.  At night he would drift, a silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the downtown district that was a blaze of light.

That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the haunt of the soap-boxer.  This curious thoroughfare lay upon the borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco’s Chinatown.  For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man’s debating ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience.  In the evening there was always a crowd.  Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters from the crowd.

But the street fakirs were in the minority.  The percentage of gullible ones was small.  Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of propagandists.  Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites, syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men with social and economic theories of the extremist type.  But they talked well.  They had a grasp of their subject.  They had on tap tremendous quantities of all sorts of knowledge.  The very extent of their vocabulary amazed Thompson.  He heard scientific and historical authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every sort of ground—­from biological complexities which he could not understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less.  A lot of it perplexed