All we do is sign the pay-roll—
And we don’t get a goddam
cent.
You would go a little farther, and find a couple of
automobiles trying to get past, and a merry crowd
amusing itself throwing large waste cans in front
of them. Some one would shout: “Who
won the war?” And the answer would come booming:
“The goddam slackers;” or maybe it would
be, “The goddam officers.” The crowd
would move along, starting to chant the favorite refrain:
You’re in the army now,
You’re not behind the
plow—;
You son-of-a—–,
You’ll never get rich—
You’re in the army now!
And from farther down the street would come a chorus
from another crowd of marchers:
I got a girl in Baltimore,
The street-car runs right
by her door.
Every now and then you would come on a fist-fight,
or maybe a fight with bottles, and a crowd, laughing
and whooping, engaged in pulling the warriors apart
and sitting on them. Through a mile or two of
this kind of thing I made my way, my heart sinking
deeper with misgiving. I got within a couple
of blocks of the City Hall, and then suddenly I came
upon the thing I dreaded—my friend Carpenter
in the hands of the mob!
They had got hold of a canvas-covered wagon, of the
type of the old “prairie-schooner.”
You still find these camped by our roadsides now and
then, with nomad families in them; and evidently one
of these families had been so ill advised as to come
to town for the convention. The rioters had hoisted
their victim on top of the wagon, having first dumped
a gallon of red paint over his head, so that everyone
might know him for the Red Prophet they had been reading
about in the papers. They had tied a long rope
to the shaft of the wagon, and one or two hundred
men had hold of it, and were hauling it through the
streets, dancing and singing, shouting murder-threats
against the “reds.” Some ran ahead,
to clear the traffic; and then came the wagon, lumbering
and rocking, so that the prophet was thrown from side
to side. Fortunately there was a hole in the
canvas, and he could hold to one of the wooden ribs.
The cortege came opposite to me. On each side
was a guard of honor, a line of men walking in lock-step,
each with his hands on the shoulders of the one in
front; they had got up a sort of chant: “Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet! Hi! Hi!
The Bolsheviki prophet!” And others would yell,
“I won’t work! I won’t work!”—this
being our Mobland nickname for the I.W.W. Some
one had daubed the letters on the sides of the wagon,
using the red paint; and a drunken fellow standing
near me shook his clenched fist at the wretch on top
and bellowed in a fog-horn voice: “Hey,
there, you goddam Arnychist, if you’re a prophet,
come down from that there wagon and cure my venereal
disease!” There was a roar of laughter from the
throng, and the drunken fellow liked the sensation
so well that he walked alongside, shouting his challenge
again and again.
