Frank had never known physical conflict more violent than boyhood wrestling. His hand shook. He tried to sound defiant with: “They can’t scare me!”
His telephone, and a voice: “This Shallard? Well this is a brother preacher speaking. Name don’t matter. I just want to tip you off that you’d better not speak tonight. Some of the boys are pretty rough.”
Then Frank began to know the joy of anger.
The hall of his lecture was half filled when he looked across the ice-water pitcher on the speaker’s table. At the front were the provincial intellectuals, most of them very eager, most of them dreadfully poor: a Jewish girl librarian with hungry eyes, a crippled tailor, a spectacled doctor sympathetic to radical disturbances but too good a surgeon to be driven out of town. There was a waste of empty seats, then, and at the back a group of solid, prosperous, scowling burghers, with a leonine man who was either an actor, a congressman, or a popular clergyman.
This respectable group grumbled softly, and hissed a little as Frank nervously began.
America, he said, in its laughter at the “monkey trial” at Dayton, did not understand the veritable menace of the Fundamentalists’ crusade. (“Outrageous!” from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches. We might live to see men burned to death for refusing to attend Protestant churches.
Frank quoted the Fundamentalist who asserted that evolutionists were literally murderers, because they killed orthodox faith, and ought therefore to be lynched; William Jennings Bryan, with his proposal that any American who took a drink outside the country should be exiled for life.
“That’s how these men speak, with so little power—as yet!” Frank pleaded. “Use your imaginations! Think how they would rule this nation, and compel the more easygoing half-liberal clergy to work with them, if they had the power!”
There were constant grunts of “That’s a lie!” and “They ought to shut him up!” from the back, and now Frank saw marching into the hall a dozen tough young men. They stood ready for action, looking expectantly toward the line of prosperous Christian Citizens.
“And you have here in your own city,” Frank continued, “a minister of the gospel who enjoys bellowing that anyone who disagrees with him is a Judas.”
“That’s enough!” cried someone at the back, and the young toughs galloped down the aisle toward Frank, their eyes hot with cruelty, teeth like a fighting dog’s, hands working—he could feel them at his neck. They were met and held a moment by the sympathizers in front. Frank saw the crippled tailor knocked down by a man who stepped on the body as he charged on.
With a curious lassitude more than with any fear, Frank sighed, “Hang it, I’ve got to join the fight and get killed!”
He started down from the platform.
The chairman seized his shoulder. “No! Don’t! You’ll get beaten to death! We need you! Come here—come here! This back door!”
Frank was thrust through a door into a half-lighted alley.
A motor was waiting, and by it two men, one of whom cried, “Right in here, Brother.”
It was a large sedan; it seemed security, life. But as Frank started to climb in he noted the man at the wheel, then looked closer at the others. The man at the wheel had no lips but only a bitter dry line across his face—the mouth of an executioner. Of the other two, one was like an unreformed bartender, with curly mustache and a barber’s lock; one was gaunt, with insane eyes.
“Who are you fellows?” he demanded.
“Shut your damned trap and get t’ hell in there!” shrieked the bartender, pushing Frank into the back of the car, so that he fell with his head on the cushion.
The insane man scrambled in, and the car was off.
“We told you to get out of town. We gave you your chance. By God, you’ll learn something now, you God damned atheist—and probably a damn’ socialist or I.W.W. too!” the seeming bartender said. “See this gun?” He stuck it into Frank’s side, most painfully. “We may decide to let you live if you keep your mouth shut and do what we tell you to—and again we may not. You’re going to have a nice ride with us! Just think what fun you’re going to have when we get you in the country—alone—where it’s nice and dark and quiet!”
He placidly lifted his hands and gouged Frank’s cheek with his strong fingernails.
“I won’t stand it!” screamed Frank.
He rose, struggling. He felt the gaunt fanatic’s fingers—just two fingers, demon-strong—close on his neck, dig in with pain that made him sick. He felt the bartender’s fist smashing his jaw. As he slumped down, limp against the forward seat, half-fainting, he heard the bartender chuckle:
“That’ll give the blank, blank, blank of a blank some idea of the fun we’ll have watching him squirm bimeby!”
The gaunt one snapped, “The boss said not to cuss.”
“Cuss, hell! I don’t pretend to be any tin angel. I’ve done a lot of tough things. But, by God, when a fellow pretending to be a minister comes sneaking around trying to make fun of the Christian religion—the only chance us poor devils have got to become decent again—then, by God, it’s time to show we’ve got some guts and appreciation!”
The pseudo-bartender spoke with the smugly joyous tones of any crusader given a chance to be fiendish for a moral reason, and placidly raising his leg, he brought his heel down on Frank’s instep.
When the cloud of pain had cleared from his head, Frank sat rigid. … What would Bess and the kids do if these men killed him? … Would they beat him much before he died?
The car left the highway, followed a country road and ran along a lane, through what seemed to Frank to be
