They endorsed and participated in brutalities, cowardly cruelties at which in their saner moments they could only shudder in horror. But they made Jared Thurston chairman of the publicity committee and the Times, morning after morning, fanned the passions of the people higher and higher. “Skin the Rats,” was the caption of his editorial the morning after a young fellow was tarred and feathered and beaten until he lost consciousness and was left in the highway. The editorial under this heading declared that anarchy had lifted its hydra head; that Grant Adams preaching peace in the Valley was preparing to let in the jungle, and that the bums who were flooding the city jail were Adams’s tools, who soon would begin dynamiting and burning the town, when it suited his purpose, while his holier-than-thou dupes in the Valley were conducting their goody-goody strike.
Plots of dynamiting were discovered. Hardly a day passed for nearly a week that the big black headlines of the Times did not tell of dynamite found in obviously conspicuous places–in the court house, in the Sands opera house, in the schoolhouses, in the city hall. So Harvey grew class conscious, property conscious, and the town went stark mad. 581 It was the gibbering fear of those who make property of privilege, and privilege of property, afraid of losing both.
But for a week and a day the motive power of the strike was Grant Adams’s indomitable will. Hour after hour, day after day he paced his iron floor, and dreamed his dream of the conquest of the world through fellowship. And by the power of his faith and by the example of his imprisonment for his faith, he held his comrades in the gardens, kept the strikers on the picket lines and sustained the courage of the delegates in Belgian Hall, who met inside a wall of blue-coated policemen. The mind of the Valley had reached a place where sympathy for Grant Adams and devotion to him, imprisoned as their leader, was stronger than his influence would have been outside. So during the week and a day, the waves of hate and the winds of adverse circumstance beat upon the house of faith, which he had builded slowly through other years in the Valley, and it stood unshaken.
582CHAPTER XLIX
HOW MORTY SANDS TURNED AWAY SADLY AND JUDGE VAN DORN UNCOVERED A SECRET
Grant Adams sat in his cell, with the jail smell of stone and iron and damp in his nostrils. As he read the copy of Tolstoy’s “The Resurrection,” which his cell-mate had left in his hurried departure the night before, Grant moved unconsciously to get into the thin direct rays of the only sunlight–the early morning sunlight, that fell into his cage during the long summer day. The morning Times lay on the floor where Grant had dropped it after reading the account of what had happened to his cell-mate when the police had turned him over to the Law and Order League, at midnight. To be sure, the account made a great hero of John Kollander and praised the patriotism of the mob that had tortured the poor fellow. But the fact of his torture, the fact that he had been tarred and feathered, and turned out naked on the golf links of the country club, was heralded by the Times as a warning to others who came to Harvey to preach Socialism, and flaunt the red flag. Grant felt that the jailer’s kindness in giving him the morning paper so early in the day, was probably inspired by a desire to frighten him rather than to inform him of the night’s events.
Gradually he felt the last warmth of the morning sun creep away and he heard a new step beside the jailer’s velvet footfall in the corridor, and heard the jailer fumbling with his keys and heard him say: “That’s the Adams cell there in the corner,” and an instant later Morty Sands stood at the door, and the jailer let him in as Grant said:
“Well, Morty–come right in and make yourself at home.”
He was not the dashing young blade who for thirty years had been the Beau Brummel of George Brotherton’s establishment; 583but a rather weazened little man whose mind illumined a face that still clung to sportive youth, while premature age was claiming his body.
He cleared his throat as he sat on the bunk, and after dropping Grant’s hand and glancing at the book title, said: “Great, isn’t it? Where’d you get it?”