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himself facing
    a PanAsian wearing the green uniform of a civil administrator and carrying a
    swagger cane.
    "Keep out of the way, boy!" He spoke in English, but in a light, singing
    tone which lacked the customary American accentuation.
    Thomas jumped into the gutter-"They like to look down, not up"-and
    clasped his hands together in the form required. He ducked his head and
    replied, "The master speaks; the servant obeys."
    "That's better," acknowledged the Asiatic, apparently somewhat mollified.
    "Your ticket."
    The man's accent was not bad, but Thomas did not comprehend
    immediately, possibly because the emotional impact of his experience in the
    role of slave was all out of proportion to what he had expected. To say that
    he raged inwardly is meaninglessly inadequate.
    The swagger cane cut across his face. "Your ticket!"
    Thomas produced his registration card. The time the Oriental spent in
    examining it gave Thomas an opportunity to pull himself together to some
    extent. At the moment he did not care greatly whether the card passed
    muster or not; if it came to trouble, he would take this one apart with his bare
    hands.
    But it passed. The Asiatic grudgingly handed it back and strutted away,
    unaware that death had brushed his elbow.
    It turned out that there was little to be picked up in town that he had not
    already acquired secondhand in the hobo jungles. He had a chance to
    estimate for himself the proportion of rulers to ruled, and saw for himself that
    the schools were closed and the newspapers had vanished. He noted with
    interest that church services were still held, although any other gathering
    together of white men in assembly was strictly forbidden.
    But it was the dead, wooden faces of the people, the quiet children, that
    got under his skin and made him decide to sleep in the jungles rather than in
    town.
    Thomas ran across an old friend at one of the hobo hideouts. Frank
    Roosevelt Mitsui was as American as Will Rogers, and much more American
    than that English aristocrat, George Washington. His grandfather had
    brought his grandmother, half Chinese and half wahini, from Honolulu to Los
    Angeles, where he opened a nursery and raised flowers, plants, and little
    yellow children, children that knew neither Chinese nor Japanese, nor cared.
    Frank's father met his mother, Thelma Wang, part Chinese but mostly
    Caucasian, at the International Club at the University of Southern California.
    He took her to the Imperial Valley and installed her on a nice ranch with a
    nice mortgage. By the time Frank was raised, so was the mortgage.
    Jet Thomas had cropped lettuce and honeydew melon for Frank Mitsui
    three seasons and knew him as a good boss. He had become almost
    intimate with his employer because of his liking for the swarm of brown kids
    that were Frank's most important crop. But the sight of a flat, yellow face in a
    hobo jungle made Thomas' hackles rise and almost interfered with his
    recognizing his old acquaintance.
    It was an awkward meeting. Well as he knew Frank, Thomas was in no
    mood to trust an Oriental. It was Frank's eyes that convinced him; they held a
    tortured look that was even more intense than that found in the eyes of white
    men, a look that did not lessen even while he smiled and shook hands.
    "Well, Frank," Jeff improvised inanely, "who'd expect to find you here? I
    should think you'd find it easy to get along with the new regime."
    Frank Mitsui looked still more unhappy and seemed to be fumbling for
    words. One of the other hobos cut in. "Don't be a fool, Jeff. Don't you know
    what they've done to people like Frank?"
    "No, I don't."
    "Well, you're on the dodge. If they catch you, it's the labor camp. So is
    Frank. But if they catch him, it's curtains-right now. They'll shoot him on sight."
    "So? What did you do, Frank?"
    Mitsui shook his head miserably.
    "He didn't do anything," the other continued. "The empire has no use for
    American Asiatics. They're liquidating them."
    It was quite