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Jurgis would have spoken again, but the policeman had seized him by the collar and was twisting it, and a second policeman was making for him with evidently hostile intentions. So he let them lead him away.
"I want to get drunk." But a big man cannot stay drunk very long on three dollars. That was Sunday morning, and Monday night Jurgis came home, sober and sick, realizing that he had spent every cent the family owned, and had not bought a single instant's forgetfulness with it.
Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor and fell to snoring, others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and quarreling. The air was fetid with their breath, yet in spite of this some of them smelled Jurgis and called down the torments of hell upon him, while he lay in a far corner of his cell, counting the throbbings of the blood in his forehead.
"I've no place to go," said Jurgis, sadly. "Neither have I," replied the other, laughing lightly. "But we'll wait till we get out and see." In the Bridewell Jurgis met few who had been there the last time, but he met scores of others, old and young, of exactly the same sort. It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same.
That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost profanity to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing as tremendous as the universe the laws and ways of its working no more than the universe to be questioned or understood.
Scully had gone into semiretirement, and looked nervous and worried. "What do you want?" he demanded, when he saw Jurgis. "I came to see if maybe you could get me a place during the strike," the other replied. And Scully knit his brows and eyed him narrowly.
Downstairs, where the greater part of the prisoners were now massed, she sought out the stout personage with the diamond earrings, and had a few whispered words with her. The latter then approached the police sergeant who was in charge of the raid. "Billy," she said, pointing to Jurgis, "there's a fellow who came in to see his sister. He'd just got in the door when you knocked.
And he would have told the "pitchfork senator" all his experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the neck and shoved him into a seat. One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job was to go and see Marija.
And in the morning, when the twenty thousand men thronged into the yards, with their dinner pails and working clothes, Jurgis stood near the door of the hog-trimming room, where he had worked before the strike, and saw a throng of eager men, with a score or two of policemen watching them; and he saw a superintendent come out and walk down the line, and pick out man after man that pleased him; and one after another came, and there were some men up near the head of the line who were never picked they being the union stewards and delegates, and the men Jurgis had heard making speeches at the meetings.
"You live here!" Jurgis panted. He turned white and clung more tightly to the railing. "You live here! Then where's my family?" The boy looked surprised. "Your family!" he echoed. And Jurgis started toward him. "I this is my house!" he cried. "Come off!" said the boy; then suddenly the door upstairs opened, and he called: "Hey, ma! Here's a fellow says he owns this house."
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