They left the office and went down the stairs. Maisie was bursting with questions, but controlled her curiosity with an effort while they found the coffeehouse and settled themselves at a table. At last she said: "What have you been doing for the last seven years?"
"Building railways," he said. "It so happened that I arrived at a good time. The war between the states had just ended and the railway boom was beginning. They were so desperate for workers that they were shipping them over from Europe. Even a skinny thirteen-year-old could get a job. I worked on the first-ever steel bridge, over the Mississippi at St Louis; then I got a job building the Union Pacific Railroad in Utah. I was a ganger by the time I was nineteen--it's young men's work. And I joined the trade union and led a strike."
"Why did you come back?"
"There's been a stock market crash. The railroads have run out of money, and the banks that were financing them have gone bust. There are thousands of men, hundreds of thousands, looking for work. I decided to come home and make a new start."
"What will you do--build railroads here?"
He shook his head. "I've got a new idea. You see, it's happened to me twice, that my life has been wrecked by a financial crash. The men who own banks are the stupidest people in the world. They never learn, so they make the same mistakes again and again. And it's the workingmen who suffer. Nobody ever helps them--nobody ever will. They have to help each other."
April said: "People never help each other. It's everyone for himself in this world. You've got to be selfish."
April often said that, Maisie recalled, even though in practice she was a generous person and would do anything for a friend.
Danny said: "I'm going to start a kind of club for workingmen. They'll pay sixpence a week, and if they're thrown out of work through no fault of their own the club will pay them a pound a week while they look for a new job."
Maisie stared at her brother in admiration. The plan was formidably ambitious--but she had thought the same when at the age of thirteen he had said There's a ship in the harbor that's bound for Boston on the morning tide--I'll shin up a rope tonight and hide on deck in one of the boats. He had done what he said then and he probably would now. He said he had led a strike. He seemed to have grown into the kind of person other men would follow.
"But what about Papa and Mama?" he said. "Have you been in touch with them?"
