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.
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,
