And Jones sang triumphant snatches of song and hammered away merrily at shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and heavier hammers.

The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter.  The affair was just serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention.  And the story was a good one—­the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.

Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.

Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker.  Reporters swarmed over his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.

Penton gave out interview after interview.  And, to his credit let it be said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ... he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them ... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow prisoners lived under, who had not gone to the workhouse in a jocular mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.

Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could.  He was accused of loving notoriety.  His attitude toward it was mixed.  He did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with infinite gusto.  But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done with, that would otherwise never have been noticed.  The others were willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.  Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for propaganda—­turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit people....

He gave the papers a very bad poem—­The Prison Night.  I remember but one line of it—­

  “The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide.”

* * * * *

“Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about you, too,” he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts, while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant, blandly smiling, and vain-glorious.

“Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture, too.”

“Oh, all right!” they assented indifferently, which injured my egotism.  But I was too adroit to show it.  I still demurred with mock modesty.  Penton would have been franker.

Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other’s shoulders.

In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture.

* * * * *