CHAPTER XXVI. JIMMIE HIGGINS DISCOVERS HIS SOUL
I.
Jimmie went to supper in the mess-hall; but the piles of steaming hot food choked him—he was thinking of the half-starved little Jew. The thirty pieces of silver in the pocket of his army jacket burned each a separate hole. Like the Judas of old, he wanted to hang himself, and he took a quick method of doing it.
Next to him at the table sat a motor-cyclist who had been a union plumber before the war, and had agreed with Jimmie that working-men were going to get their jobs back or would make the politicians sweat for it. On the way out from the meal, Jimmie edged this fellow off and remarked, “Say, I've got somethin' interestin'.”
Now interesting things were rare here under the Arctic Circle. “What's that?” asked the plumber.
“I was walkin' on the street,” said Jimmie, “an' I seen a printed paper in the gutter. It's a copy of the proclamation the Bolsheviki have made to the German soldiers, an' that they're givin' out in the German trenches.”
“By heck!” said the plumber. “What's in it?”
“Why, it calls on them to rise against the Kaiser—to do what the Russians have done.”
“Can you read German?” asked the other.
“Naw,” said Jimmie. “This is in English.”