Chapter 37
XII. Peter could see it all very clearly when he came to figure over the thing. He could see what a whooping jackass he had been. He might have known that it was up to him to be careful, at this time of all times, when he was suspected of having rubbed out Donald Gordon's pencil marks.
They had picked out a girl whom Peter had never seen before, and she had come and posed as Miriam's friend, and had proceeded to take Peter by the nose and lead him to the edge of the precipice and shove him over. And now she would be laughing at him, telling all her friends about her triumph, and about Peter's thirty dollars a week that he would never see again.
Peter spent a good part of the night getting up the story that he was to tell McGivney next morning. He wouldn't mention Rosie Stern, of course. He would say that the Reds had trailed him to room 427, and it must be they had a spy in Guffey's office.
Peter repeated the story quite solemnly, and again realized too late that he had made a fool of himself. It wasn't twenty-four hours before every Red in American City knew the true inside story of the unveiling of Peter Gudge as a spy of the Traction Trust. The story occupied a couple of pages in that week's issue of the Clarion, and included
Peter's picture, and an account of the part that Peter had played in various frame-ups. It was nearly all true, and the fact that it was guesswork on Donald Gordon's part did not make it any the better for Peter. Of course McGivney and Guffey and all his men read the story, and knew Peter for the whooping jackass that Peter knew himself.
"'You go and get yourself a job with a pick and shovel,' said McGivney, and Peter sorrowfully took his departure. He had only a few dollars in his pocket, and these did not last very long. Then he had got down to his last nickel and was confronting the wolf of starvation again when McGivney came to his lodging-house room with a new proposition.
There was one job left, and Peter might take it if he thought he could stand the gaffe. It was the job of state's witness. Peter had been all through the Red Movement, he knew all these pacifists and socialists and syndicalists and I.W.W.'s, who were now in jail. In some cases the evidence of the government was far from satisfactory.
So Peter might have his salary back again, if he were willing to take the witness stand and tell what he was told to tell, and if he could manage to sit in a court room without falling in love with some of the lady jurors or some of the lady spies of the defence. These deadly shafts of sarcasm Peter did not even feel, because he was so frightened by the proposition which McGivney put up to him.
To come out into the open and face the blinding glare of the Red Hate, to place himself, the giant, between the smashing fists of the battling giants. Yes, it might seem dangerous, said McGivney, for a cowardly little whelp like himself. But then a good many men have had the nerve to do it, and none of them had died yet. McGivney himself did not pretend to care very much whether Peter did it or not.
He put the matter up to him on Guffey's orders. The job was worth forty dollars a week, and he might take it or leave it. And there sat Peter, with only a nickel and a couple of pennies in his pocket, and the rent for his room two weeks overdue, and his landlady lying in wait in the hallway like an Indian with a tomahawk.
Peter objected, what about all those bad things in his early record, Pericles' Priam and the Temple of Jim Jumbo, which had ruined him as a witness in the Gouber case? McGivney answered dryly that he couldn't let himself out with that excuse. He was invited to pose as a reformed wobbly, and the more crimes and rascalities he had in his record, the more convinced the jury would be that he had been a real wobbly.
Peter asked just when would he be expected to appear, and McGivney answered the very next week. They were trying seventeen of the wobblies on a conspiracy charge, and Peter would be expected to take the stand and tell how he had heard them advocate violence, and heard them boast of having set fire to barns and wheat fields, and how they had put phosphorus
bombs into haystacks, and copper nails into fruit trees, and spikes into sawmill logs, and emery powder into engine bearings. Peter needn't worry about what he would have to say, McGivney would tell him everything, and would see him thoroughly posted, and he would find himself a hero in the newspapers, which would make clear that he had done everything from the very highest possible motives of
100% Americanism, and that no soldier in the war had been performing a more dangerous service. To Peter it seemed they might say that without troubling their conscience very much, but McGivney went on to declare that he needn't be afraid, it was no part of Guffey's program to give the Reds the satisfaction of putting his star witness out of business. Peter would be kept in a safe place, and would always have a bodyguard.
While he was in the city giving his testimony, they would put him up at the Hotel De Soto, and that of course settled it. Here was poor Peter, with only a nickel and two coppers in his pocket, and before him stood a chariot of fire with magic steeds, and all he had to do was to step in and be whirled away to Mount Olympus.
Peter stepped in. Section 74 McGivney took him to Guffey's office, and Guffey wasted no time upon preliminaries, but took to his desk, and took out a long typewritten document, a complete account of what the prosecution meant to prove against the seventeen I.W.W.'s.
First Peter told what he himself had seen and heard, not very much, but a beginning, a hook to hang his story upon. The I.W.W. Hall was the meeting place for the casual and homeless labor of the country, the Bindelstiffs, who took the hardest of the world's hard knocks, and sometimes returned them.
There was no kind of injustice these fellows hadn't experienced, and now and then they had given blow for blow. Also, there were loose talkers among them, who worked off their feelings by threats of vengeance upon their enemies. Now and then a real criminal came along, and now and then a paid insider, a Peter Gudge
or a Joe Angel. Peter told the worst that he had heard, and all he knew about the arrested men, and Guffey wrote it all down, and then proceeded to build upon it. This fellow, Alf Guinness, had had a row with a farmer in Wheatland County. There had been a barn burned nearby, and Guffey would furnish an automobile and a couple of
detectives to travel with Peter, and they would visit the scene of that fire in the nearby village, and familiarize themselves with the locality, and Peter would testify how he had been with Guinness when he and a half dozen of the defendants had set fire to that barn. Peter hadn't intended anything quite so serious as that, but Guffey was so business-like,
and took it all so much as a matter of course, that Peter was afraid to show the white feather. After all, this was wartime, hundreds of men were giving up their lives every day in the Argonne, and why shouldn't Peter take a little risk, in order to put out of business his country's most dangerous enemies. So Peter and his two detectives blew themselves to a joyride in the country, and then Peter
was brought back, and made comfortable in a room on the twelfth floor of the Hotel De Soto, where he diligently studied the typewritten documents which McGivney brought him, and thoroughly learned the story he was to tell. There was always one of Guffey's men walking up and down in the hallway, outside with a gun on his hip, and they brought Peter three meals a day, not forgetting a bottle of beer
and a package of cigarettes. Twice a day Peter read in the newspapers about the heroic deeds of our boys over there, and also about the latest bomb plots which had been discovered all over the country, and about various trials under the Espionage Act. Also, Peter had the thrill of reading about himself in a real newspaper.
Other two, he had been featured in labor papers, and socialist papers like the Clarion, which did not count. But now the American City Times came out with a long story of how the District Attorney's Office had planted a secret agent with the IWW, and how this man, whose name was Peter Gudge, had been working as one of them for the past two years, and was going to reveal
the whole story of IWW infamy on the witness stand. Two days before the trial, Peter was escorted by McGivney and another detective to the District Attorney's Office, and spent the best part of the day in conference with Mr. Burchard and his deputy, Mr. Stannard, who were to try the case. McGivney had told Peter that the District Attorney was not in the secret.
He really believed that Peter's story was all true. But Peter suspected that this was camouflage to save Mr. Burchard's face, and to protect him in case Peter ever tried to throw him down. Peter noticed that whenever he left any gap in his story, the District Attorney and the deputy told him to fill it, and he managed to guess what to fill it with.
Henry Clay Burchard came from the far south, and followed a style of oratory long since gone out of date. He wore his heavy black hair a little long, and when he mounted the platform he would pull out the tremulo stop, stretching out his hands and saying in tones of quivering emotion,
The ladies, God bless them! Also, he would say, I am a friend of the common man. My heart beats with sympathy for those who constitute the real backbone of America, the toilers of the shop and farm.
And then all the banqueters of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association would applaud, and would send their checks to the campaign fund of this friend of the common man. Mr. Burchard's deputy, Mr. Stanard, was a legal fox who told his chief what to do and how to do it.
A dried up little man who looked like a bookworm, and sat boring you through with his keen eyes, watching for your weak points and preparing to pierce you through with one of his legal rapiers. He would be quite friendly about it. He would joke with you in the noon hour, assuming that you would of course understand it was
all in the line of business, and no harm meant.
