Carmichael put his tongue into his cheek instead of spitting out an oath; but after Mr. Dround had gone, he growled at me:—
"That's all right for young America, but I am no damn fool, either! My father saw the riots back home in Dublin. It's no good sitting too close on the top of a chimney—maybe you'll set the house on fire. The police? The police are half thieves and all blackguards! They got this up for a benefit party, most likely. Why, didn't they kill more'n twice as many men over at McCormick's only the other day, just because the boys were making a bit of a disturbance? And nobody said anything about it! What are they kicking for, anyway?"
Mr. Dround's view, however, was the one generally held. That very evening there was a meeting of the prominent men of the city to take counsel together how anarchy might be suppressed with a strong hand. We little people heard only rumors of what took place in that gathering, but it leaked out that there had been two minds among those wealthy and powerful men—the timid and the bold. The timid were overridden by the bolder-hearted. Good citizens, like Strauss and Vitzer, so Carmichael told me with a sneer, talked strong about encouraging the district attorney to do his duty, and raised a fund to pay for having justice done.
"It means that some of those rats the police have been ferreting out of the West Side saloons will hang to make them feel right. The swells are bringing pressure to bear, and some one must be punished. It's grand!"
He chuckled bitterly at his own wit. But the swells meant business, and when Henry I. Dround was drawn for the grand jury, to indict those anarchists that the police had already netted, big John swore:—
"He needn't have done that! There are plenty to do the fool things. It's his sense of duty, I s'pose, damn him! It's some of his duty to come over here and help us make enough money to keep his old business afloat!"
The Irishman thought only of the business, but Henry I. Dround was not the man to let any personal interest stand in the way of what he considered his duty to society. Perhaps he was a little too proud of his sacrifices and his civic virtues. Some years later he told me all about that grand jury. All I need say here is that this famous trial of the anarchists was engineered from the beginning by prominent men to go straight.
The hatred and the rage of all kinds of men during those months while the anarchists were on our hands, before they were finally hanged or sent to prison, is hard to understand now at this distance from the event. That bomb in its murderous course had stirred our people to the depths of terror and hate: even easy-going hustlers like myself seemed to look at that time in the face of an awful fate. The pity of it all was—I say it now openly and advisedly—that our one motive was hate. Stamp this thing out! that was the one cry. Few stopped to think of justice, and no one of mercy. We were afraid, and we hated.
Finally it came time for the trial; the venire for the jury was issued. One night, to my consternation, I found a summons at the house. When I showed it to a fellow-clerk at the office the next morning, he whistled:—
"I thought I saw the bailiff in here yesterday, looking around for likely men. They are after a safe jury this time, sure!"