Also, the farms and warehouses were the property of the Iron Heel.  Armies of troops were put into the field, and the fanatics were herded back at the bayonet point to their tasks in the cities.  There they broke out in ever recurring mobs and riots.  Their leaders were executed for sedition or confined in madhouses.  Those who were executed went to their deaths with all the gladness of martyrs.  It was a time of madness.  The unrest spread.  In the swamps and deserts and waste places, from Florida to Alaska, the small groups of Indians that survived were dancing ghost dances and waiting the coming of a Messiah of their own.

And through it all, with a serenity and certitude that was terrifying, continued to rise the form of that monster of the ages, the Oligarchy.  With iron hand and iron heel it mastered the surging millions, out of confusion brought order, out of the very chaos wrought its own foundation and structure.

“Just wait till we get in,” the Grangers said—­Calvin said it to us in our Pell Street quarters.  “Look at the states we’ve captured.  With you socialists to back us, we’ll make them sing another song when we take office.”

“The millions of the discontented and the impoverished are ours,” the socialists said.  “The Grangers have come over to us, the farmers, the middle class, and the laborers.  The capitalist system will fall to pieces.  In another month we send fifty men to Congress.  Two years hence every office will be ours, from the President down to the local dog-catcher.”

To all of which Ernest would shake his head and say: 

“How many rifles have you got?  Do you know where you can get plenty of lead?  When it comes to powder, chemical mixtures are better than mechanical mixtures, you take my word.”

CHAPTER XVI

THE END

When it came time for Ernest and me to go to Washington, father did not accompany us.  He had become enamoured of proletarian life.  He looked upon our slum neighborhood as a great sociological laboratory, and he had embarked upon an apparently endless orgy of investigation.  He chummed with the laborers, and was an intimate in scores of homes.  Also, he worked at odd jobs, and the work was play as well as learned investigation, for he delighted in it and was always returning home with copious notes and bubbling over with new adventures.  He was the perfect scientist.

There was no need for his working at all, because Ernest managed to earn enough from his translating to take care of the three of us.  But father insisted on pursuing his favorite phantom, and a protean phantom it was, judging from the jobs he worked at.  I shall never forget the evening he brought home his street pedler’s outfit of shoe-laces and suspenders, nor the time I went into the little corner grocery to make some purchase and had him wait on me.  After that I was not surprised when he tended bar for a week in the saloon across the street.  He worked as a night watchman, hawked potatoes on the street, pasted labels in a cannery warehouse, was utility man in a paper-box factory, and water-carrier for a street railway construction gang, and even joined the Dishwashers’ Union just before it fell to pieces.