It is not really dark in the accepted sense of the word, for a great, yellow, electric lamp sputtering overhead casts a wide circle of gold, but it is one-fifteen of a cold January morning, and this light is all the immediate light there is. The offices of the great newspaper center, the sidewalk in front of one of which constitutes the stage of this scene, are dark and silent. The great presses in every newspaper building hereabouts are getting ready to whir mightily, and if only the passers-by would cease their shuffling you could hear the noises of preparation. A little later, when they are actually in motion, you can hear them, a sound of rushing, dim and muffled, but audible—the cataract of news which the world waits for, its daily mental stimulus, not unlike the bread that is left at your door for your body. But who are these peculiar individuals who seem to be gathering here at this time in the morning? You did not notice any one a few minutes ago, but now there are three or four over there discussing the reasons for the present hard times, and here in the shadow of this great arch of a door are three or four more. And now you look about you and they are coming from all directions, slipping in out of the shadow toward this light, where sits a fat old Irish woman beside an empty news-stand waiting to tend it, for as yet there is nothing on it. They225 all seem at first to be men of one type, small and underweight and gaunt. But a little later you realize that they are not so much alike in height and weight as you first thought, and of differing nationalities. But they are all cold, though, that is certain, and a little impatient. They are constantly shifting and turning and looking at the City Hall clock, where its yellow face shows the hour, or looking down the street, and sometimes murmuring, but not much. There is very little said.
“What is all the trouble?” you ask of some available bystander, who ought to be fairly en rapport with the situation, since he has been standing here for some time.
“Nothin’,” he retorts. “They’re waitin’ for the mornin’ papers. They’re lookin’ to see which can git to a job first.”
“Oh!” you exclaim, a great light breaking. “So they’re here to get a good start. They wait all night, eh? That’s pretty tough, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re mostly Swedes and Germans.” This last as though these two nationalities, and no doubt some others, were beyond the need of human consideration. “They’re waiters and cooks and order men and dishwashers. There’s some other kinds, too, but they’re mostly waiters.”
“Would you say that that old man over there—that fellow with a white beard—was a waiter?”
“Aw, naw! He ain’t no waiter. I don’t know what he is—pan-handler, maybe. They wouldn’t have the likes of him. It’s these other fellows that are waiters, these young ones.”
226 You look, and they are young in a way, lean, with thin lips and narrow chests and sallow faces, a little shabby, all of them, and each has a roll of something wrapped up in a newspaper or a brown paper and tucked under his arm—an apron, maybe.
You begin speculating for yourself, and, with the aid of your friend to supply occasional points, you piece the whole thing together. This is really a very great, hard, cold city, and these men are creatures at the bottom of the ladder, temporarily, anyhow. And these columns of ads in the successful morning papers attract them as a chance. And they come here thus early in the cold in order to get a good start on a given job before any one else can get ahead of them. First come, first served.
And while you are waiting, speculating, another creature edges near you. He is not quite so prosperous looking as the last one you talked to; he seems thinner, more emaciated.
“Take a look at that, boss,” he says, opening his palm and shoving something bright toward you. It looks like gold.
“No,” you answer nervously. (You have been held up before.) “No, I don’t want to look at it.”
“Take a look at it,” he insists.
“No,” you retort irritably, but you do it in a half-hearted, objecting way and see that it is a gold ring with an initial carved in the seal plate.
 
The Men in the Dark
He closes his thin hand and puts it back in his pocket.227 He is inclined to go away, and then another idea strikes him.
“Are you lookin’ fer a job?” he asks.
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