V
He had been warned not to talk to anyone, so he told Lizzie that he
had been kept late to make repairs on a motor-cycle. And next
morning he got up at the usual hour, to avoid exciting suspicion,
and went and stared at the shop, which was locked up, with a
policeman on guard. He bought a copy of the Leesville Herald, and
read the thrilling story of the German plot which had been unearthed
in Leesville. There were half a dozen conspirators under arrest, and
more than a dozen bombs had been found, all destined to be set off
in the Empire Shops. Franz Heinrich von Holtz, who had blown up a
bridge in Canada and put an infernal machine on board a big Atlantic
liner, had been nailed at last!
Half an hour before time, Jimmie was waiting at the Post Office
building, and when Comrade Dr. Service arrived, they went in and
signed the bond. Coming out again, the grim and forbidding doctor
ordered Jimmie into his car, and oh, what a dressing-down he did
give him! He had Jimmie where he wanted him--right over his
knees--and before he let him up he surely did make him burn! The
little machinist had been so cock-sure of himself; going ahead to
end the war, by stopping the shipping of munitions, and paying no
heed to warnings from men older and wiser than himself! And now see
what he had got himself in for--arrested with a gang of fire-bugs
and desperadoes, under the control and in the pay of a personal
friend of the Kaiser!
Poor Jimmie couldn't put up much of a defence: he was cowed, for
once. He could only say that he had had no evil intention--he had
merely been agitating against the trade in munitions--a wicked
thing--
"Wicked?" broke in the Comrade Doctor. "The thing upon which the
freedom of mankind depends!"
"W--what?" exclaimed Jimmie; for these words sounded to him like
sheer lunacy.
The other explained. "A nation that means to destroy its neighbours
sets to work and puts all its energies into making guns and shells.
The free peoples of the world won't follow suit--you can't persuade
them to do it, because they don't believe in war, they can't realize
that their neighbours intend to make war. So, when they are attacked
their only chance for life is to go out into the open market and buy
the means of defence. And you propose to deprive them of that
right--to betray them, to throw them under the hoofs of the
war-monster! You, who call yourself a believer in justice, make
yourself a tool of such a conspiracy! You take German money--"
"I never took no German money!" cried Jimmie, wildly.
"Didn't Kumme pay you money?"
"But I worked in his shop--I done my ten hours a day right
straight!"
"And this fellow Jerry Coleman? Hasn't he given you money?"
"But that was for propaganda--he was agent for Labour's National
Peace Council--"
And the Comrade Doctor fairly snorted. "How could you be such an
ass? Don't you read the news? But no--of course, you don't--you
only read German dope!" And the Comrade Doctor drew out his
pocket-book, which was bursting with clippings, and selected one
from a New York paper, telling how the government was proceeding
against the officials of an organization called "Labour's National
Peace Council" for conspiring to cause strikes and violence. The
founder of the organization was a person known as "the Wolf of Wall
Street"; the funds had been furnished by a Prussian army officer, an
attache of the German legation, who had used his official immunity
to incite conspiracy and wholesale destruction of property in a
friendly country. What had Jimmie to say to that?
And poor Jimmie for once had nothing to say. He sat, completely
crushed. Not merely the money which he had got from Kumme on
Saturday night, but also the ten-dollar bills which Jerry Coleman
had been slipping into his hand--they, too, had come from the
Kaiser! Was the whole radical movement to be taken over by the
Kaiser, and Jimmie Higgins put out of his job?
