Then one day the steamer brought a telegram signed Annabelle, addressed to Bunny, and reading, “Spring lamb for dinner come on home.” He explained what that meant, the strike was over; and so the occupants of the camp packed up, and Mr. Appleton Laurence went back to his fair Harvard, with woe in his heart and a packet of immortal sonnets in his suitcase, while Vee Tracy and Dad and Bunny and the secretary made themselves luxurious in compartments on a Canadian-Pacific train bound West.
XVI
The Killing
I
Bunny passed his examinations, and was duly established as a “grave old senior” in Southern Pacific University. And then he hunted up his friends—and such a load of troubles as fell onto his shoulders! Literally everybody had troubles! Rachel and Jacob Menzies had come back from their summer’s fruit-picking, to find their two younger brothers, the “left wingers,” in the county jail! The police had raided a Communist meeting and arrested all the speakers, and the organizers, and the literature sellers, and all who had red badges in their buttonholes. They had raided the Communist headquarters—determined, so the newspapers announced, to root every Moscow agent out of the city. They had sorted the prisoners, and fined a few, and were holding the rest, including the Menzies boys, under that convenient universal charge, “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.”
These foolish boys had made their own trouble, said Rachel; but still it was an outrage to arrest people for their beliefs; and it was tormenting to think of your own flesh and blood shut up in those horrible cages. Bunny asked the bail—it was two thousand dollars per brother. He began explaining his troubles with his father, and his own impotence; and Rachel said of course, she understood, they couldn’t expect him to bail out the whole radical movement. And yet that did not entirely restore his peace of mind.
Then Harry Seager, whose business college was on the rocks. The boycott had wrecked it, and Harry was trying to sell the debris. He was going to buy him a walnut ranch; it would be harder to boycott walnuts, you couldn’t tell the “red” ones from the “white”!
And then Dan Irving, whose labor college was in almost as bad a way. The orgy of arrests had frightened the old line labor leaders completely off. The college was still going, but it was in debt, and the head of it hadn’t had any salary for several months. Bunny wrote a check for two hundred dollars, and went away debating the question that never would be settled—to what extent had he a right to plunder his father for the benefit of his father’s enemies?
From Dan Irving he learned that Paul had got out of jail, and was in Angel City, together with Ruth. It was a dirty deal the oil workers had got, said Dan; the operators had made one last use of the oil board, to trick the men into a complete surrender. They had promised the oil board there would be no discrimination against union men, but they had never had the least intention of keeping this promise. They had kept all the strikebreakers at work, and taken back just enough of the strikers to make up their needs. All the active union fellows were begging jobs, and the oil industry was a slave-yard of the “open shop.”
II
Bunny went at once to call on Paul and Ruth at the address which Dan Irving gave him. It was a mean and dingy lodging-house, in a part of the city given up to Mexicans and Chinese. An old woman sent him up to the second floor, and told him which door to knock on, but he got no response. He came back later, and found that Ruth had just got in. They were crowded into one little room, with a gas plate and a sink in an unventilated alcove, and another alcove with a curtain before it, and a cot on which Paul slept. Ruth was ashamed to have Bunny see them in such a place, but explained that it wouldn’t be long, just till Paul got a job; he was out looking for one now. She herself had got work in a department-store, and as soon as they could get ahead, she was going to study trained nursing. She looked pale and worn, but smiled bravely; she didn’t really mind anything, so long as Paul was out of jail.
Bunny wanted to know all the news, and plied Ruth with questions. Just what had Paul done to get arrested? The first time, Ruth said, the sheriff had raided the Rascum cabin, with a lot of rough, hateful men, who had torn everything to pieces and carried off all of Paul’s books and papers—they had them still. They had done the same thing to all the other fellows that used to come to the cabin—they were going to prove them “reds,” but what evidence they had or claimed to have was a secret the sheriff or the district attorney or whoever it was was keeping to himself. They had had a lot of spies on the bunch—one fellow was known to be a spy, and two others had disappeared, and would no doubt turn up as witnesses—but who could tell what they would testify? All the other boys were still
