Part 20

But all other thoughts were driven from Peter’s mind by one emotion, which was terror. His teeth began giving their imitation of an angry woodchuck, and his knees refused to hold him; he sat down on the edge of the bed, staring from one to another of these three stone Aztec faces. “Well, Gudge,” said Andrews, at last, “so you’re the spy we’ve been looking for all this time!”

Peter remembered Nell’s injunction, “Stick it out, Peter! Stick it out!”

“Wh-wh-what do you mean, Mr. Andrews?”

“Forget it, Gudge,” said Andrews. “We’ve just been talking with Rosie, and Rosie was our spy.”

“She’s been lying to you!” Peter cried.

But Andrews said: “Oh rubbish! We’re not that easy! Miriam Yankovich was listening behind the door, and heard your talk.”

So then Peter knew that the case was hopeless, and there was nothing left but to ascertain his fate. Had they come just to scold him and appeal to his conscience? Or did they plan to carry him away and strangle him and torture him to death? The latter was the terror that had been haunting Peter from the beginning of his career, and when gradually be made out that the three Aztecs did not intend violence, and that all they hoped for was to get him to admit how much he had told to his employers--then there was laughter inside Peter, and he broke down and wept tears of scalding shame, and said that it had all been because McCormick had told that cruel lie about him and little Jennie Todd. He had resisted the temptation for a year, but then he had been out of a job, and the Goober Defense Committee had refused him any work; he had actually been starving, and so at last he had accepted McGivney’s offer to let him know about the seditious activities of the extreme Reds. But he had never reported anybody who hadn’t really broken the law, and he had never told McGivney anything but the truth.

Then Andrews proceeded to examine him. Peter denied that he had ever reported anything about the Goober case. He denied most strenuously that he had ever had anything to do with the McCormick “frame-up.” When they tried to pin him down on this case and that, he suddenly summoned his dignity and declared that Andrews had no right to cross-question him, he was a 100%, red-blooded American patriot, and had been saving his country and his God from German agents and Bolshevik traitors.

Donald Gordon almost went wild at that. “What you’ve been doing was to slip stuff into our pamphlet about conscientious objectors, so as to get us all indicted!”

“That’s a lie!” cried Peter. “I never done nothing of the kind!”

“You know perfectly well you rubbed out those pencil marks that I drew through that sentence in the pamphlet.”

“I never done it!” cried Peter, again and again.

And suddenly big John Durand clenched his hands, and his face became terrible with his pent-up rage. “You white-livered little sneak!” he hissed. “What we ought to do with you is to pull the lying tongue out of you!” He took a step forward, as if he really meant to do it.

But David Andrews interfered. He was a lawyer, and knew the difference between what he could do and what Guffey’s men could do. “No, no, John,” he said, “nothing like that. I guess we’ve got all we can get out of this fellow. We’ll leave him to his own conscience and his Jingo God. Come on, Donald.” And he took the white-faced Quaker boy with one hand, and the big labor giant with the other, and walked them out of the room, and Peter heard them tramping down the stairs of his lodging house, and he lay on his bed and buried his face in the pillows, and felt utterly wretched, because once more he had been made a fool of, and as usual it was a woman that had done it.

Section 73

Peter could see it all very clearly when he came to figure over the thing; he could see what a whooping jackass he had been. He might have known that it was up to him to be careful, at this time of all times, when he was suspected of having rubbed out Donald Gordon’s pencil marks. They had picked out a girl whom Peter had never seen before, and she had come and posed as Miriam’s friend, and had proceeded to take Peter by the nose and lead him to the edge of the precipice and shove him over. And now she would be laughing at him, telling all her friends about her triumph, and about Peter’s thirty dollars a week that he would never see again.

Peter spent a good part of the night getting up the story that he was to tell McGivney next morning. He wouldn’t mention Rosie Stern, of course; he would say that the Reds had trailed him to Room 427, and it must be they had a spy in Guffey’s office. Peter repeated this story quite solemnly, and again realized too late that he had made a fool of himself. It wasn’t twenty-four hours before every Red in American City knew the true, inside history of the unveiling of Peter Gudge as a spy of the Traction Trust. The story occupied a couple of pages in that week’s issue of the “Clarion,” and included Peter’s picture, and an account of the part that Peter had played in various frame-ups. It was nearly all true, and the fact that it was guess-work on Donald Gordon’s part did not make it any the better for Peter. Of course McGivney and Guffey and all his men read the story, and knew Peter for the whooping jackass that Peter knew himself.

“You go and get yourself a job with a pick and shovel,” said McGivney, and Peter sorrowfully took his departure. He had only a few dollars in his pocket, and these did not last very long, and he had got down to his last nickel, and was confronting the wolf of starvation again, when McGivney came to his lodging house room with a new proposition. There was one job left, and Peter might take it if he thought he could stand the gaff.

It was the job of state’s witness. Peter had been all thru the Red movement, he knew all these pacifists and Socialists and Syndicalists and I. W. Ws. who were now in jail. In some cases the evidence of the government was far from satisfactory; so Peter might have his salary back again, if he were willing to take the witness stand and tell what he was told to tell, and if he could manage to sit in a courtroom without falling in love with some of the lady jurors, or some of the lady spies of the defense. These deadly shafts of sarcasm Peter did not even feel, because he was so frightened by the proposition which McGivney put up to him. To come out into the open and face the blinding glare of the Red hate! To place himself, the ant, between the smashing fists of the battling giants!

Yes, it might seem dangerous, said McGivney, for a cowardly little whelp like himself; but then a good many men had had the nerve to do it, and none of them had died yet. McGivney himself did not pretend to care very much whether Peter did it or not; he put the matter up to him on Guffey’s orders. The job was worth forty dollars a week, and he might take it or leave it.

And there sat Peter, with only a nickel and a couple of pennies in his pocket, and the rent for his room two weeks over-due, and his landlady lying in wait in the hallway like an Indian with a tomahawk. Peter objected, what about all those bad things in his early record, Pericles Priam and the Temple of Jimjambo, which had ruined him as a witness in the Goober case. McGivney answered dryly that he couldn’t let himself out with that excuse; he was invited to pose as a reformed “wobbly,” and the more crimes and rascalities he had in his record, the more convinced the jury would be that he had been a real “wobbly.”

Peter asked, just when would he be expected to appear? And McGivney answered, the very next week. They were trying seventeen of the “wobblies” on a conspiracy charge, and Peter would be expected to take the stand and tell how he had heard them advocate violence, and heard them boast of having set fire to barns and wheat fields, and how they had put phosphorus bombs into haystacks, and copper nails into fruit trees, and spikes into sawmill logs, and emery powder into engine bearings. Peter needn’t worry about what he would have to say, McGivney would tell him everything, and would see him thoroughly posted, and he would find himself a hero in the newspapers, which would make clear that he had done everything from the very highest possible motives of 100% Americanism, and that no soldier in the war had been performing a more dangerous service.

To Peter it seemed they might say that without troubling their conscience very much. But McGivney went on to declare that he needn’t be afraid; it was no part of Guffey’s program to give the Reds the satisfaction of putting his star witness out of business. Peter would be kept in a safe place, and would always have a body-guard. While he was in the city, giving his testimony, they would put him up at the Hotel de Soto.

And that of course settled it. Here was poor Peter, with only a nickel and two coppers in his pocket, and before him stood a chariot of fire with magic steeds, and all he had to do was to step in, and be whirled away to Mount Olympus. Peter stepped in!

Section 74

McGivney took him to Guffey’s office, and Guffey wasted no time upon preliminaries, but turned to his desk, and took out a long typewritten document, a complete account of what the prosecution meant to prove against the seventeen I. W. Ws. First, Peter told what he himself had seen and heard--not very much, but a beginning, a hook to hang his story upon. The I. W. W. hall was the meeting place for the casual and homeless labor of the country, the “bindle-stiffs” who took the hardest of the world’s hard knocks, and sometimes returned them. There was no kind of injustice these fellows hadn’t experienced, and now and then they had given blow for blow. Also there were loose talkers among them, who worked off their feelings by threats of vengeance upon their enemies. Now and then a real criminal came along, and now and then a paid inciter, a Peter Gudge or a Joe Angell. Peter told the worst that he had heard, and all he knew about the arrested men, and Guffey wrote it all down, and then proceeded to build upon it. This fellow Alf Guinness had had a row with a farmer in Wheatland County; there had been a barn burned nearby, and Guffey would furnish an automobile and a couple of detectives to travel with Peter, and they would visit the scene of that fire and the nearby village, and familiarize themselves with the locality, and Peter would testify how he had been with Guinness when he and a half dozen of the defendants had set fire to that barn.

Peter hadn’t intended anything quite so serious as that, but Guffey was so business-like, and took it all so much as a matter of course, that Peter was afraid to show the white feather. After all, this was war-time; hundreds of men were giving up their lives every day in the Argonne, and why shouldn’t Peter take a little risk in order to put out of business his country’s most dangerous enemies?

So Peter and his two detectives blew themselves to a joy ride in the country. And then Peter was brought back and made comfortable in a room on the twelfth floor of the Hotel de Soto, where he diligently studied the typewritten documents which McGivney brought him, and thoroughly learned the story he was to tell. There was always one of Guffey’s men walking up and down in the hallway outside with a gun on his hip, and they brought Peter three meals a day, not forgetting a bottle of beer and a package of cigarettes. Twice a day Peter read in the newspapers about the heroic deeds of our boys over there, and also about the latest bomb plots which had been discovered all over the country, and about various trials under the espionage act.

Also, Peter had the thrill of reading about himself in a real newspaper. Hitherto he had been featured in labor papers, and Socialist papers like the “Clarion,” which did not count; but now the American City “Times” came out with a long story of how the district attorney’s office had “planted” a secret agent with the I. W. W., and how this man, whose name was Peter Gudge, had been working as one of them for the past two years, and was going to reveal the whole story of I. W. W. infamy on the witness stand.

Two days before the trial Peter was escorted by McGivney and another detective to the district attorney’s office, and spent the best part of the day in conference with Mr. Burchard and his deputy, Mr. Stannard, who were to try the case. McGivney had told Peter that the district attorney was not in the secret, he really believed that Peter’s story was all true; but Peter suspected that this was camouflage, to save Mr. Burchard’s face, and to protect him in case Peter ever tried to “throw him down.” Peter noticed that whenever he left any gap in his story, the district attorney and the deputy told him to fill it, and he managed to guess what to fill it with.

Henry Clay Burchard came from the far South, and followed a style of oratory long since gone out of date. He wore his heavy black hair a little long, and when he mounted the platform he would pull out the tremulo stop, stretching out his hands and saying in tones of quivering emotion: “The ladies, God bless them!” Also he would say: “I am a friend of the common man. My heart beats with sympathy for those who constitute the real backbone of America, the toilers of the shop and farm.” And then all the banqueters of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association would applaud, and would send their checks to the campaign fund of this friend of the common man. Mr. Burchard’s deputy, Mr. Stannard, was a legal fox who told his chief what to do and how to do it; a dried-up little man who looked like a bookworm, and sat boring you thru with his keen eyes, watching for your weak points and preparing to pierce you thru with one of his legal rapiers. He would be quite friendly about it--he would joke with you in the noon hour, assuming that you would of course understand it was all in the line of business, and no harm meant.

Section 75

The two men heard Peter’s story and changed it a little, and then heard him over again and pronounced him all right, and Peter went back to his hotel room and waited in trepidation for his hour in the limelight. When they took him to court his knees were shaking, but also he had a thrill of real importance, for they had provided him with a body-guard of four big huskies; also he saw two “bulls” whom he recognized in the hallway outside the court-room, and many others scattered thru the audience. The place was packed with Red sympathizers, but they had all been searched before they were allowed to enter, and were being watched every moment during the trial.

When Peter stepped into the witness box he felt as Tom Duggan and Donald Gordon must have felt that night when the white glare from thirty or forty automobiles was beating upon them. Peter felt the concentrated Red hate of two or three hundred spectators, and now and then their pent-up fury would break restraint; there would be a murmur of protest, or perhaps a wave of sneering laughter, and the bailiff would bang on the table with his wooden mallet, and the judge would half rise from his seat, and declare that if that happened again he would order the court-room cleared.

Not far in front of Peter at a long table sat the seventeen defendants, looking like trapped rats, and every one of their thirty-four rat eyes were fixed upon Peter’s face, and never moved from it. Peter only glanced that way once; they bared their rats’ teeth at him, and he quickly looked in another direction. But there also he saw a face that brought him no comfort; there sat Mrs. Godd, in her immaculate white chiffons, her wide-open blue eyes fixed upon his face, her expression full of grief and reproach. “Oh, Mr. Gudge!” she seemed to be saying. “How can you? Mr. Gudge, is this Peace. . . justice. . . Truth. . . Law?” And Peter realized with a pang that he had cut himself off forever from Mount Olympus, and from the porch chair with the soft silken pillows! He turned away toward the box where sat the twelve jurymen and women. One old lady gave him a benevolent smile, and a young farmer gave him a sly wink, so Peter knew that he had friends in that quarter--and after all, they were the ones who really counted in this trial. Mrs. Godd was as helpless as any “wobbly,” in the presence of this august court.

Peter told his story, and then came his cross-questioning, and who should rise and start the job but David Andrews, suave and humorous and deadly. Peter had always been afraid of Andrews, and now he winced. Nobody had told him he was to face an ordeal like this! Nobody had told him that Andrews would be allowed to question him about every detail of these crimes which he said he had witnessed, and about all the conversations that had taken place, and who else was present, and what else had been said, and how he had come to be there, and what he had done afterwards, and what he had had to eat for breakfast that morning. Only two things saved Peter, first the constant rapid-fire of objections which Stannard kept making, to give Peter time to think; and second, the cyclone-cellar which Stannard had provided for him in advance. “You can always fail to remember,” the deputy had said; “nobody can punish you for forgetting something.” So Peter would repeat the minute details of a conversation in which Alf Guinness had told of burning down the barn, but he didn’t remember who else had heard the conversation, and he didn’t remember what else had been said, nor what was the date of the conversation.

Then came the blessed hour of noon, with a chance for Peter to get fixed up again before the court resumed at two. He was questioned again by Stannard, who patched up all the gaps in his testimony, and then again he failed to remember things, and so avoided the traps which Andrews set for his feet. He was told that he had “done fine,” and was escorted back to the Hotel de Soto in triumph, and there for a week he stayed while the defense made a feeble effort to answer his testimony. Peter read in the papers the long speeches in which the district attorney and the deputy acclaimed him as a patriot, protecting his country from its “enemies within;” also he read a brief reference to the “tirade” of David Andrews, who had called him a “rat” and a “slinking Judas.” Peter didn’t mind that, of course--it was all part of the game, and the calling of names is a pretty sure sign of impotence.

Less easy to accept placidly, however, was something which came to Peter that same day--a letter from Mrs. Godd! It wasn’t written to him, but he saw Hammett and another of the “bulls” chuckling together, and he asked what was the joke, and they told him that Mrs. Godd had somehow found out about Guffey, and had written him a letter full of insults, and Guffey was furious. Peter asked what was in it, and they told him, and later on when he insisted, they brought it and showed it to him, and Peter was furious too. On very expensive stationery with a stately crest at the top, the mother of Mount Olympus had written in a large, bland, girlish hand her opinion of “under cover” men and those who hired them:

“You sit like a big spider and weave a net to catch men and destroy them. You destroy alike your victims and your tools. The poor boy, Peter Gudge, whom you sent to my home--my heart bleeds when I think of him, and what you have put him up to! A wretched, feeble-minded victim of greed, who ought to be sent to a hospital for deformed souls, you have taken him and taught him a piece of villainy to recite, so that he may send a group of sincere idealists to prison.”

That was enough! Peter put down the letter--he would not dignify such stuff by reading it. He realized that he would have to put his mind on the problem of Mrs. Godd once more. One woman like that, in her position of power, was more dangerous than all the seventeen “wobblies” who had been haled before the court. Peter inquired, and learned that Guffey had already been to see Nelse Ackerman about it, and Mr. Ackerman had been to see Mr. Godd, and Mr. Godd had been to see Mrs. Godd. Also the “Times” had an editorial referring to the “nest of Bolshevism” upon Mount Olympus, and all Mrs. Godd’s friends were staying away from her luncheon-parties--so she was being made to suffer for her insolence to Peter Gudge!

“A hospital for deformed souls,” indeed! Peter was so upset that his joy in life was not restored even by the news that the jury had found the defendants guilty on the first ballot. He told McGivney that the strain of this trial had been too much for his nerves, and they must take care of him; so an automobile was provided, and Peter was taken to a secret hiding place in the country to recuperate.

Hammett went with him, and Hammett was a first-class gunman, and Peter stayed close by him; in the evening he stayed up in the second story of the farm-house, lest perchance one of the “wobblies” should take too literally the testimony Peter had given concerning their habit of shooting at their enemies out of the darkness. Peter knew how they all must hate him; he read in the paper how the judge summoned the guilty men before him and sentenced them, incidentally forcing them to listen to a scathing address, which was published in full in the “Times.” The law provided a penalty of from one to fourteen years, and the judge sentenced sixteen of them to fourteen years, and one to ten years, thus tempering justice with mercy.