"Your name?" said the stern-faced young man; and then, "Where do you live?" And then, "Tell me all you know about this bomb-conspiracy."

"But I don't know nothin'!" cried Jimmie.

"You are in the hands of the Federal government," replied the young man, "and your only chance will be to make a clean breast. If you will help us, you may get off."

"But I don't know nothin'!" cried Jimmie, again.

"You have heard talk about dynamiting the Empire Shops?"

"Y—yes, sir."

"Who?"

"A man—" Jimmie got that far, and then he recollected the promise he had given. "I—I can't tell!" he said.

"Why not?"

"It wouldn't be right."

"Do you believe in dynamiting buildings?"

"No, sir!" Jimmie put into this reply a note of tense sincerity, and so the other began to argue with him. Atrocious crimes had been committed all over the country, and the government wished to put a stop to them; surely it was the duty of a decent citizen to give what help he could. Jimmie listened until a sweat of anxiety stood out on his forehead; but he could not bring himself to "peach" on fellow working men. No, not if he were sent to jail for ten or twenty years, as the stern-faced young man told him might happen.

"You told Reilly you wouldn't have anything to do with bombs?" asked the young man; and Jimmie answered "Sure, I did!" And his poor head was so addled that he didn't even realize that in his reply he had told what he had been vowing he would never tell!

The questioner seemed to know all about everything, so it was easy for him to lead Jimmie to tell how he had heard Kumme cursing the Empire Shops, and the country, and the President; how he had seen Kumme whispering to Reilly, and to Germans whose names he had not learned, and how he had seen Heinrich, Kumme's nephew, cutting up lengths of steel tubing. Then the questioner asked about Jerry Coleman. How much money had Jimmie got, and just what had he done with it? Jimmie refused to name other people; but when the young man made the insinuation that Jimmie might have kept some of the money for himself, the little machinist exclaimed with passionate intensity—not one dollar had he kept, nor his friend Meissner either; they had given statements to Jerry Coleman, and this though many a time they had been hard up for their rent. The police could ask Comrade Gerrity and Comrade Mary Allen, and the other members of the local.

So the questioner led Jimmie on to talk about the Germans in the movement. Schneider, the brewer, for example—he was one of those who cursed the Allies most vehemently, and he had been in this bomb-conspiracy. Jimmie was indignant; Comrade Schneider was as good a Socialist as you could find, and Socialists had nothing to do with bombs! But young Emil Forster—he had been making explosives in his spare hours, had he not? At which Jimmie became still more outraged. He knew young Emil well; the boy was a carpet-designer and musician, and if anybody had told such tales about him, they were lying, that was all. The questioner went on for an hour or so, tormenting poor Jimmie with such doubts and fears; until finally he dropped a little of his sternness of manner, and told Jimmie that he had merely been trying him out, to see what he knew about various men whose pro-German feelings had brought them under suspicion. No, the government had no evidence of crime against Schneider or Forster, or any of the bona-fide Socialists. They were just plain fools, letting themselves be used as tools of German plotters, who were spending money like water to make trouble in munition factories all over the country.



IV



The questioner, who explained himself as a "special agent" of the Department of Justice, went on to read Jimmie a lecture. A sincere man like himself ought to be ashamed to let himself be taken in by German conspirators, who were trying to break up American industry, to lead American labour by the nose.

"But they want to stop the making of munitions!" cried Jimmie.

"But's that's only so that Germany can make more munitions!"

"But I'm opposed to their being made in Germany, too!"

"What can you do to stop it in Germany?"

"I'm an international Socialist. When I oppose war in my own country, I help the Socialists to oppose it in other countries. I ain't a-going to stop—not so long as I've got any breath left in me!" And here was Comrade Jimmie, delivering a sermon on pacifism to the "special agent" of the government, who held his fate in his hands! But no one was going to defend war to Jimmie Higgins and not be answered—even though Jimmie might go to jail for the rest of his life!

The young man laughed—more genially than Jimmie would have thought possible at the start of this grilling. "Higgins," he said, "you're a good-natured idiot. You can thank your lucky stars that one of the men you trusted happened to be a government detective. If we didn't know the truth about you, you might have had a hard time clearing yourself."

Jimmie's jaw had fallen. "A government detective! Who is the government detective?"

"Reilly," said the young man.

"Reilly? But it was him that tempted me!"

"Well, congratulate yourself that you resisted temptation!"

"But maybe he tempted Heinrich, too!"

"No, Heinrich didn't have to be tempted. It was on account of Heinrich that we began the investigation. He has been making explosives and planting them all over the country. His name isn't Heinrich, and he isn't a nephew of Kumme; his name is von Holtz, and he's a Prussian officer, a personal friend of the Kaiser."

Jimmie was speechless. For the love of Mike! He had been sitting in the back part of old Kumme's bicycle-shop, filling his pipe from the tobacco-pouch of a personal friend of the Kaiser. He had called this personal friend of the Kaiser a fool and a jackass, informing him that a real mechanic could put a ball-bearing together while he, the personal friend of the Kaiser, was spitting on his hands. Could you beat it?

Mr. Harrod, the "special agent", informed Jimmie that he would have to testify as to what he knew; and Jimmie was so indignant at the way he had been taken in that he was willing to do so. He would have to give bond to appear, added the other; did he know anyone who would vouch for him? Jimmie racked his harassed brain. Comrade Dr. Service might consent, if he were quite sure that Jimmie had not really meant to help the Germans. Mr. Harrod kindly consented to give this assurance, and called up Dr. Service, whom he seemed to know, and told him the circumstances. Dr. Service finally said that he would put up a couple of thousand dollars to guarantee Jimmie's appearance before the grand jury and at the trial. Mr. Harrod added that if Dr. Service would promise to come in the morning and attend to the matter, the government would take his word and let the witness go for the night. The doctor promised, and Jimmie was told that he was free till ten o'clock next morning. He went out like a skylark escaping from a cage!



V



He had been warned not to talk to anyone, so he told Lizzie that he had been kept late to make repairs on a motor-cycle. And next morning he got up at the usual hour, to avoid exciting suspicion, and went and stared at the shop, which was locked up, with a policeman on guard. He bought a copy of the Leesville Herald, and read the thrilling story of the German plot which had been unearthed in Leesville. There were half a dozen conspirators under arrest, and more than a dozen bombs had been found, all destined to be set off in the Empire Shops. Franz Heinrich von Holtz, who had blown up a bridge in Canada and put an infernal machine on board a big Atlantic liner, had been nailed at last!

Half an hour before time, Jimmie was waiting at the Post Office building, and when Comrade Dr. Service arrived, they went in and signed the bond. Coming out again, the grim and forbidding doctor ordered Jimmie into his car, and oh, what a dressing-down he did give him! He had Jimmie where he wanted him—right over his knees—and before he let him up he surely did make him burn! The little machinist had been so cock-sure of himself; going ahead to end the war, by stopping the shipping of munitions, and paying no heed to warnings from men older and wiser than himself! And now see what he had got himself in for—arrested with a gang of fire-bugs and desperadoes, under the control and in the pay of a personal friend of the Kaiser!

Poor Jimmie couldn't put up much of a defence: he was cowed, for once. He could only say that he had had no evil intention—he had merely been agitating against the trade in munitions—a wicked thing—

"Wicked?" broke in the Comrade Doctor. "The thing upon which the freedom of mankind depends!"

"W—what?" exclaimed Jimmie; for these words sounded to him like sheer lunacy.

The other explained. "A nation that means to destroy its neighbours sets to work and puts all its energies into making guns and shells. The free peoples of the world won't follow suit—you can't persuade them to do it, because they don't believe in war, they can't realize that their neighbours intend to make war. So, when they are attacked their only chance for life is to go out into the open market and buy the means of defence. And you propose to deprive them of that right—to betray them, to throw them under the hoofs of the war-monster! You, who call yourself a believer in justice, make yourself a tool of such a conspiracy! You take German money—"

"I never took no German money!" cried Jimmie, wildly.

"Didn't Kumme pay you money?"

"But I worked in his shop—I done my ten hours a day right straight!"

"And this fellow Jerry Coleman? Hasn't he given you money?"

"But that was for propaganda—he was agent for Labour's National Peace Council—"

And the Comrade Doctor fairly snorted. "How could you be such an ass? Don't you read the news? But no—of course, you don't—you only read German dope!" And the Comrade Doctor drew out his pocket-book, which was bursting with clippings, and selected one from a New York paper, telling how the government was proceeding against the officials of an organization called "Labour's National Peace Council" for conspiring to cause strikes and violence. The founder of the organization was a person known as "the Wolf of Wall Street"; the funds had been furnished by a Prussian army officer, an attache of the German legation, who had used his official immunity to incite conspiracy and wholesale destruction of property in a friendly country. What had Jimmie to say to that?

And poor Jimmie for once had nothing to say. He sat, completely crushed. Not merely the money which he had got from Kumme on Saturday night, but also the ten-dollar bills which Jerry Coleman had been slipping into his hand—they, too, had come from the Kaiser! Was the whole radical movement to be taken over by the Kaiser, and Jimmie Higgins put out of his job?



CHAPTER IX

JIMMIE HIGGINS RETURNS TO NATURE

I



Kumme's bicycle-shop went out of business, and its contents were sold at auction. Jimmie Higgins watched the process wistfully, reflecting how, if he had not wasted his substance on Socialist tracts, if he had saved a bit of his wages like any normal human being, he might have bought this little business and got a start in life. But alas, such hopes were not for Jimmie! He must remain in the condition which the President of his country described as "industrial serfdom"; he must continue to work for some other man's profit, to be at the mercy of some other man's whim.

He found himself a job in the railroad shops; but in a couple of weeks came an organizer, trying to start a union in the place. Jimmie, of course, joined; how could he refuse? And so the next time he went to get his pay he found a green slip in his envelope informing him that the Atlantic Western Railroad Company would no longer require his services. No explanation was given, and none sought—for Jimmie was old in the ways of American wage-slavery, euphemistically referred to as "industrial serfdom".

He got another start as helper to a truckman. It was the hardest work he had yet done—all the harder because the boss was a dull fellow who would not talk about politics or the war. So Jimmie was discontented; perhaps the spring-time was getting into his blood; at any rate, he hunted through his Sunday paper, and came on an advertisement of a farmer who wanted a "hand". It was six miles out in the country, and Jimmie, remembering his walk with the Candidate, treated himself to a Sunday afternoon excursion. He knew nothing about farm-work, and said so; but the munition-factories had drained so much labour from the land that the farmer was glad to get anybody. He had a "tenant-house" on his place, and on Monday morning Jimmie hired his former boss—and truckman—to move his few sticks of furniture; he bade farewell to his little friend Meissner, and next day was learning to milk cows and steer a plough.

So Jimmie came back to the bosom of his ancient Mother. But alas, he came, not to find joy and health, not as a free man, to win his own way and make a new life for himself; he came as a soil-slave, to drudge from dawn to dark for a hire that barely kept him going. The farmer was the owner of Jimmie's time, and Jimmie disliked him heartily, because he was surly-tempered and stingy, abusing his horses and nagging at his hired man. Jimmie's education in farm-economics was not thorough enough to enable him to realize that John Cutter was as much of a slave as himself—bound by a mortgage to Ashton Chalmers, President of the First National Bank of Leesville. John drudged from dawn to dark, just as Jimmie did, and in addition had all the worry and fear; his wife was a sallow and hollow-chested drudge, who took as many bottles of patent-medicine as poor Mrs. Meissner.

But Jimmie kept fairly cheerful because he was learning new things, and because he saw how good it was for the babies, who were getting fresh air and better food than they had ever had in their little lives before. All summer long he ploughed and harrowed and hoed, he tended horses and cows and pigs and chickens, and drove to town with farm produce to be sold. He would be too tired at night even to read his Socialist papers; for six months he let the world go its way unhindered—its way of desperate strife and colossal anguish. It was the time when the German hordes hurled themselves against the fortifications of Verdun. For five horrible months they came on, wave upon endless wave; the people of France set their teeth and swore, "They shall not pass!" and the rest of civilization waited, holding its breath.



II



The only chance Jimmie had to talk about these matters was of a Saturday night when he strolled up to the store at a near-by cross-roads. The men he met here were of a new type to him—as different from factory people as if they came from another planet. Jimmie had been taught to laugh at them as "hayseeds"; intellectually he regarded them as relics of a vanished age so, of course, he could not listen to their talk very long without "butting in". He began with the declaration that the Allies were as bad as the Germans. He got away with that, because they had all been taught to hate the "Britishers" in their school-books, and they didn't know very much about Frenchmen and "Eye-talians". But when Jimmie went on to say that the American government was as bad as the German government—that all governments were run by capitalists, and all went to war for foreign markets and such plunder—then what a hornet's nest he brought about his ears! "You mean to say American armies would do what them Proosians done in Belgium?" And when Jimmie answered "Yes," an indignant citizen rose from his seat on a cracker-box, and tapped him on the shoulder and said: "Look here, young feller, you better run along home. You'll git yerself a coat of tar and feathers if you talk too much round these parts."

So Jimmie shut up for a while; and when he went out with his armful of purchases, an aged, white-whiskered patriarch who had been listening got up and followed him out. "I'm going your way," he said. "Git in with me." Jimmie climbed into the buggy; and while the bony old mare ambled along through the summer night the driver asked questions about Jimmie's life. Where had he been brought up? How had it been possible for a man to live all his life in America, and know so little about his native land?

Peter Drew was this old farmer's name, and he had been in the first battle of Bull Run, and had fought with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way to Richmond. So he knew how American armies behave; he could tell Jimmie about a million free men who had rushed to arms to save their nation's integrity, and had made a clean job of it, and then gone quietly back to their work at farm and forge. Jimmie had heard Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker, make the statement that "Force never settled anything". He repeated this now, and the other replied that an American ought to be the last person in the world to make such a statement, for his country had provided the best illustration in history of the importance of a good job of spanking. It was force that had settled the slavery question—and settled it so that now you might travel in the South and have a hard time to find a man that would want to unsettle it.

But Jimmie knew nothing about all that; he knew nothing about anything in America. The old man said it frightened him to realize that the country had let a man grow up in it with so little understanding of its soul. All that precious tradition, utterly dead so far as Jimmie was concerned! All those heroes who had died to make free the land in which he lived, and to keep it free—and he did not know their names, he did not even know the names of the great battles they had fought! The old man's voice trembled and he laid his hand on Jimmie's knee.

The little Socialist tried to explain that he had dreams of his own. He was fighting for international freedom—his patriotism was higher and wider than any one country. And that was all right, said the other, but why kick down the ladder by which you had climbed—and especially when you had perhaps not entirely finished climbing? Why not know the better side of your own country, and appeal to it? Peter Drew went on to tell of a speech he had heard Abraham Lincoln make, and to quote things Lincoln had said; could Jimmie doubt that Lincoln would have opposed the rule of the country by Wall Street? And when a country had been shaped and guided by such men as Lincoln, why trample its face and besmirch its good name—just because there were in it some evil men contending against its ideals of freedom and democracy?

This old soldier lived about a mile from Jimmie, and asked his new friend to come and see him. So the next afternoon, which was Sunday, Lizzie put on a newly starched dress, and Jimmie packed the two smallest infants in the double perambulator, and took Jimmie Junior's chubby hand and they trudged down the road to the farmhouse which the old man's father had built. Mrs. Drew was a sweet-faced, rather tired looking old lady, but her pale eyes seemed to smile with hospitality, and she brought out a basket of ripe peaches, and sat and chatted sympathetically with Lizzie about the care of babies, while Jimmie and the old man sat under the shade of an elm tree by the kitchen-door and discussed American history. Jimmie listened to stories of battle and imprisonment, of monster heroisms and self-immolations. Up to this time he had been looking at war from the outside, as it were; but now he got a glimpse of the soul of it, he began to understand how a man might be willing to leave his home and his loved ones, and march out to fight and suffer and die to save his country in which he believed.

And here was another new idea: this old fellow had been a soldier, had fought through four years of incessant battles, and yet he had not lost his goodness. He was kind, gentle, generous; he gave dignity to the phrases at which Jimmie had been taught to mock. It was impossible not to respect such a man; and so little by little Jimmie was made to reflect that there might be such a thing as the soul of America, about which Peter Drew was all the time talking. Perhaps there was really more to the country than Wall Street speculators and grafting politicians, policemen with clubs and militiamen with bayonets to stick into the bodies of working-men who tried to improve their lot in life!



III



In the course of the summer Jimmie had to take several days off and go into Leesville to attend the trial of the German plotters. He had to take the witness-stand and tell all he knew about Kumme and Heinrich and the other men who had frequented the bicycle-shop. It was a very serious experience, and before it was over Jimmie was heartily glad that he had rejected the invitation to help blow up the Empire Machine Shops. The trial ended with a sentence of six months for Jimmie's old employer, and of two years each for Heinrich and his pals. The law allowed no more—to the intense disgust of the Leesville Herald. The Herald was in favour of a life-sentence for anyone who interfered with the industry upon which the prosperity of the city depended.

Among those who came to the trial was Comrade Smith, editor of the Worker, and Jimmie sat with him in Tom's "Buffeteria", and heard an account of the latest developments in the Empire Shops. The movement of discontent had been entirely crushed; the great establishment was going at full blast, both day and night. They were taking on hundreds of new hands, mostly women and girls, speeding them faster and faster, turning out tens of thousands of shell-casings every day. And still they were not satisfied; new buildings were going up, the concern was spreading like a huge blot over the landscape. There was talk of an explosive factory near-by, so that shells might be filled as fast as they were made.

The "boom" conditions continued in Leesville; speculators were reaping harvests, it seemed as if the masters of the city were all on a spree. Comrade Smith advised Jimmie to stay where he was, for it was getting to be harder and harder for the workers in Leesville to get anything to eat. But out on the heights along the river front, the part of the city called "Nob Hill", new palaces were rising. And it was that way all over the Eastern part of the country, said the young editor; the rich no longer knew what to do with their millions.

On the day the trial ended, Jimmie stayed in town to attend a meeting of the local and pay his back dues. So he met all his old friends, and heard "Wild Bill" get up and deliver one of his tirades. Bill had in his hand a newspaper clipping telling of the amazing madness that had struck Wall Street. Munition stocks were soaring to prices beyond belief; "war-babies", men called them, with unthinkably cynical wit. On the "Great White Way", to which they rushed to celebrate these new Arabian Nights, there was such an orgy of dissipation as the world had never seen. "And is this what we have to slave for!" yelled "Wild Bill"—looking wilder than ever since the police had broken his nose and knocked out his three front teeth. "This is why we are chained to our jobs—shut up in jail if we so much as open our mouths! Piling up millions for old man Granitch, so that young Lacey can marry chorus-girls and divorce them—or steal away another man's wife, as they say he's doing just now!"

Then young Emil Forster spoke, explaining to Jimmie the inner significance of terrific world-events. Russia was in the midst of a gigantic offensive, which was meant to overwhelm Austria; England at the same time was hurling in her new armies on the Somme; for these two giant movements they wanted shells—millions and millions of shells from America, which alone could make enough of them. The railroads were clogged with them, they were piled mountain-high at the terminals and ports; whole fleets of steamers were loading up with them, and proceeding to England and France, and to Russia by way of Archangel. And, of course, the German submarines were out to stop them; the whole world was like a powder-magazine over the issue. The President, by his series of notes, had forced Germany to agree not to sink passenger-vessels; but this promise was not easy to keep—accidents kept happening, and the temper of the peoples was rising, America was being drawn nearer every hour to the vortex of this dreadful strife. Such was the picture which Jimmie carried back to the farm; you could hardly wonder if he missed that peace and joy which men are supposed to imbibe at the bosom of their Mother Nature!



CHAPTER X

JIMMIE HIGGINS MEETS THE OWNER

I



It was late at night when Jimmie left the Socialist local, and took the trolley out into the country. He had to walk nearly two miles from where he got off, and a thunder-storm had come up; he got out and started to trudge through the darkness and the floods of rain. Several times he slipped off the road into the ditch, and once he fell prone, and got up and washed the mud from his eyes and nose with the stream of fresh water pouring about his head. While he was thus occupied he heard the sound of a horn, and saw a glare of light rushing up. He jumped into the ditch again, and a big automobile went by at a fast pace, spattering showers of mud all over him. He plodded on, swearing to himself. Some of them munition- millionaires, no doubt—tearing over the country at night honking their horns like they owned the roads, and covering poor walking people with their splashings!

And so on, until Jimmie came round a turn of the road and saw the white glare of light again, this time standing still. It seemed to be pointing up into the trees; and when he got nearer he made out the reason—it had run off the road into the ditch, and then up the other slope, and there rolled over on to its side.

"Hello!" said a voice, as Jimmie came slopping up.

"Hello!" he answered.

"How far is it to the nearest house?"

"Maybe half a mile."

"Who lives there?"

"I do."

"Have you got a horse and buggy?"

"There's one at the big house, just a piece beyond."

"Do you suppose we could get enough men to turn this car over?"

"I dunno; there ain't many about here."

"Damn!" muttered the man to himself. Then, after a moment, "Well, there's no use staying here." This to his companion, whom Jimmie made out to be a woman. She was standing still, with the cold rain pouring over her. The man put his arm about her, and said to Jimmie, "Lead the way, please." So Jimmie set out, slopping through the mud as before.

Nothing more was said until they reached the "tenant-house" where the Jimmies lived. But meantime the little Socialist's mind was busy; it seemed to him that the man's voice was familiar, and he was trying to recall where and how he had heard it before. They came to the house, which was dark, and the couple stood on the porch while Jimmie went in and groped for a match and lighted the single smoky oil-lamp on which the household depended. Carrying it in his hand, he went to the door and invited the couple in. They came; and so Jimmie got a glimpse of the face of the man, and almost dropped the lamp right there where he stood. It was Lacey Granitch!



II



The young lord of Leesville was too much occupied with his own affairs to notice the look on the face of the yokel before him; or perhaps he was so used to being recognized, and to being stared at by yokels. He looked about the room and saw a stove. "Can you get us a fire, so this lady can get dry?"

"Y—yes," said Jimmie. "I—I suppose so." But he made no move; he stood rooted to the spot.

"Lacey," put in the woman, "don't stop for that. Get the car started, or get another." And Jimmie looked at her; she was rather small, and very beautiful—quite the most beautiful human creature that Jimmie had ever looked at. One could see that she was expensively dressed, even though everything she had on was soaked with rain.

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Lacey. "You can't travel till you get dry—you'd be ill." And he turned upon Jimmie. "Get a fire, won't you?" he exclaimed. "A big fire. I'll make it worth while to you for whatever you do. Only don't stand there gaping all night," he added impatiently.

Jimmie leaped to obey; partly because he had been in the habit of leaping to obey all his life—but also partly because he was sorry for the beautiful wet lady, and because, if he stood and stared any longer, Lacey Granitch might recognize him. The moment when Jimmie had been singled out in the herd of strikers and cursed by the young master of the Empire Machine Shops was one of the most vivid memories of Jimmie's rebellious life, and it did not occur to him that the incident might not have equally impressed the other participant.

In a few minutes the stove was hot; and urged by her escort, the lady took off her driving-coat and hat, and hung them over a chair. Everything underneath was wet, and the man urged her to take off her skirt and blouse. "What does he matter?" he argued, referring to Jimmie; but the lady would not do it. She stood by the stove, shivering slightly, and pleading with her escort to make haste, to find some way to get the car running again. They might be followed—

"Oh, nonsense, Helen!" cried Lacey. "You are tormenting yourself with nightmares. Be sensible and get dry." He piled the wood into the stove, and ordered Jimmie to get another armful; and Jimmie obeyed with his hands and feet—but meantime his rebellious little brain was taking in every detail of the situation, putting this and that together.

The talking had waked up Lizzie, so Jimmie rushed into the next room and whispered, "Lacey Granitch is here!" If he had told her that the Angel Gabriel was there, or Jehovah with all his thunders and his retinue of seraphim, poor Lizzie could not have been more stunned. Jimmie ordered her to get up, and get on her dress and shoes, and get a cup of coffee for the lady; the dazed woman obeyed—though she would rather have crawled under the bed than face the celestial personages who had taken possession of her home.



III



Lacey ordered Jimmie to accompany him, to find some help to get the car into travelling condition. They went out together, and on the porch, before they braved the rain again, young Granitch stopped and spoke: "See here, my man; I want you to help me get a gang together, and I want you to keep quiet, please—say nothing about who was in the car. If any other people come along and ask questions, keep your mouth shut, and I'll make it worth while to you—well worth while. Do you understand?"

Every instinct in Jimmie Higgins was ready to answer, "Yes, sir." That was what he had always answered to such commands—he, and his father, and his father's fathers before him. But something else within him resisted this instinct—the new revolutionary psychology which he had so painfully acquired, and which made continual war upon his old-time docilities. It seemed that this was the moment, if ever in his life, to show the stuff he was made of. He clenched his hands, and everything in him turned to iron. "WHO IS THAT LADY?" he demanded.

Lacey Granitch was so taken aback that he started visibly. "What do you mean?"

"I mean—is she your wife? Or is she some other man's wife?"

"Why you damned—" And the young lord of Leesville stopped, speechless. Jimmie fell back a couple of steps, as a matter of precaution, but he did not weaken in his rigid resolve.

"I know you, Mr. Granitch," he said; "and I know what you're doing. You might as well know you ain't foolin' nobody."

"What the hell is it to you?" cried the other; but then he stopped again, and Jimmie heard him breathing hard. Evidently he made an effort to keep his self-control; when he spoke again, his voice was quieter. "Listen, my good fellow," he said. "You have a chance to make a good deal of money to-night—"

"I don't want your money!" broke in Jimmie. "I wouldn't touch your filthy money, that you get by murdering men!"

"My God!" said Lacey Granitch; and then, weakly: "What have you got against me?"

"What have I got? I was workin' in the Empire, an' I went on strike for my rights, an' you cursed me like I was a dog, an' you sent the police an' had me arrested, an' they smashed Wild Bill's nose, an' sent me up for ten days when I hadn't done nothin'—"

"Oh! So that's it, is it?"

"Yes, that's it; but I wouldn't mind that so much—if it wasn't for them shells you're makin' to kill men over in Europe. And you spendin' the money drinkin' champagne with chorus-girls, an' runnin' off with other men's wives!"

"You—" and Lacey uttered a foul oath, and leaped at Jimmie; but Jimmie had expected that, he was looking out for himself. There was no railing to the little porch on which he stood, and he leaped off to the ground and away. Because he knew the lay of the land, he could run faster in the darkness than his pursuer.

He sped down the path and out into the road—and there was the headlight of an automobile, almost upon him. The vehicle came to an instant stop, and a startled voice cried, "Hey, there!"

"Hey, there!" answered Jimmie, and stopped in the light; for he did not believe that his enemy would dare pursue him there.

The voice from the car spoke again. "There's an automobile off the road a ways back here. Do you know anything about who the people are that were driving it?"

"Sure I do!" answered Jimmie promptly.

"Where are they?"

"They're up in that house—Lacey Granitch an' a lady named Helen—"

And instantly the door of the car was flung open. A man leaped out, and another man, and another; they kept coming—Jimmie would not have believed that an automobile could have held so many people. Not one of them said a word, but all started on the run for Jimmie's house as if they were charging in a battle.



IV



Jimmie followed behind. He heard sounds of a scuffle on the lawn, and screams from inside. At first the little farm-hand could not make up his mind what to do, but finally he ran to the house; and there in the front room he saw the beautiful lady, with her wet hair streaming down her back, and the tears streaming down her face, sunk on her knees, before the man who had hailed Jimmie from the automobile. She had caught his coat with her two hands, and clung to it with such desperation that when he tried to draw away he dragged her along the floor. "Paul!" she was screaming. "What are you going to do?"

"Be quiet! Be quiet!" commanded the man. He was young, tall and superhumanly handsome; his face had the white light of a passionate resolve, his lips were set like those of a man who is marching to his death in battle. "Answer me!" cried the woman again and again; until finally he said: "I shan't kill him; but I mean to teach him his lesson."

"Paul, Paul, have mercy!" sobbed the woman; she went on pleading hysterically, in the most dreadful distress that Jimmie had ever seen or heard. "It wasn't his fault, Paul, it was mine! I did it all! Oh, for Christ's sake! You are driving me mad!" She moaned, she implored, she sobbed till she choked herself; and when the man tried to tear her hands loose she fought with him, he could not get free of her.

"You're not going to move me, Helen," he declared. "You might as well get that clear."

"But I tell you it was my fault, Paul! I ran away with him!"

"All right," answered the man, grimly. "I'll fix him so no other man's wife will ever run away with him."

Her clamour continued more wildly than ever, until two other men came into the room. "Joe," said Paul, to one of them, "take her down to the car and keep her there. Don't let her call for help—if anybody comes along, keep her quiet, keep your hand tight over her mouth."

"Paul, you're a fiend!" shrieked the woman. "I'll kill you for this!"

"You're welcome to," answered the man. "I shouldn't care—but I'm going to do this job before I die." And he tore the woman's hands away from him, and by his stern anger he gave the other two men the necessary resolution. They carried her, half-fainting, out of the room.

All this time Jimmie Higgins had been standing like one turned to stone; and Lizzie had shrunk into a far corner of the room, all but paralysed with terror. Now the man turned to them. "My good people," he said, "we want to borrow your room for a half-hour or so. We'll pay you well for it—enough to buy the whole house if you want to."

"W—w—what are you goin' to do?" stammered Jimmie.

"We're going to teach a little fundamental morality to a young man whose education has been neglected," replied the other. That somehow did not tell Jimmie very much, but he forebore to speak again, for never in all his life had he seen a man who conveyed to him the impression of such resistless force as this man. He was truly a superhuman creature, terrifying, panoplied in lightnings of wrath.

The door of the house opened again, and Lacey Granitch came in, with a man on each side holding him by the arms and a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Of all the dreadful spectacles that Jimmie had seen that dreadful night, the worst was the face of the young master of the Empire Machine Shops. It was green—absolutely and literally green. His knees trembled so that he seemed about to sink to the floor, and his dark eyes were those of an animal in a trap.

There came another man behind him carrying two black cases in his hands. He opened one, and took out some instrument with wires attached, and hung part of it to a hook on the wall; he pressed a switch, and a soft white radiance flooded the room. The man who was in command, the one whom the lady had called "Paul", now turned to Jimmie and his wife. "You may take your lamp," he said. "Go into the other room and stay there till we call you, please."

"W—w—what are you goin' to do?" Jimmie found courage to stammer again. But the other merely bade him to go into the other room and stay, and it would be all right, and he would be well paid for his time and trouble. There was no use trying to interfere; no use trying to get away, for the house would be watched.



V



Jimmie Junior had been wakened by the uproar, and was whimpering; so Lizzie hurried to quiet him, and Jimmie set the little smoky lamp on the dresser, and went and sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand in his. Both their hands were shaking in a way that was amazing.

Every sound from the other room was plainly audible. Lacey was pleading, and "Paul" commanded him to hold his tongue. There was a scuffle, and then terrified moans, which died away. There began to steal into the Higgins's bedroom a most ghastly odour; they could not imagine what it was. And then they began to hear wild clamour from Lacey Granitch, as if he were suffering in hell. It was awful beyond words; the perspiration came out in beads on the faces of the listeners, and Jimmie was just about making up his mind that it was his duty to rush in and protest, or perhaps to climb out of the window and make an effort to steal away and summon help, when the door opened and the man called "Paul" came in, closing the door behind him.

"It's all right," said he. "People always make a fuss when they're given an anaesthetic, so don't let it frighten you." And he stood there waiting, rigid, grim, while the sounds went on. Finally they died away and silence fell—a long, long silence. He opened the door and went back into the other room, and the two Jimmies were left holding each other's shaking hands.

Now and then they heard a man speak in a low voice, or someone move across the room; and always that ghastly, overpowering odour kept creeping in, making them think they would die of suffocation, and their three babies also. The suspense and horror had become almost unbearable—when finally they began to hear Lacey Granitch again, moaning, sobbing—most harrowing sounds. "My God! My God!" whispered Lizzie, "What are they doing?" And when Jimmie did not answer, she whispered again. "We ought to stop them! We ought to get help!"

But then once more the door opened, and "Paul" came in. "It's all right now," he said. "He's coming out." Neither of the Jimmies had the least idea what "coming out" meant, but they were reassured to know that the masterful person at least was satisfied. They waited; they heard Lacey vomiting, as it seemed—and then they heard him cursing, in between his feeble gasps. He called the men the same foul name that he had called Jimmie; and that somehow made the whole affair seem better—it brought one down to earth again!

"Paul" went out and stayed for a while, and when he came back, he said, "We're going now; and understand, there's nothing for you to worry about. We shall leave the patient here, and as soon as we get to a telephone, we'll notify the hospital to send an ambulance. So all you have to do is to wait, and keep quiet and don't worry. And here's something for the use of your house—"The man put out his hand with a roll of bills, which Jimmie mechanically took—"and if anybody asks you about what happened to-night, just say you didn't see anything and don't know anything whatever about it. I'm sorry to have troubled you, but it couldn't be helped. And now, good night."

And so the masterful young man went out, and they heard him and his companions tramping down the porch-steps. They listened, until they heard the automobile start up and disappear in the darkness. Then from the next room they heard a moan.

Trembling with terror, Jimmie got up and stole to the door, and opened it a tiny crack. The room was in utter darkness. "Get me some water!" the voice of Lacey groaned; and Jimmie tiptoed back and got the little smoky lamp, and came to the door again. He peered in, and saw that Lacey was lying on the floor with a sheet over him—everything but his head, which was resting on a pillow. His face was yellow and twisted with pain. "Water! Water!" he sobbed; and Jimmie rushed to get a glass and fill it from the pail. When he brought it, Lacey first tried to drink, and then began to vomit; then he lay, sobbing softly to himself. He saw Jimmie staring at him, and his eyes filled with sudden hate and he whispered, "This is what you got me in for, you damned little skunk!"



CHAPTER XI

JIMMIE HIGGINS FACES THE WAR

I



The ambulance arrived, and the two attendants who came with it brought in a stretcher and carried young Granitch away. Jimmie opened the windows to get rid of the odour of ether, and meantime he and Lizzie sat for hours discussing every aspect of the dreadful scene they had witnessed, and speculating as to its meaning. When Jimmie investigated the roll of bills which had been slipped into his hand, he found that there were ten of them, new, crisp, and bright yellow, each having the figure twenty printed upon it. It was more money than these two humble little people had ever had or expected to have in all their lives. It was literally blood-money they felt, but it would be hard to see who would be benefited if they rejected it. Certainly the deed which had been done that night could not be undone—not for all the money that old Granitch had heaped up in his vaults.

Jimmie kept quiet, as he had been bidden, and apparently no one told about his part in the affair—no reporters came out to his country home to ask for interviews. But when he went to the cross-roads store a couple of nights later he found that the storm was all over—nobody was talking or thinking about anything else. The news, in fact, had gone by telegraph all over the world, and wherever people read it they shuddered with horror, and the Socialists had a choice illustration of the effect of excessive wealth upon morals.

There were half a dozen versions of the story, Jimmie found; some declared that the outraged husband had caught young Granitch in his home and had fetched a surgeon there; others that he had taken him to a hospital; others that the operation had been performed in a road-house near by. But none mentioned the tenant-house on the farm of John Cutter, and Jimmie wrapped himself in his pride of superior knowledge, and let the loungers in the country store chatter on. He would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the hospital and vanished, no one knew where. And they never knew; never again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way! His grim old father's hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that his heart was eaten out with grief and rage and shame.

Jimmie and his wife held numerous confabulations over those twenty-dollar bills. What should they do with their fortune? The Worker, always in need of funds, was just now issuing bonds in small denominations, and Jimmie could not imagine any better financial investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not be made to see it. And then his eye was caught by an advertisement of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it above suspicion. But again Lizzie blocked the way. She begged her visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that half of it belonged to her anyhow—had she not done her part to earn it? "What part?" Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept quiet—and what more had he done?

Eleeza Betooser wanted that treasure to insure safety for the children through whatever troubles might come to their propagandist father. And finally the propagandist father gave way, and the woman proceeded to secure the money in the ancient way of her sex. She took the ten crisp bills and sewed them in a layer of cloth, and wound the cloth about the ankle of her right leg, and sewed it there, and put a stocking over it to hide it. And that apparatus would stay there—day or night, winter or summer, it would never part from its owner. She would be a walking bank, a bank that she knew was safe from panic or crisis; the feeling of the two hundred dollars about her ankle would be communicated to every part of Lizzie—warming her heart, delighting her brain, and stimulating her liver and digestion.



II



And soon the chances of life caused Jimmie to be glad of the innate conservatism of the feminine nature. The giant British offensive was drowned in mud and blood on the Somme, and the Russian offensive went to pieces before Lemberg; and meantime John Cutter stowed his barrels of apples in the cellar, and got the last of his corn-crop husked, and drove his load of pumpkins to market; and then one Saturday night, after the cows had come in, wet and steaming with November rain, he informed his hired man that he would not need his services after that month, he would no longer be able to afford "help".

Jimmie stared at him in consternation—for he had thought that he had a permanent job, having learned the work and having heard no serious complaints.

"But," explained Cutter, "the work's all done. Do you expect me to pay you to sit round? I'll be glad to take you on next spring, of course."

"And what'll I do in the meantime?" Jimmie glared, and all his hatred of the villainous profit-system welled up in his heart. So much food he had helped to raise and store away—and not a pound of it his! "Say," he remarked, "I know what you want! Some kind of a trained bear, that'll work all summer, and go to sleep in winter an' not eat nothin'!"

The little Socialist was all the crosser, because he knew that his boss had just made a lucky stroke—they were running a spur on the railroad out to the vast explosives plant they were constructing in the country, and Cutter had got the price of his mortgage for a narrow strip of land that was nothing but wood-lot. Jimmie had seen the deal made, and had put in a useful word as to the value of that "timber", but now he had no share in the deal. He must be content with an offer of the tenant-house for five dollars a month through the winter, and a job with the rail-road company, grading track.

There came rain and snow and blizzards, but the rail-road construction stopped for nothing. It went on in three shifts, day and night; for half the world was clamouring for the means to blow itself up, and the other half must work like the devil to furnish the means. At least that was the way the matter presented itself to Jimmie Higgins, who took it as a personal affront the way this diabolical war kept pursuing him. He had fled into the country from it, bringing his little family to a tenant-house on an obscure, worn-out farm, several miles from the nearest town; but here all of a sudden came a gang of Dagoes with picks and shovels. They lifted up and set to one side the chicken-house where Lizzie kept her eleven hens and one rooster, and the pig-sty where one little hog gobbled up their table-scraps; and two days later came a huge machine, driven by steam, creeping on a track, picking up rails and ties from a car behind it, swinging them round and laying them in front of it, and then rolling ahead over the bed it had made. So the railroad just literally walked out into the country, and before long whole train-loads of cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and listen to trains rattling past, coming out from the explosives plant, piled to the tops with loads of trinitrotoluol, and such unpronounceable instruments of murder and destruction. And this was the fate which capitalism had handed out to an ardent anti-militarist, a propagandist of international fraternity!



III



Jimmie Higgins went into the Socialist local now and then, to pay his dues and to refresh his soul on pacifist speeches. Just before Christmas the President of the United States wrote a letter to all the warring nations pleading with them to end the strife; intimating that all the belligerents were on a par as to badness, and stating explicitly that America had nothing to do with their struggle. This, of course, brought intense satisfaction to the members of Local Leesville of the Socialist party; it was what they had been proclaiming for two years and four months! They had never expected to have a capitalist President in agreement with them, but when the opportunity came, they made the most of it; clamouring that the capitalist President should go farther—should back up his words by actions. If the warring nations would not make peace, let America at least clear her skirts by declaring an embargo, refusing to furnish them with the means of self-destruction!

But for some reason incomprehensible to Jimmie Higgins, the capitalist President would not take this further step; and time moved on, and at the end of January fell a thunder-bolt, in the shape of a declaration from the German government that beginning next day it rescinded its agreement to visit and search steamers, and declared war to the death against all vessels sailing in barred zones. Jimmie went to a meeting of the local a few days after that, and found the gathering seething with excitement. The President had appeared before Congress that day and made a speech calling for war; and the Germans and Austrians in the local were wild with indignation, shaking their fists and clamouring against the unthinkable outrage of an attack upon the Fatherland. There was a new edition of the Worker just out, filled with bitter protests, and the Germans and the pacifists wanted to pledge the local to a movement for a general strike of labour throughout the country. Street-meetings had been resumed—for, of course, since the strike in the Empire had been settled, the police had had no pretext to prevent them. The extremists now wanted anti-war speakers on every corner, and anti-war leaflets shoved under every doorstep; they were willing to put up the money and to pledge their time for these activities.

Lawyer Norwood rose and revealed the split that was now full-grown in the party. For the United States to lie down before that insolent declaration of the German government would be to imperil everything which a lover of liberty held dear. It would mean that Britain would be starved out of the war, and British sea-power shattered—that British sea-power upon which free government had based itself throughout the world. Norwood was unable to get any further for the tempest of jeering and ridicule that overwhelmed him. "Freedom in Ireland!" shrieked Comrade Mary Allen. "And in India! And in Egypt!" bellowed Comrade Koeln, the glass-blower, whose mighty lungs had been twenty years preparing for this emergency.

It was hard to stop the laughter—it seemed so funny that a man who called himself a Socialist should be defending British battleships! But Comrade Gerrity, the chairman, pounded with his gavel, and insisted that the meeting should give fair play, that every speaker should be heard in his turn. So Norwood went on. He understood that no government in this world was perfect, but some were better than others, and it was a fact of history, whether or not they chose to admit it, that such freedom as had already been secured in the world—in Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and the United States—had rested under the protection of British battleships. If those battleships went down, it would mean that every one of those free communities would begin building up a military force many times as strong as they had now. If the United States did not maintain the established customs of sea-commerce in the present crisis, it would mean one thing and one only—that America would spend the next thirty years devoting her energies to preparing for a life-and-death struggle with German Imperialism. If we were not to fight later, we must fight now—

"All right, you fight!" shouted Comrade Schneider, the brewer, his purple face more purple than ever before in the history of Local Leesville.

"I'm going to fight all right," answered the young lawyer. "This is my last speech here or anywhere else—I'm leaving for an officers' training-camp to-morrow. I have come here to do my duty, to warn you comrades—even though I know it will be in vain. The time for debate has passed—the country is going into war—"

"I'm not going into war!" roared Schneider.

"Be careful," answered the other. "You may find yourself in before you know it."

And the big brewer laughed to shake the plaster off the walls. "I'd like to see them send me! To fight for the British sea-power! Ho! Ho! Ho!"



IV



It was a stormy speech young Norwood made, but he persisted to the end, so that, as he said, his conscience might be clear, he might know that he had done what he could to protect the movement from its greatest blunder. He warned them that the temper of the country was rising; you could see it rising hour by hour, and things which had been tolerated in the past would be tolerated no longer. Democracy would protect its life—it would show that in a crisis it was as strong as militarism—

"Yes, and turn itself into militarism to do it!" cried Comrade Mary Allen. The Quaker lady was almost beside herself; she, more even than the Germans, saw in what was transpiring the violation of her most sacred convictions.

America, her own country, was giving itself to war, making ready to turn its resources to the wholesale mutilation of men! Comrade Mary's thin face was white; her lips were tight with resolve, but her feelings betrayed themselves by the quivering of her nostrils. And oh, what a speech she made! Such torrents of furious hatred in the cause of universal love! Comrade Mary quoted a Socialist writer who had said that just as gladiatorial combats had continued until Christian monks were willing to throw themselves into the arena, so war would continue until Socialists were willing to throw themselves beneath the hoofs of the cavalry. And in this Quaker spinster you saw one Socialist who was ready to go out that very night and throw herself beneath the hoofs of cavalry, infantry, or artillery, or even of a police automobile.

And that was the sentiment of the meeting as a whole. If America entered the European strife, it would be because the Socialist organization had exhausted its means of protest in vain. They would call meetings, they would distribute literature, they would voice their convictions on the streets and in the shops and wherever the people might be reached. They would have no part in this wicked strife, either now or later; they would continue in the future, as in the past, to denounce and to expose the capitalist politicians and the capitalist newspapers who caused war and thrived upon war. And in proportion to the intensity of their feelings would be their bitterness and contempt for the few renegades who in this hour of crisis, this test of manhood and integrity, were deserting the movement and going to enrol themselves in officers' training-camps!

And so when Jimmie went home that night he carried with him an armful of revolutionary literature, which during the noon-hour he proceeded to distribute among the workers on the construction-job, which was now inside the preserves of the explosives company. So naturally in the course of the afternoon he was summoned before the boss and discharged; they escorted him to the limits of the property, and told him that if he ever returned he would be shot on sight. And then at night he went up to the cross-roads store and tried to give out his literature there, and got into a controversy with some of the cracker-box loungers, one of whom jumped up and shook his fist in Jimmie's face, shouting, "Get out of here, you dirty little louse! If you don't stop talking your treason round here, we'll come down some night and ride you out of the country on a rail!"



CHAPTER XII

JIMMIE HIGGINS MEETS A PATRIOT

I



The country, it seemed, was hell-bent for war; and Jimmie Higgins was hell-bent for martyrdom. If the great madness were to take possession of America, it would not be without his having done what he could to prevent it. He would stand in the path of the war chariot, he would throw himself beneath the hoofs of the cavalry; and block the road with his dead body. To which vivid programme there was only one obstacle—or, to be precise, four obstacles, one large and three small, the large one being Eleeza Betooser.

Poor Lizzie of course had no real comprehension of the world-forces against which her husband was contending; to Lizzie, life consisted of three babies, whom it was her duty to feed and protect, and a husband, who was her instrument for carrying out this duty. The world outside of these was to her a vague and shadowy place, full of vague and shadowy terrors. Somewhere up in the sky was a Holy Virgin who would help when properly appealed to, but Lizzie was handicapped in appealing to this Virgin by the fact that her husband despised the Holy One, and would cast insulting doubts upon her virtue.

Now the shadowy terrors of this vast outside world were moving to ends of their own, and her poor, puny husband persisted in putting himself in their way. He had got turned out of his job, for the fourth or fifth time since Lizzie had known him, and he was in imminent danger of getting into jail, or into a coat of tar and feathers. As the controversy grew hotter and the peril greater, Lizzie came to a condition which might have been diagnosed as chronic impending hysteria. Her eyes were red from secret weeping, and at the slightest provocation she would burst into floods of tears and throw herself into her husband's arms. This would start off Jimmie Junior and the little ones, who always took their cue from him. And Jimmie Senior would stand perplexed and helpless. Here was a new aspect of the heroic life, not dealt with in the books. He wondered—had there ever in history been such a thing as a married martyr? If so, what had this martyr done with his family?

Jimmie would try to explain this to his distressed spouse. It was a question of saving a hundred million people from the horrors of war; what did one man matter, in comparison with that? But alas, the argument did not carry at all, the simple truth being that the one man mattered more to Lizzie than all the other ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine. And besides, what could the one man do? One poor, obscure, helpless working-man out of a job—

"But it's the organization!" he cried. "It's all of us together—it's the party! We promised to stand together, so we got to do it! If I drop out, I'm a coward, a traitor! We must make the workers understand—"

"But you can't!" cried Lizzie.

"But we're doin' it! Come see!"

"And what can they do?"

Which of course started Jimmy off on a propaganda speech. What could the workers do? Say rather, what could they not do! How could any war be fought without the workers? If only they would stand together, if they would rise against their capitalist oppressors—

"But they won't!" sobbed the woman. "They got no use for you at all! You go an' get fired—or you get your face beat in, like poor Bill Murray—"

"But is that any worse than goin' to war?"

"You ain't got to go to war!"

"Who says I ain't? I got to go, if the country goes. They'll drag me off and make me! If I refuse they'll shoot me! Ain't they doin' that in England and France an' Roosia an' all them countries?"

"But will they do it here?" cried Lizzie, aghast.

"Sure they will! That's exactly what they're gettin' ready for—what we're fightin' to stop them from! You don't know what's goin' on in this country—listen here!"

And Jimmie hauled out the last issue of the Worker, which quoted speeches made in Congress, calling for conscription, declaring that such a measure was an essential war-step. "Don't you see what they're up to? An' if we're goin' to stop them, we gotta act now, before it's too late. Hadn't I just as good go to jail here in Leesville as be shipped over to Europe to be shot—or maybe drowned by a submarine on the way?"

And thus a new terror was introduced into Lizzie's life—robbing her of sleep for many a night thereafter, planting in her mother-heart for the first time the idea that she might be concerned in the world-war. "What'd become of the babies?" she wailed; and Jimmie answered: Whose business was it to bother about working-class babies, under the hellish capitalist system?



II



So Jimmie had his way for a bit—he went into Leesville and helped distribute literature, and held the torch at street-meetings, where some people hooted at them and others defended them, and the police had to interfere to prevent a riot. It was at this time that a militant majority was trying to drive through the Senate a declaration of war against Germany, and a handful of pacifists blocked the way in the closing hours of the session, thus causing a delay of several weeks. How you regarded this action depended upon your point of view. The President denounced them as "wilful men", and the Wall Street newspapers apparently wanted them lynched; whereas Jimmie and his fellows in the local hailed them as heroes and friends of mankind. The Socialists argued that the President had been re-elected, only four months before, by pacifist votes, and upon a pacifist platform; and now he was sweeping the country into war, and denouncing those who stood upon his former convictions!

On top of this came another event which set Jimmie almost beside himself with excitement. For three days all news from Petrograd was cut off; and then came a report, electrifying the world—the Tsar had been overthrown, the Russian people were free! Jimmie could hardly believe his eyes; he went in to the meeting of the local three nights later, to find his comrades celebrating as if the world was theirs. Here was the thing they had been preaching, day in and day out, all these weary years, amid ridicule, hatred and persecution; here was the Social Revolution, knocking at the gates of the world! It would spread to Austria and Germany, to Italy, France, England—and so to Leesville! Everywhere the people would come into their own, and war and tyranny would vanish like a hateful nightmare!

Speaker after speaker got up to proclaim this glorious future; they sang the Marseillaise and the Internationale, and the Russians who were present clasped one another in their arms, with tears running down their cheeks. It was voted that they must hold a mass-meeting immediately, to explain this epoch-making event to the people of the city; also they must stand more firmly than ever by their programme of opposition to war. Now, with Social Revolution knocking at the gates of the world, what was the use of America's going in for militarism?

So Jimmie set to work with redoubled fervour, giving all his time to agitation. He had apparently no chance of getting a job, and for the moment he gave up trying. The keeper of the cross-roads store, being down on him because of his ideas, refused him any more credit; and so poor Lizzie was driven to do what she had vowed never to do—take off the stocking from her right leg, and unsew the bandage from her ankle, and extract one of the ten precious twenty-dollar bills. Their bright yellow was considerably faded now, their beautiful crispness gone entirely; but the store-keeper made no kick on that account—he returned the change, and incidentally took occasion to give her a friendly warning concerning her husband's reckless talk. There was trouble coming to him, and his wife had better shut him up before it was too late. So poor Lizzie ceased being a pacifist, and went home to have more hysterics on her husband's bosom.



III



Being unable to hold him back, she sent word by the mail-carrier to old Peter Drew to come up and help; the old farmer hitched up his bony mare and drove to see them, and for a couple of hours talked America while Jimmie talked Russia. Was America to lie down before the Kaiser? Jimmie would answer that they were going to bring down the Kaiser in the same way they had brought down the Tsar. The workers of Russia having shown the way, never more would the workers of any nation bow to the yoke of slavery. Yes, even in the so-called republics, such as France, which was ruled by bankers, and America, which was ruled by Wall Street—even here, the workers would read the lesson of revolt!

"But in America the people can get anything they want!" cried the bewildered old man. "They only have to vote—"

"VOTE?" snarled Jimmie. "An' have their votes thrown out by some rotten political gang, like they got here in Leesville? Don't talk to me about votin'—they told me I'd moved into a new district an' lost my vote—lost it because I lost my job! So it's old man Granitch has the say whether I can vote or not! You'll find the same thing true of two-thirds of the men in the Empire Shops—half the unskilled men in the country got no votes, because they got no home, no nothin'."

"But," argued the old soldier, "how will you run your new working-class government, if not by votes?"

"Sure, we'll run it by votes," Jimmie answered—"but first we'll turn out the capitalists; they won't have the money to buy political machines; they won't own the newspapers an' print lies about us. Look at this Leesville Herald right now—just plain downright lies they print—we can't get any truth at all to the people."

And so it went. It was of no use for the old man to plead for the "country"; to Jimmie the "country" had let itself be lost, suppressed, taken over by the capitalists, the "plutes". Jimmie's sense of loyalty was not to his country, but to his class, which had been exploited, hounded, driven from pillar to post. In past times the government had allowed itself to be used by corporations; so now it was in vain that the President made appeals for justice and democracy, using the beautiful language of idealism. Jimmie did not believe that he meant it; or anyhow, Wall Street would see that nothing came of his promises. The "plutes" would take his words and twist them into whatever sense they wished; and meantime they went on pouring abuse on Jimmie Higgins—throwing the same old mud into his eyes, blinding him with the same old hatred. So there was no way for an old soldier and patriot to break through the armour of Jimmie's prejudice.

IV

Next day was to be the great mass-meeting in celebration of the Russian revolution; and would you believe it, Lizzie was hoping to persuade Jimmie to stay away; she had brought Mr. Drew to help persuade him! Poor Lizzie had visions of everybody in the hall being carted off to jail, of Jimmie getting up and shouting something, causing the police to fall on him and beat in his skull with their clubs. It was in vain he declared that he was going to do nothing more romantic than sell literature and act as usher. She clasped him in her arms, weeping copiously, and when he was still obdurate, she declared that she would go with him. She would try to persuade Mrs. Drew to take care of the babies for one night.

Old Peter Drew answered that he would be interested to attend the meeting himself. How would it do for him to come for Lizzie and the little ones, and leave the latter at his home, and then drive with Lizzie to the meeting? They could meet Jimmie at the Opera-house, where he would be spending the day decorating. Then after the meeting they could all drive back together. "Fine!" said Jimmie, who had visions of the old soldier becoming infected with revolutionary fever.

But alas, it did not work out that way. To Jimmie's consternation the old man turned up at the Opera-house in a faded blue uniform with brass buttons all over it! Everybody stared, of course; and they stared all the harder because they saw this military personage in company with Comrade Higgins. The old boy gazed about at the swarms of people, many of them with red buttons, the women with red ribbons or sashes; he gazed at the decorations—the huge flag and the long red streamers, the banner of the Karl Marx Verein, and the banner of the Ypsels, or Young Peoples' Socialist League of Leesville, and the banner of the Machinists' Union, Local 4717, and of the Carpenters' Union, District 529, and of the Workers' Co-operative Society. He turned to Jimmie and said, "Where's the American flag?"

The Liederkranz sang the Marseillaise, and after the audience had cheered and waved red handkerchiefs and shouted itself hoarse, Comrade Gerrity, the chairman, made a little speech. For many years all Socialists had been accustomed to employ a metaphor by which to describe conditions in their country, and now they would no longer be able to use it, for Russia was free, and America would follow her example when she had the sense. He introduced Comrade Pavel Michaelovitch, who had come all the way from New York to tell them the meaning of the greatest event of history. Comrade Pavel, a slender, frail, scholarly-looking man with a black beard and black-rimmed spectacles, said a few words in Russian, and then he talked for an hour in broken English, explaining how the Russians had won their way to freedom, and now would use it to set free the rest of the proletariat. And then came Comrade Schultze, of the Carpet Weavers' Union, assuring them that there was no need to go to war with Germany, because the German workers had been shown the way to freedom, and would follow very soon; Schultze knew, because his brother was editor of a Socialist paper in Leipzig, and he had inside information as to what was going on in the Fatherland.

Then Comrade Smith, the editor of the Worker, was introduced, and the trouble began. The young editor wasted no time in preliminaries; he was an international revolutionist, and no capitalist government was going to draft him for its bloody knaveries. Never would he be led out to murder his fellow-workers, whether in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria or Turkey; the masters of Wall Street would find that when they set out to drive American free men to the slaughter-pen, they had made the mistake of their greedy lives. "Understand me," declared Comrade Smith—though there seemed so far to have been nothing in which anyone could possibly have misunderstood him—"understand me, I am no pacifist, I am not opposed to war—it is merely that I purpose to choose the war in which I fight. If they try to put a gun into my hands, I shall not refuse to take it—not much, for I and my fellow wage-slaves have long wished for guns! But I shall use my own judgement as to where I aim that gun—whether at enemies in front of me, or at enemies behind me—whether at my brothers, the working-men of Germany, or at my oppressors, the exploiters of Wall Street, their newspaper lackeys and military martinets!"

The sentences of this speech came like the blows of a hammer, and they struck forth a clamour of applause from the audience. But suddenly the cheering crowd became aware that something out of the ordinary was happening. An aged, white-whiskered man clad in a faded blue uniform had risen from his seat in the middle of the hall and was shouting and waving his arms. People near him were trying to pull him down into his seat, but he would not be squelched, he went on shouting; and the audience in part fell silent out of curiosity. "Shame! Shame!" they heard him cry. "Shame upon you!" And he pointed a trembling finger at the orator, declaring, "You are talking treason, young man!"

"Sit down!" shrieked the crowd. "Shut up!"

But the old man turned upon them. "Are there no Americans at all in this audience? Will you listen to this shameless traitor without one word?"

People caught him by the coat-tails, men shook their fists at him; at the other side of the hall "Wild Bill" leaped upon a chair, shrieking: "Cut his throat, the old geezer!"

Two policemen came running down the aisle, and the "old geezer" appealed to them: "What are you here for, if not to protect the flag and the honour of America?" But the policemen insisted that he stop interrupting the meeting, and so the old man turned and stalked out from the hall. But he did not go until he had turned once more and shaken his fist at the crowd, yelling in his cracked voice, "Traitors! Traitors!"



V



Poor Jimmie remained in his seat, overwhelmed. That he, the most devoted of workers for Socialism, should have been the cause of such a disgraceful scene—bringing to this revolutionary meeting a man in the uniform of a killer of the working-class! He could not stay and face the comrades; before the speaking had finished, he gave Lizzie a nudge, and the two got up and stole out, dodging everyone they knew.

Outside they stood in perplexity. They thought, of course, that the old man would have driven away without them; they pictured the long walk from the trolley-line in the darkness and mud—and with Lizzie dressed in her only Sunday-go-to-meeting! But when they went to the place where Mr. Drew had left his buggy, to their surprise they found him patiently waiting for them. Seeing them hesitate, he said, "Come! Get in!" They were much embarrassed, but obeyed, and the old mare started her amble towards home.

They rode for a long time in silence. Finally Jimmie could not stand it, and began, "I'm so sorry, Mr. Drew. You don't understand—" But the old man cut him off. "There's no use you and me tryin' to talk, young man." So they rode the rest of the way without a sound—except that once Jimmie imagined he heard Lizzie sobbing to herself.

Jimmie really felt terribly about it, for he had for this old soldier a deep respect, even an affection. Mr. Drew had made his impression not so much by his arguments, which Jimmie considered sixty years out of date, as by his personality. Here was one patriot who was straight! What a pity that he could not understand the revolutionary point of view! What a pity that he had to be made angry! It was one more of the horrors of war, which tore friends apart, and set them to disputing and hating one another.

At least, that was the way it seemed to Jimmie that night, while he was still full of the speeches he had heard. But at other times doubts assailed him—for, of course, a man cannot defy and combat a whole community without sometimes being led to wonder whether the community may not have some right on its side. Jimmie would hear of things the Germans had done in the war; they were such dirty fighters, they went out of their way to do such utterly revolting and useless, almost insane things! They made it so needlessly hard for anyone who tried to defend them to think of them even as human beings. Jimmie would argue that he did not mean to help the Germans; he would resent bitterly the charges of the Leesville newspapers that he was a German agent and a traitor; but he could not get away from the uncomfortable fact that the things he was doing DID have a tendency to further German interests, at least for a time.

When that was pointed out to him by some patriot in a controversy, his answer would be that he was appealing to the German Socialists to revolt against their military leaders; but then the patriot would begin to find fault with the German Socialists, declaring that they were much better Germans than Socialists, and citing utterances and actions to prove it. One German Socialist had stood up in the Reichstag and declared that the Germans had two ways of fighting—their armies overcame their enemies in the field, while their Socialists undermined the morale of the workers in enemy countries. When that passage was read to Jimmie, he answered that it was a lie; no such speech had ever been made by a Socialist. He had no way of proving it was a lie, of course; he just knew it! But then, when he went away and thought it over, he began to wonder; suppose it were true! Suppose the German workers had been so drilled and schooled in childhood that even those who called themselves revolutionists were patriots at heart! Jimmie would begin to piece this and that together—things he had heard or read. Certainly these German Socialists were not displaying any great boldness in fighting their government!

The answer was that they could not oppose their government, because they would be put in jail. But that was a pretty poor answer; it was their business to go to jail—if not, what right had they to expect Jimmie Higgins to go here in America? Jimmie presented this problem to Comrade Meissner, who answered that if Jimmie would go first, then doubtless the German comrades would follow. But Jimmie could not see why he should be first; and when they tried to clear up the reason, it developed that down in his heart Jimmie had begun to believe that Germany was more to blame for the war than America. And not merely would Comrade Meissner not admit that, but he became excited and vehement, trying to convince Jimmie that the other capitalist governments of the world were the cause of the war—Germany was only defending herself against them! So there they were, involved in a controversy, just like any two non-revolutionary people! Repeating over the same arguments which had gone on in the local between Norwood, the lawyer, and Schneider, the brewer; only this time Jimmie was taking the side of Norwood! Jimmie found himself face to face with the disconcerting fact that his devoted friend Meissner was a German—and therefore in some subtle way different from him, unable to see things as he did!



CHAPTER XIII

JIMMIE HIGGINS DODGES TROUBLE

I



War or no war, the soil had to be ploughed and seed sown; so John Cutter came to his tenant and proposed that he should resume his job as farm-hand. Only he must agree to shut up about the war, for while Cutter himself was not a rabid patriot, he would take no chances of having his tenant-house burned down some night. So there was another discussion in the Higgins family. Lizzie remembered how, during the previous summer, Jimmie had worked from dawn till dark, and been too tired even to read Socialist papers, to say nothing of carrying on propaganda; which seemed to the distracted wife of a propagandist the most desirable condition possible! Poor Eleeza Betooser—twice again she had been compelled to take down the stocking from her right leg, and unsew the bandage round her ankle, and extract another of those precious yellow twenty-dollar bills; there were only seven of them left now, and each of them was more valuable to Lizzie than her eye-teeth.

Jimmie finally agreed that he would gag himself, so far as concerned this country-side. What was the use of trying to teach anything to these barnyard fools? They wanted war, let them go to war, and be blown to bits, or poisoned in the trenches! If Jimmie had propaganding to do, he would do it in the city, where the working-men had brains, and knew who their enemies were. So once more Jimmie harnessed up John Cutter's horses to the plough, and went out into John Cutter's field to raise another crop of corn for a man whom he hated. All day he guided the plough or the harrow, and at night he fed and cared for the horses and the cows, and then he came home and ate his supper, listening to the rattling of the long freight-train that went through his backyard, carrying materials for the making of TNT.

For the great explosives plant was now working day and night, keeping the war in Jimmie's thoughts all the time, whether he would or not. In the midnight hours the trains of finished materials went out, making Jimmie's windows rattle with their rumble and clatter, and bearing his fancies away to the battle-line across the seas, where men were soon to be blown to pieces with the contents of these cars. One night something went wrong on the track, and the train stopped in his backyard, and in the morning he saw the cars, painted black, with the word "danger" in flaming red letters. On top of the cars walked a man with a club in his hand and a bulge on his hip, keeping guard.

It appeared that someone had torn up a rail in the night, evidently for the purpose of wrecking the train; so there came a detective to Jimmie, while he was working in the field, to cross-question him. They had Jimmie's record, and suspected him of knowing more than he would tell. "Aw, go to hell!" exclaimed the irate Socialist. "D'you suppose, if I'd wanted to smash anything, I'd done it on the place where I work?" And then, when he went home to dinner, he found that they had been after Lizzie, and had frightened her out of her wits. They had threatened to turn them out of their home; Jimmie saw himself hounded here and there by this accursed war—until it finished by seizing him and dragging him to the trenches!



II



The new Congress had met, and declared a state of war with Germany, and the whole country was rushing into arms. Men were enlisting by hundreds of thousands; but that was not enough for the militarists—they wanted a conscription-law, so that every man might be compelled to go. If they were so sure of themselves and their wonderful war, why weren't they satisfied to let those fight it who wanted to? So argued the rebellious Jimmie and his anti-militarist associates. But no! the militarists knew perfectly well that the bulk of the people did not want to fight, so they proposed to make them fight. Every energy of the Socialist movement was now concentrated on the blocking of this conscription scheme.

Local Leesville hired the Opera-house again, organizing a mass-meeting of protest, and the capitalist papers of the city began clamouring against this meeting. Was the patriotism and loyalty of Leesville to be affronted by another gathering of sedition and treason? The Herald told all over again the story of the gallant old Civil War veteran who had risen in his seat and shouted his protest against the incitements of "Jack" Smith, the notorious "red" editor. The Herald printed a second time the picture of the gallant old veteran in his faded blue uniform, and the list of battles in which he had fought, from the first Bull Run to the last siege of Richmond. Some farmer passing by handed a copy of this paper to Lizzie, adding that if there was any more treason-talk in this locality there was going to be a lynching bee. So Jimmie found his wife in tears again. She was absolutely determined that he should not go to that meeting. For three days she wept and argued with him, and for a part of three nights.

It would have been comical if it had not been so tragic. Jimmie would use the old argument, that if he did not succeed in stopping the war, he would be dragged into the trenches and killed. So, of course, Lizzie would become a pacifist at once. What right had the war to take Jimmie from her? The little Jimmies had a right to their father! All children had a right to their fathers! But then, after Lizzie had expressed these tearful convictions, Jimmie would say, "All right, then, he must go to that meeting, he must do what he could to prevent the war." And poor Lizzie would find herself suddenly confronting the terrors of the police with their clubs and the patriots with their buckets of tar and bags of feathers! No, Jimmie must not carry on any propaganda, Jimmie must not go to the meeting! Poor Jimmie would try to pin her down; which way did she want him killed, by the Germans, or by the police and the mobs? But Lizzie did not want him killed either way! She wanted him to go on living!

Jimmie would try to arrange a compromise for the present. He would go to the meeting, but he would promise not to say a word. But that did not console Lizzie—she knew that if anything happened, her man would get into it. No, if he were determined to go, she would go, too,—even if they had to load the three babies into the perambulator, and push them two or three miles to the trolley! If Jimmie tried to make a speech, she would hang on to his coat-tails, she would clasp her hands over his mouth, she would throw herself between him and the clubs of the policemen!

So matters stood, when on the afternoon before the meeting there came a heavy rain, and the road to the trolley was rendered impossible for a triple-loaded baby-carriage. So there were more hysterics in the family; Jimmie took his wife's hand in his and solemnly swore to her that she might trust him to go to this meeting, he would not do anything that could by any possibility get him into trouble. He would not try to make a speech, he would not get up and shout—no matter what happened, he would not say a word! He would merely sell pamphlets, and show people to their seats, as he had done at a hundred meetings before. To make sure of his immunity, he would even leave off the red badge which he was accustomed to display on Socialist occasions! By these pledges repeated over and over, he finally succeeded in pacifying his weeping spouse, and gently removed her clutch on his coat-tails, and departed, waving his hand to her and the kids.

The last thing he saw through the rain was Jimmie Junior, flourishing a red handkerchief which Lizzie at the last moment had extracted from her husband's pocket. The last sound he heard was Jimmie Junior's voice, shouting:

"You be good now! You shut up!" Jimmie went off, thinking about this little tike; he was five years old, and growing so that you could notice the difference overnight. He had big black eyes like his mother, and a grin full of all the mischief in the world. The things he knew and the questions he asked! Jimmie and Lizzie never got tired of talking about them; Jimmie recalled them one by one, as he trudged through the mud—and, as always, he set his lips and clenched his hands, and took up anew the task of making the world a fit place for a working-man's child to grow up in!



III



The principal orator of the evening was a young college professor who had been turned out of his job for taking the side of the working-class in his public utterances, and who was therefore a hero to Jimmie Higgins. This young man had the facts of the war at his finger-tips; he made you see it as a gigantic conspiracy of capitalists the world over to complete their grip on the raw materials of wealth, and on the bodies and souls of the workers. He bitterly denounced those who had forced the country into the war; he denounced the Wall Street speculators and financiers who had made their billions already, and would be making their tens of billions. He denounced the plan to force men to fight who did not wish to fight, and his every sentence was followed by a burst of applause from the throng which packed the Opera-house. If you judged by this meeting, you would conclude that America was on the verge of a revolution against the war.

The young professor sat down, wiping the perspiration from his pale forehead; and then the Liederkranz sang again—only it was not called the Liederkranz now, it had become known as the "Workers' Singing Society", out of deference to local prejudice. Then arose Comrade Smith, editor of the Worker, and announced that after the collection the orator would answer questions; then Comrade Smith launched into a speech of his own, to the effect that something definite ought to be done by the workers of Leesville to make clear their opposition to being dragged into war. For his part he wished to say that he would not yield one inch to the war-clamour—he was on record as refusing to be drafted in any capitalist war, and he was ready to join with others to agree that they would not be drafted. The time was short—if anything were to be done, they must act at once—

And then suddenly came an interruption—this time not from an old soldier, but from a sergeant of police, who had been standing at one side of the stage, and who now stepped forward, announcing, "This meeting is closed."

"What?" shouted the orator.

"This meeting is closed," repeated the other. "And you, young man, are under arrest."

There was a howl from the audience, and suddenly from the pit in front of the stage, whence ordinarily the orchestra dispensed sweet music, there leaped a line of blue-uniformed men, distributing themselves between the public and the speaker. At the same time down the centre aisle came a dozen soldiers marching, with guns in their hands and bayonets fixed.

"This is an outrage!" shouted Comrade Smith.

"Not another word!" commanded the police official; and two policemen who had followed him grabbed the orator by each arm and started to lead him off the stage.

Comrade Gerrity leaped to the front of the platform. "I denounce this proceeding!" he shouted. "We are holding an orderly meeting here—"

A policeman laid hold of him. "You are under arrest."

Then came Comrade Mabel Smith, sister of the editor of the Worker. "For shame! For shame!" she cried. And then, to a policeman, "No, I will not be silent! I protest in the name of free speech! I declare—" And when the policeman seized her by the arm, she continued to shout at the top of her lungs, driving the crowd to frenzy.

There were disturbances all over the audience. Mrs. Gerrity, wife of the organizer, sprang up in her seat and began to protest. It happened that Jimmie Higgins was in the aisle not far from her, and his heart leaped with strange, half-forgotten emotions as he saw this trim little figure, with the jaunty hat and the turkey feather stuck on one side. Comrade Evelyn Baskerville, of Greenwich Village, she of the fluffy brown hair and the pert little dimples and the bold terrifying ideas, she who had so ploughed up the soul of Jimmie Higgins and almost broken up the Higgins' home—here she was, employing a new variety of coquetry, by which she compelled three soldiers with rifles and bayonets to devote their exclusive attention to her!

And then Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker lady, who believed in moral force applied through the ear-drums. She stood in the aisle with her armful of pamphlets and her red sash over her shoulder, proclaiming, "In the name of liberty and fair play I protest against this outrage! I will not see my country dragged into war without asserting my right of protest! I stand here, in what is supposed to be a Christian city; I speak in the name of the Prince of Peace—" and so on, quite a little speech, while several embarrassed young men in khaki were trying to find out how to hold their rifles and a shouting Quakeress at the same time.

And then Comrade Schneider, the brewer. He had been up on the stage with the singers, and now got somehow to the front. "Haf we got no rights in America left?" he shouted. "Do we in this audience—"

"Shut up, you Hun!" roared someone on the front of the crowd, and three policemen at once leaped for Comrade Schneider, and grabbed him by the collar, twisting so hard that the German's face, always purple when he was excited, took on a dark and deadly hue.

Poor Jimmie Higgins! He stood there with his armful of "War, What For?"—trembling with excitement, itching in every nerve and sinew to leap into this conflict, to make his voice heard above the uproar, to play his part as a man—or even as a Comrade Mabel Smith, or a Comrade Mary Alien, or a Comrade Mrs. Gerrity, nee Baskerville. But he was helpless, speechless—bound hand and foot by those solemn pledges he had given to Eleeza Betooser, the mother of babies.

He looked about, and near him in the aisle he saw another man, also bound hand and foot—bound by the memory of the smash in the face which had broken his nose and knocked out three of his front teeth! "Wild Bill" saw a policeman watching him now, eager for another pretext to leap on him and pound him; so he was silent, like Jimmie. The two of them had to stand there and see the fundamental constitutional rights of American citizens set at naught, to see liberty trampled in the dust beneath the boots of a brutal soldiery, to see justice strangled and raped in the innermost shrine of her temple. At least, that was what you had seen if you read the Leesville Worker; if on the other hand you read the Herald—which nine out of ten people did—then you learned that the forces of decency and order had at last prevailed in Leesville, the propaganda of the Hun was stifled for ever, the mouthers of sedition had felt the heavy hand of public indignation.



IV



Outside, a crowd gathered to jeer while the prisoners were loaded into the patrol-wagon; but the police drove them away, keeping everybody moving, and breaking up several attempts at street-oratory. Jimmie found himself with half a dozen other comrades, wandering aimlessly down Main Street, talking over and over what had happened, each explaining why and how he had not shared the crown of martyrdom. Some had shouted as loud as the rest, but had been missed by the police; some had thought it wiser to run away and live to shout another day; some wanted to start that very night to print a leaflet and call another mass-meeting. They adjourned to Tom's "Buffeteria" to talk things over; they took possession of a couple of tables, and got their due quotas of coffee and sandwiches, or pie and milk, and had just got fairly started on the question of raising bail without the help of Comrade Dr. Service—when suddenly something happened which drove all thoughts of the meeting out of their minds.

It was like a gigantic blow, striking the whole world at once; a cosmic convulsion, quite indescribable. The air became suddenly a living thing, which leaped against your face; the windows of the little eating-place flew inward in a shower of glass, and the walls and tables shook as if with palsy. The sound of it all was a vast, all-pervasive sound, at once far off and near, tailing away in the clatter and crash of innumerable panes of glass falling from innumerable windows. Then came silence, a sinister, frightful silence, it seemed; men stared at one another, crying, "My God! What's that?" The answer seemed to dawn upon everyone at once: "The powder-plant!"

Yes, that must be it, beyond doubt. For months they had been talking about it and thinking about it, speculating as to the probabilities and the consequences. And now it had happened. Suddenly one of the company gave a cry, and they turned and stared at his white face, and realized the terror that clutched his heart. Comrade Higgins, whose home was so near the place of peril!

"Gee, fellers, I gotta go!" he gasped; and several of the comrades jumped up and ran with him into the street. If there was a single pane of glass left intact in Leesville, you would not have thought it as you trod those pavements.

If Jimmie had been trained in efficiency, and accustomed to spending money more freely, he might perhaps have found out something by the telephone or by inquiry at the newspaper offices; but the one thing he thought of was to take the trolley and get to his home. The comrades ran with him, speculating with eager excitement, trying to reassure him—it could be nothing worse than some glass and some dishes smashed. Some had thought of going all the way with him, but they remembered they would be too late for the last trolley back, and they had their jobs in the morning. So they put him on the car and bade him good-bye.