“Well, s’pose you’d ’a’ seen—s’pose you could see, you know, Bennie—an’ s’pose you’d ’a’ seen Jack Rennie set fire to that breaker; would you tell on him?”
“Yes, I would,” said Bennie, resolutely, “if I thought he’d never get punished for it ’less I did tell on him.”
“Well, don’t you think,” continued Tom, reflectively, “’at that’d be sidin’ with the wealthy clapitulist, against the poor laborer, who ain’t got no other way to get even justice for himself, except to make the rich corpurations afraid of him, that way?”
Tom was using Pleadwell’s argument, not because he believed in it himself, but simply to see how Bennie would meet it.
Bennie met it by saying,—
“Well, I don’t care; I don’t b’lieve it’s ever right to burn up any thing ’at belongs to anybody else; an’ if I saw any one a-doin’ it, I’d tell on him if”—Bennie hesitated a moment, and Tom looked up eagerly—“if I wasn’t afraid o’ the Molly Maguires. Jack Rennie’s a Molly, you know.”
“But wouldn’t you be afraid of ’em? s’pose one of ’em should come to you an’ say, ‘Ben Taylor, if you tell on Jack, we’ll put out your’—I mean ‘cut off your tongue.’ What’d you do?”
Bennie thought a moment.
“Well, I b’lieve I’d tell on him, anyway; an’ then I’d get a pistol, an’ I wouldn’t let no Molly get nearer to me’n the muzzle of it.”
In spite of his great anxiety, Tom laughed at the picture of weak, blind little Bennie holding a crowd of outlaws at bay, with a cocked revolver in his hand. But he felt that he was not getting at the real question very fast, so he tried again.