A Poor Wise Man

  CHAPTER XLVII

  It was dark when Howard Cardew and Willy Cameron left the hospital.Elinor's information had been detailed and exact. Under cover of thegeneral strike the radical element intended to take over the city.On the evening of the first day of the strike, armed groups from therevolutionary party would proceed first to the municipal light plant,and, having driven out any employees who remained at their posts,or such volunteers as had replaced them, would plunge the city intodarkness.

  Elinor was convinced that following this would come various bomboutrages, perhaps a great number of them, but of this she had nodetailed information. What she did know, however, was the dependencethat Doyle and the other leaders were placing in the foreign elementin the nearby mill towns and from one or two mining districts in thecounty.

  Around the city, in the mill towns, there were more than forty thousandforeign laborers. Subtract from that the loyal aliens, but add a certainpercentage of the native-born element, members of seditious societiesand followers of the red flag, and the Reds had a potential army ofdangerous size.

  As an actual fighting force they were much less impressive. Only a smallpercentage, she knew and told them, were adequately armed. There werea few machine guns, and some long-range rifles, but by far the greaternumber had only revolvers. The remainder had extemporized weapons, barsof iron, pieces of pipe, farm implements, lances of wood tipped withiron and beaten out on home forges.

  They were a rabble, not an army, without organization and with fewleaders. Their fighting was certain to be as individualistic as theirdoctrines. They had two elements in their favor only, numbers andsurprise.

  To oppose them, if the worst came, there were perhaps five thousandarmed men, including the city and county police, the state constabulary,and the citizens who had signed the cards of the Vigilance Committee.The local post of the American Legion stood ready for instant service,and a few national guard troops still remained in the vicinity. "Whatthey expect," she said, looking up from her pillows with tragic eyes,"is that the police and the troops will join them. You don't think theywill, do you?"

  They reassured her, and after a time she slept again. When she wakened,at midnight, the room was empty save for a nurse reading under a nightlamp behind a screen. Elinor was not in pain. She lay there, listeningto the night sounds of the hospital, the watchman shuffling along thecorridor in slippers, the closing of a window, the wail of a newborninfant far away.

  There was a shuffling of feet in the street below, the sound of manymen, not marching but grimly walking, bent on some unknown errand. Thenurse opened the window and looked out.

  "That's queer!" she said. "About thirty men, and not saying a word. Theywalk like soldiers, but they're not in uniform."

  Elinor pondered that, but it was not for some days that she knew thatPink Denslow and a picked number of volunteers from the American Legionhad that night, quite silently and unemotionally, broken into theprinting office where Doyle and Akers had met Cusick, and had, not sosilently but still unemotionally, destroyed the presses and about a tonof inflammatory pamphlets.