§ 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.
