As the morning waned, crowds began gathering at the ILA hall on Steuart Street, where the bodies of Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise had been lying in state, and where at 11:00 A.M. funeral services for the two victims of Bloody Thursday would be held. Alex Walthers, who had been a longshoreman in the 1919 strike and whose brother was working on the waterfront, spoke a simple sermon. In the distance the bell of a Belt Line locomotive could be heard. Bridges, asked if he would say something, shook his head, a reporter noted, "too distraught to utter his feelings." After the brief ceremony, the caskets were placed on black-draped flatbed trucks, and flowers were loaded on three more trucks. As the trucks moved along Steuart Street, then turned into Market Street, thousands-strikers and strike leaders, honor guard, families, sympathizersfollowed to the slow step of a funeral march. "That strange, silent march,'' as George Hedley described it, a march without banners but with a profound moral surge powerfully impressed a city still deeply shaken by the bloody violence of July 3 and 5 and the occupation of the waterfront by the National Guard. It heated the angers of many, reinforced the sympathies of the sympathizers, and converted the sympathies of many more. It put the "riots" and the "mobs" of the port opening, the tortured turns of the strike, as pictured in the daily press, in a different light. Events had made a general protest likely; now this grim, silent parade made it inevitable