CHAPTER XI
JIMMIE HIGGINS FACES THE WAR
I
The ambulance arrived, and the two attendants who came with it
brought in a stretcher and carried young Granitch away. Jimmie
opened the windows to get rid of the odour of ether, and meantime he
and Lizzie sat for hours discussing every aspect of the dreadful
scene they had witnessed, and speculating as to its meaning. When
Jimmie investigated the roll of bills which had been slipped into
his hand, he found that there were ten of them, new, crisp, and
bright yellow, each having the figure twenty printed upon it. It was
more money than these two humble little people had ever had or
expected to have in all their lives. It was literally blood-money
they felt, but it would be hard to see who would be benefited if
they rejected it. Certainly the deed which had been done that night
could not be undone--not for all the money that old Granitch had
heaped up in his vaults.
Jimmie kept quiet, as he had been bidden, and apparently no one told
about his part in the affair--no reporters came out to his country
home to ask for interviews. But when he went to the cross-roads
store a couple of nights later he found that the storm was all
over--nobody was talking or thinking about anything else. The news,
in fact, had gone by telegraph all over the world, and wherever
people read it they shuddered with horror, and the Socialists had a
choice illustration of the effect of excessive wealth upon morals.
There were half a dozen versions of the story, Jimmie found; some
declared that the outraged husband had caught young Granitch in his
home and had fetched a surgeon there; others that he had taken him
to a hospital; others that the operation had been performed in a
road-house near by. But none mentioned the tenant-house on the farm
of John Cutter, and Jimmie wrapped himself in his pride of superior
knowledge, and let the loungers in the country store chatter on. He
would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old
man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and
sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the
hospital and vanished, no one knew where. And they never knew; never
again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to
break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way! His grim
old father's hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on
to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that
his heart was eaten out with grief and rage and shame.
Jimmie and his wife held numerous confabulations over those
twenty-dollar bills. What should they do with their fortune? The
Worker, always in need of funds, was just now issuing bonds in small
denominations, and Jimmie could not imagine any better financial
investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not
be made to see it. And then his eye was caught by an advertisement
of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it
above suspicion. But again Lizzie blocked the way. She begged her
visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that
half of it belonged to her anyhow--had she not done her part to earn
it? "What part?" Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept
quiet--and what more had he done?
Eleeza Betooser wanted that treasure to insure safety for the
children through whatever troubles might come to their propagandist
father. And finally the propagandist father gave way, and the woman
proceeded to secure the money in the ancient way of her sex. She
took the ten crisp bills and sewed them in a layer of cloth, and
wound the cloth about the ankle of her right leg, and sewed it
there, and put a stocking over it to hide it. And that apparatus
would stay there--day or night, winter or summer, it would never
part from its owner. She would be a walking bank, a bank that she
knew was safe from panic or crisis; the feeling of the two hundred
dollars about her ankle would be communicated to every part of
Lizzie--warming her heart, delighting her brain, and stimulating her
liver and digestion.
