made him indispensable, and he became practically the boss of the proceedings.  It had been arranged thru “Shorty” Gunton and the other “under cover” men that the meetings of the Communist and Communist Labor parties should be held on the same night; and all over the country this same thing was done, and next morning the world was electrified by the news that all these meetings had been raided at the same hour, and thousands of Reds placed under arrest.  In American City the Federal government had hired a suite of about a dozen rooms adjoining the offices of Guffey, and all night and next morning batches of prisoners were brought in, until there were about four hundred in all.  They were crowded into these rooms with barely space to sit down; of course there was an awful uproar, moaning and screaming of people who had been battered, and a smell that beat the monkey cage at the zoological gardens.

The prisoners were kept penned up in this place for several weeks, and all the time more were being brought in; there were so many that the women had to be stored in the toilets.  Many of the prisoners fell ill, or pretended to fall ill, and several of them went insane, or pretended to go insane, and several of them died, or pretended to die.  And of course the parlor Reds and sympathizers were busy outside making a terrible fuss about it.  They had no more papers, and could not hold any more meetings, and when they tried to circulate literature the post-office authorities tied them up; but still somehow they managed to get publicity, and Peter’s “under cover” men would report to him who was doing this work, and Peter would arrange to have more raids and more batches of prisoners brought in.  In one of the “bomb-plots” which had been unveiled in the East they had discovered some pink paper, used either for printing leaflets, or for wrapping explosives, one could not be sure.  Anyhow, the secret agencies with which Guffey was connected had distributed samples of this paper over the country, and any time the police wanted to finish some poor devil, they would find this deadly “pink paper” in his possession, and the newspapers would brand him as one of the group of conspirators who were sending infernal machines thru the mails.

Section 82

Peter was so busy these days that he missed several nights’ sleep, and hardly even stopped to eat.  He had his own private room, where the prisoners were brought for examination, and he had half a dozen men under his orders to do the “strong arm” work.  It was his task to extract from these prisoners admissions which would justify their being sent to prison if they were citizens, or being deported if they were aliens.  There was of course seldom any way to distinguish between citizens and aliens; you just had to take a chance on it, proceeding on the certainty that all were dangerous.  Many years ago, when Peter had been working for Pericles Priam,