§ 81
Peter Gudge often went along on these hunting parties. Peter,
curiously enough, discovered in himself the same "complex" as the balked
soldier boys. Peter had been reading war news for five years, but had
missed the fighting; and now he discovered that he liked to fight. What
had kept him from liking to fight in the past was the danger of getting
hurt; but now that there was no such danger, he could enjoy it. In past
times people had called him a coward, and he had heard it so often that
he had come to believe it; but now he realized that it was not true, he
was just as brave as anybody else in the crowd.
The truth was that Peter had not had a happy time in his youth,
he had never learned, like the younger members of the Chamber of
Commerce and the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association, to knock a
little white ball about a field with various shapes and sizes of clubs.
Peter was like a business man who has missed his boyhood, and then in
later years finds the need of recreation, and takes up some form of
sport by the orders of his physician. It became Peter's, form of sport
to stick an automatic revolver in his hip-pocket, and take a blackjack
in his hand, and rush into a room where thirty or forty Russians or
"Sheenies" of all ages and lengths of beard were struggling to learn the
intricacies of English spelling. Peter would give a yell, and see this
crowd leap and scurry hither and thither, and chase them about and take
a whack at a head wherever he saw one, and jump into a crowd who were
bunched together like sheep, trying to hide their heads, and pound them
over the exposed parts of their anatomy until they scattered into the
open again. He liked to get a lot of them started downstairs and send
them tumbling heels over head;
or if he could get them going out a window, that was more exhilarating
yet, and he would yell and whoop at them. He learned some of their
cries — outlandish gibberish it was — and he would curse them in their own
language. He had a streak of the monkey in him, and as he got to know
these people better he would imitate their antics and their gestures of
horror, and set a whole room full of the "bulls" laughing to split their
sides. There was a famous "movie" comedian with big feet, and Peter
would imitate this man, and waddle up to some wretched sweat-shop worker
and boot him in the trousers' seat, or step on his toes, or maybe spit
in his eye. So he became extremely popular among the "bulls," and they
would insist on his going everywhere with them.
Later on, when the government set to work to break up the
Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, Peter's popularity and
prestige increased still more. For now, instead of just raiding and
smashing, the police and detectives would round up the prisoners and
arrest them by hundreds, and carry them off and put them thru
"examinations." And Peter was always needed for this; his special
knowledge 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.
