He broke off with both arms raised, and there followed one moment without a sound. Then suddenly, quick and hard and clear, from a corner of this human ocean, I heard a single peal of laughter. In an instant scores joined in. Rising in outbursts here and there, deepening, rushing out over the Farm, it gathered and rolled in wave on wave, rising, always rising. And it swelled into such a laugh that I saw the police feel for their clubs. Reporters scrambled for high places, turned their kodaks on it all. Women snatched up their babies in terror and ran. Marsh stepped forward, caught Joe by the arm and jerked him back to where I was standing. I gripped Joe's hand, it was icy cold.
Marsh shouted to the chairman, and the piercing whistle for order was heard. But it took a long time for that laugh to die. Long after the meeting had broken up I saw groups gather together, and presently they would begin to laugh, and their laughter would take on again that same convulsive tensity. I heard small clusters laughing, and dense throngs in hot saloons where the low rooms would echo and double the roar.
Late at night out on the waterfront, under the bow of that Morgan ship, I found two strikers smoking their pipes, and I sat down and lighted mine. One was a Lascar, the other a Pole. In the strike these wanderers over the earth had met on the waterfront under a wagon where each had come to sleep the night. Since then they had become good friends. Each spoke a little English, each one had caught bits here and there from the speeches made that afternoon--and they had been trying to pool what they'd heard, trying to find why it was they had laughed. As now I tried to give them the gist of what Joe Kramer had said, from time to time they would glance up at the big ship they had paralyzed and chuckle softly to themselves.
Then I went on to Marsh's speech. And out there in the darkness I could feel their rough faces, one white and one brown, grow deeply, eagerly intent, as these strike brothers listened to the voice that had spoken the dream of the crowd:
"Other wars may come and go--but under them all on land and sea this war of ours will go steadily on--will swallow up all other wars--will swallow up in all your minds all hatred of your brother men. For you they will be workers all. With them you will rise--and the world will be free."