“Talk? Sure they'll talk. They say they're employed by the Myers Housecleaning Company, that they never saw the inside of the vault, and they're squealing louder than two pigs under a gate about false arrest. They'll have to let them go, son. Here. You can do most everything. Can you read Croatian? No? Well, here's something in English to cut your wisdom teeth on. Overthrowing the government is where these fellows start.”
It was intelligent, that propaganda. Willy Cameron thought he saw behind it Jim Doyle and other men like Doyle, men who knew the discontents of the world, and would fatten by them; men who, secretly envious of the upper classes and unable to attain to them, would pull all men to their own level, or lower. Men who cloaked their own jealousies with the garb of idealism. Intelligent it was, dangerous, and imminent.
The pamphlets spoke of “the day.” It was a Prussian phrase. The revolution was Prussian. And like the Germans, they offered loot as a reward. They appealed to the ugliest passions in the world, to lust and greed and idleness.
At a signal the mass was to arise, overthrow its masters and rule itself.
Mr. Hendricks stood in the doorway of the pharmacy and stared out at the city he loved.
“Just how far does that sort of stuff go, Cameron?” he asked. “Will our people take it up? Is the American nation going crazy?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Willy Cameron stoutly. “They're about as able to overthrow the government as you are to shove over the Saint Elmo Hotel.”
“I could do that, with a bomb.”
“No, you couldn't. But you could make a fairly sizeable hole in it. It's the hole we don't want.”
Mr. Hendricks went away, vaguely comforted.