“Think you’re going too far, Elmer,” he said. “If you really antagonize any of the big wholesale bootleggers, they’ll get us financially, and if you hit any of the tough ones, they’re likely to bump you off. Darn’ dangerous.”
“I know. I’m just going to pick out some of the smaller fellows that make their own booze and haven’t got any police protection except slipping five or ten to the cop on the beat. The newspapers will make ’em out regular homicidal gangsters, to get a good story, and we’ll have the credit without being foolish and taking risks.”
V
At least a thousand people were trying to get near the Central Police Station on the evening when a dozen armed policemen marched down the steps of the station-house and stood at attention, looking up at the door, awaiting their leader.
He came out, the great Reverend Mr. Gantry, and stood posing on the steps, while the policemen saluted, the crowd cheered or sneered, and the press cameras went off in a fury of flashlight powder. He wore the gilt-encircled cap of a police lieutenant, with a lugubrious frock coat and black trousers, and under his arm he carried a Bible.
Two patrol wagons clanged away, and all the women in the crowd, except certain professional ladies, who were grievously profane, gasped their admiration of this modern Savonarola.
He had promised the mob at least one real house of prostitution.
VI
There were two amiable young females who, tired of working in a rather nasty bread factory and of being unremuneratively seduced by the large, pale, puffy bakers on Sunday afternoons, had found it easier and much jollier to set up a small flat in a street near Elmer’s church. They were fond of reading the magazines and dancing to the phonograph and of going to church—usually Elmer’s church. If their relations to their gentlemen friends were more comforting than a preacher could expect, after his experience of the sacred and chilly state of matrimony, they entertained only a few of these friends, often they darned their socks, and almost always they praised Elmer’s oratory.
One of the girls, this evening, was discoursing with a man who was later proved in court not to be her husband; the other was in the kitchen, making a birthday-cake for her niece and humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” She was dazed by a rumbling, a clanging, a shouting in the street below, then mob-sounds on the stairs. She fluttered into the living-room, to see their pretty imitation mahogany door smashed in with a rifle butt.