Did he think this was a little white ball he was swinging
down upon? He kept on and on, until you could
no longer count the welts, until the whole back of
Michael Dubin was a mass of raw and bleeding flesh.
The screams of Michael Dubin died away, and his convulsive
struggling ceased, and his head hung limp, and he sunk
lower and lower upon the tree.
At last the master of ceremonies stepped forward and
ordered a halt, and the man with the whip wiped the
sweat from his forehead with his shirt-sleeve, and
the other men unchained the body of Michael Dubin,
and dragged it a few feet to one side and dumped it
face downward in the pine-leaves.
“Number two!” called the master of ceremonies,
in a clear, compelling voice, as if he were calling
the figures of a quadrille; and from another car another
set of men emerged, dragging another prisoner.
It was Bert Glikas, a “blanket-stiff” who
was a member of the I. W. W.’s executive committee,
and had had two teeth knocked out in a harvest-strike
only a couple of weeks previously. While they
were getting off his coat, he managed to get one hand
free, and he shook it at the spectators behind the
white lights of the automobiles. “God damn
you!” he yelled; and so they tied him up, and
a fresh man stepped forward and picked up the whip,
and spit on his hands for good luck, and laid on with
a double will; and at every stroke Glikas yelled a
fresh curse; first in English, and then, as if he
were delirious, in some foreign language. But
at last his curses died away, and he too sank insensible,
and was unhitched and dragged away and dumped down
beside the first man. “Number three!”
called the master of ceremonies.
Now Peter was sitting in the back seat of his car,
wearing the mask which McGivney had given him, a piece
of cloth with two holes for his eyes and another hole
for him to breathe thru. Peter hated these Reds,
and wanted them punished, but he was not used to bloody
sights, and was finding this endless thud, thud of
the whip on human flesh rather more than he could
stand. Why had he come? This wasn’t
his part of the job of saving his country from the
Red menace. He had done his share in pointing
out the dangerous ones; he was a man of brains, not
a man of violence. Peter saw that the next victim
was Tom Duggan with his broken and bloody nose, and
in spite of himself, Peter started with dismay.
He realized that without intending it he had become
a little fond of Tom Duggan. For all his queerness,
Duggan was loyal, he was a good fellow when you had
got underneath his surly manners. He had never
done anything except just to grumble, and to put his
grumbles into verses; they were making a mistake in
whipping him, and for a moment Peter had a crazy impulse
to interfere and tell them so.
