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—”
