“Great fun! Bravo, Errico! A trial for the robber of the poor!”
The surge of the crowd did not move Hera from where she stood—backward against the wall. She saw them lay hold of Tarsis, wrench the paper-cutting toy from his grasp, and, lifting him bodily, carry him through the jeering, laughing herd, and set him upon his cherished Napoleonic table. Then they flocked around with vituperative malice. In an hour of mastery they displayed the worse traits of their class. The women put out their claws and scratched his face, pulled his hair, and spat upon him, and covered him with the vilest epithets of their patois. It was the barbarous culmination of a movement which to Tarsis had always seemed so far away. Red Errico, exercising the function of judge, tweaked the prisoner’s nose and ordered him to sit up and look happy.
La Ferita, her scar glowing hideously, kept crying, “Down with him, I say! Bah for your trial! He killed my child!”
The air was stifling with the smoke of torches. Tarsis coughed and was barely able to hold up his head.
“Why do you persecute me?” he said, his voice faintly audible. “I have never harmed you.”
The few who heard burst into derisive laughter and passed the words along; and the whole pack took them up with such rough comments as they could invent.
“And so, my fine fellow,” was Red Errico’s sneer, “you have never harmed us! Bravissimo! But you are a magnificent liar, signore—magnificent! Now for the trial! Question No. 1: How comes it that you are the possessor of millions, that you live in a grand house, eat the fat of the earth, while we who have worked for you, we who have produced the things that have brought your wealth, are scarcely able to keep body and soul together?”
The others had quieted so much that nearly all could hear the question, and they pressed about their prey, brandishing clinched fists in his face and saying, “Answer that, you thief! Answer that!”
Tarsis seemed too weak to articulate. He moved his hand in signal that he had no answer to make, as he did to other questions put by the judge. Haggardly he shook his head once and avowed that he had not robbed them; that he had given thousands of people work, making it possible for them to earn a living; but a blast of malevolent “Bahs!” was their reply to that defence.
“Yes,” Red Errico said, “you have got all the work out of us you could, and paid us enough to keep us from starvation, so that we might go on piling up the millions for you.”