Despite all the police could do to help their friends close up for a time, it was necessary for them to arrest ten or fifteen of the hundred-odd criminals whom Elmer named. But the chief of police triumphed by announcing that it was impossible to find any of the others.
“All right,” Elmer murmured to the chief, in the gentleness of a boxed newspaper interview in boldface type, “if you’ll make me a temporary lieutenant of police and give me a squad, I’ll find and close five dives in one evening—any evening save Sunday.”
“I’ll do it—and you can make your raids tomorrow,” said the chief, in the official dignity of headlines.
Mr. Rigg was a little alarmed.
“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.
Into the room crowded a dozen grinning policemen, followed, to her modest shame, by her adored family prophet, the Reverend Gantry. But it was not the cheerful, laughing Mr. Gantry that she knew. He held out his arm in a horrible gesture of holiness, and bawled, “Scarlet woman! Thy sins be upon thy head! No longer are you going to get away with leading poor unfortunate young men into the sink and cesspool of iniquity! Sergeant! Draw your revolver! These women are known to be up to every trick!”
“All right, sure, loot!” giggled the brick-faced police sergeant.
“Oh, rats! This girl looks as dangerous as a goldfish, Gantry,” remarked Bill Kingdom, of the Advocate-Times … he who was two hours later to do an epic of the heroism of the Great Crusader.
“Let’s see what the other girl’s up to,” snickered one of the policemen.
They all laughed very much as they looked into the bedroom, where a half-dressed girl and a man shrank by the window, their faces sick with shame.
It was with her—ignoring Bill Kingdom’s mutters of “Oh, drop it! Pick on somebody your size!”—that Elmer the vice-slayer became really Biblical.
Only the insistence of Bill Kingdom kept Lieutenant Gantry from making his men load the erring one into the patrol wagon in her chemise.
Then Elmer led them to a secret den where, it was securely reported, men were ruining their bodies and souls by guzzling the devil’s brew of alcohol.
VII
Mr. Oscar Hochlauf had been a saloon-keeper in the days before prohibition, but when prohibition came, he was a saloon-keeper. A very sound, old-fashioned, drowsy, agreeable resort was Oscar’s Place; none of the grander public houses had more artistic soap scrawls on the mirror behind the bar; none had spicier pickled herring.
Tonight there were three men before the bar: Emil Fischer, the carpenter, who had a mustache like an earmuff; his son Ben, whom Emil was training to drink wholesome beer instead of the whisky and gin which America was forcing on the people; and old Daddy Sorenson, the Swedish tailor.
They were discussing jazz.
“I came to America for liberty—I think Ben’s son will go back to Germany for liberty,” said Emil. “When I was a young man here, four of us used to play every Saturday evening—Bach we played, and Brahms—Gott weiss we played terrible, but we liked it, and we never made others listen. Now, wherever you go, this jazz, like a St. Vitus’s. Jazz iss to music what this Reverend Gantry you read about is to an old-time
