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seriously, “you got ants, you got needles in you, you got yourself all hopped up and you can’t climb off.”
    The boy shrugged.
    â€œYou know what’s the essence of this, the core of your problem,” Joe went on. “I been trying to tell you. I seen maybe fifty cases like you, right here in town. If it was one, it would be a puzzle, but with fifty I put the pieces together and make a generalization.”
    â€œAnd what do you get?”
    Joe took off the towel and shook out the big apron. “All done. I get aimlessness, apathy, indifference. You don’t know where you’re going, which is all right—not all right, but understandable. But what is worse, you don’t know where you been. You been in the greatest experience mankind ever underwent, but what’s it to you?”
    â€œBad dreams,” the boy grinned.
    â€œExactly——” Someone knocked at the door, and Joe said: “Exactly—just one minute. I’ll finish that. You say a thing offhand and it can become of great importance.” He opened the door. A huge man, wrapped in a black coat, entered; Joe locked the door and said, without taking a breath: “Hello, Doc. A man asks for a doctor, not your kind of a doctor, a head doctor, let us say. He’s got bad dreams and needles in him, but what he needs is not a doctor but a little understanding. Am I right?”
    â€œI’ve known you to be right,” the man said. He was at least six feet and four inches, built to proportion, a big head, a jutting nose, and a shock of iron-gray hair. People said of Dr. Elliott Abbott that he looked like Winant, the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, but that was a superficial resemblance, and his own wife thought of him somewhat more romantically as resembling Ernest, in Hawthorne’s tale about the old man of the mountain. However that may have been, he was a big and impressive looking man, large of feature and frame, dark eyed, with shaggy brows, bearlike in his gait and surprisingly gentle in voice. Now he put down bag and hat, hung up coat and jacket, loosened his tie, and climbed into the chair with a sigh of relief, sniffing deeply and then yawning widely.
    â€œWhere I’m going, wherever it be, I will not get food like I smell. I’ve known you to be right, Joe.”
    â€œThere! Do I want a better co-signer? You stay for dinner, Doc. Johnny, did you read that literature I gave you?”
    â€œI can’t read anything outside the funnies. Joe, if Father O’Malley can’t convert me, how far you think you’re going to get?”
    â€œWe got different points of view. Just read that stuff. That’s all, Johnny, I ask a small favor.” He let him out of the store, locked the door behind him, and turned to the doctor.
    â€œDinner?”
    â€œNot tonight,” Abbott said. “That boy needs more than you can give him, Joe. He’s sick, physically sick.”
    â€œAll right. But he also needs something to put his hands on—anything.” He enveloped the doctor in the apron. “Shave you?”
    â€œShave, yes. I’ve got fifteen minutes before Ruth picks me up here. What do you know?”
    â€œIndications—just indications. This is a peculiar strike—but from what I read, all over the country it is a peculiar strike. It has strange features, like they want the men to go out. Six days of strike, and nothing happens. Everybody is sweet. Even Lowell is sweet like a lump of sugar, from what I hear.”
    â€œDo you think Lowell has horns, Joe?”
    â€œI don’t know. I got one attitude toward a boss, Doc. Only one. I make a generalization from a multitude. The other night, I’m sitting with Hannah, and we figured I worked on forty-three jobs—twenty-one states. That makes me a repository of experience, no?”
    â€œI envy you,” the doctor said.
    â€œSure, but take this——” A girl of seven