CHAPTER XIII
JIMMIE HIGGINS DODGES TROUBLE
I
War or no war, the soil had to be ploughed and seed sown; so John
Cutter came to his tenant and proposed that he should resume his job
as farm-hand. Only he must agree to shut up about the war, for while
Cutter himself was not a rabid patriot, he would take no chances of
having his tenant-house burned down some night. So there was another
discussion in the Higgins family. Lizzie remembered how, during the
previous summer, Jimmie had worked from dawn till dark, and been too
tired even to read Socialist papers, to say nothing of carrying on
propaganda; which seemed to the distracted wife of a propagandist
the most desirable condition possible! Poor Eleeza Betooser--twice
again she had been compelled to take down the stocking from her
right leg, and unsew the bandage round her ankle, and extract
another of those precious yellow twenty-dollar bills; there were
only seven of them left now, and each of them was more valuable to
Lizzie than her eye-teeth.
Jimmie finally agreed that he would gag himself, so far as concerned
this country-side. What was the use of trying to teach anything to
these barnyard fools? They wanted war, let them go to war, and be
blown to bits, or poisoned in the trenches! If Jimmie had
propaganding to do, he would do it in the city, where the
working-men had brains, and knew who their enemies were. So once
more Jimmie harnessed up John Cutter's horses to the plough, and
went out into John Cutter's field to raise another crop of corn for
a man whom he hated. All day he guided the plough or the harrow, and
at night he fed and cared for the horses and the cows, and then he
came home and ate his supper, listening to the rattling of the long
freight-train that went through his backyard, carrying materials for
the making of TNT.
For the great explosives plant was now working day and night,
keeping the war in Jimmie's thoughts all the time, whether he would
or not. In the midnight hours the trains of finished materials went
out, making Jimmie's windows rattle with their rumble and clatter,
and bearing his fancies away to the battle-line across the seas,
where men were soon to be blown to pieces with the contents of these
cars. One night something went wrong on the track, and the train
stopped in his backyard, and in the morning he saw the cars, painted
black, with the word "danger" in flaming red letters. On top of the
cars walked a man with a club in his hand and a bulge on his hip,
keeping guard.
It appeared that someone had torn up a rail in the night, evidently
for the purpose of wrecking the train; so there came a detective to
Jimmie, while he was working in the field, to cross-question him.
They had Jimmie's record, and suspected him of knowing more than he
would tell. "Aw, go to hell!" exclaimed the irate Socialist. "D'you
suppose, if I'd wanted to smash anything, I'd done it on the place
where I work?" And then, when he went home to dinner, he found that
they had been after Lizzie, and had frightened her out of her wits.
They had threatened to turn them out of their home; Jimmie saw
himself hounded here and there by this accursed war--until it
finished by seizing him and dragging him to the trenches!
