Hurstwood, warmed and excited, gazed steadily ahead.  It was an astonishing experience for him.  He had read of these things, but the reality seemed something altogether new.  He was no coward in spirit.  The fact that he had suffered this much now rather operated to arouse a stolid determination to stick it out.  He did not recur in thought to New York or the flat.  This one trip seemed a consuming thing.

They now ran into the business heart of Brooklyn uninterrupted.  People gazed at the broken windows of the car and at Hurstwood in his plain clothes.  Voices called “scab” now and then, as well as other epithets, but no crowd attacked the car.  At the downtown end of the line, one of the officers went to call up his station and report the trouble.

“There’s a gang out there,” he said, “laying for us yet.  Better send some one over there and clean them out.”

The car ran back more quietly—­hooted, watched, flung at, but not attacked.  Hurstwood breathed freely when he saw the barns.

“Well,” he observed to himself, “I came out of that all right.”

The car was turned in and he was allowed to loaf a while, but later he was again called.  This time a new team of officers was aboard.  Slightly more confident, he sped the car along the commonplace streets and felt somewhat less fearful.  On one side, however, he suffered intensely.  The day was raw, with a sprinkling of snow and a gusty wind, made all the more intolerable by the speed of the car.  His clothing was not intended for this sort of work.  He shivered, stamped his feet, and beat his arms as he had seen other motormen do in the past, but said nothing.  The novelty and danger of the situation modified in a way his disgust and distress at being compelled to be here, but not enough to prevent him from feeling grim and sour.  This was a dog’s life, he thought.  It was a tough thing to have to come to.

The one thought that strengthened him was the insult offered by Carrie.  He was not down so low as to take all that, he thought.  He could do something—­this, even—­for a while.  It would get better.  He would save a little.

A boy threw a clod of mud while he was thus reflecting and hit him upon the arm.  It hurt sharply and angered him more than he had been any time since morning.

“The little cur!” he muttered.

“Hurt you?” asked one of the policemen.

“No,” he answered.

At one of the corners, where the car slowed up because of a turn, an ex-motorman, standing on the sidewalk, called to him: 

“Won’t you come out, pardner, and be a man?  Remember we’re fighting for decent day’s wages, that’s all.  We’ve got families to support.”  The man seemed most peaceably inclined.

Hurstwood pretended not to see him.  He kept his eyes straight on before and opened the lever wide.  The voice had something appealing in it.

All morning this went on and long into the afternoon.  He made three such trips.  The dinner he had was no stay for such work and the cold was telling on him.  At each end of the line he stopped to thaw out, but he could have groaned at the anguish of it.  One of the barn men, out of pity, loaned him a heavy cap and a pair of sheepskin gloves, and for once he was extremely thankful.