by Jack London
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA
Of myself, during this period, there is not much to say. For six monthsI was kept in prison, though charged with no crime. I was a suspect--aword of fear that all revolutionists were soon to come to know. Butour own nascent secret service was beginning to work. By the end ofmy second month in prison, one of the jailers made himself known asa revolutionist in touch with the organization. Several weeks later,Joseph Parkhurst, the prison doctor who had just been appointed, provedhimself to be a member of one of the Fighting Groups.
Thus, throughout the organization of the Oligarchy, our ownorganization, weblike and spidery, was insinuating itself. And so Iwas kept in touch with all that was happening in the world without. Andfurthermore, every one of our imprisoned leaders was in contact withbrave comrades who masqueraded in the livery of the Iron Heel. ThoughErnest lay in prison three thousand miles away, on the Pacific Coast, Iwas in unbroken communication with him, and our letters passed regularlyback and forth.
The leaders, in prison and out, were able to discuss and direct thecampaign. It would have been possible, within a few months, to haveeffected the escape of some of them; but since imprisonment provedno bar to our activities, it was decided to avoid anything premature.Fifty-two Congressmen were in prison, and fully three hundred moreof our leaders. It was planned that they should be deliveredsimultaneously. If part of them escaped, the vigilance of the oligarchsmight be aroused so as to prevent the escape of the remainder. On theother hand, it was held that a simultaneous jail-delivery all over theland would have immense psychological influence on the proletariat. Itwould show our strength and give confidence.
So it was arranged, when I was released at the end of six months, thatI was to disappear and prepare a secure hiding-place for Ernest. Todisappear was in itself no easy thing. No sooner did I get my freedomthan my footsteps began to be dogged by the spies of the Iron Heel.It was necessary that they should be thrown off the track, and thatI should win to California. It is laughable, the way this wasaccomplished.
Already the passport system, modelled on the Russian, was developing. Idared not cross the continent in my own character. It was necessary thatI should be completely lost if ever I was to see Ernest again, for bytrailing me after he escaped, he would be caught once more. Again, Icould not disguise myself as a proletarian and travel. There remainedthe disguise of a member of the Oligarchy. While the arch-oligarchs wereno more than a handful, there were myriads of lesser ones of the type,say, of Mr. Wickson--men, worth a few millions, who were adherents ofthe arch-oligarchs. The wives and daughters of these lesser oligarchswere legion, and it was decided that I should assume the disguise ofsuch a one. A few years later this would have been impossible, becausethe passport system was to become so perfect that no man, woman, norchild in all the land was unregistered and unaccounted for in his or hermovements.
When the time was ripe, the spies were thrown off my track. An hourlater Avis Everhard was no more. At that time one Felice Van Verdighan,accompanied by two maids and a lap-dog, with another maid for thelap-dog,* entered a drawing-room on a Pullman,** and a few minutes laterwas speeding west.
* This ridiculous picture well illustrates the heartless conduct of the masters. While people starved, lap-dogs were waited upon by maids. This was a serious masquerade on the part of Avis Everhard. Life and death and the Cause were in the issue; therefore the picture must be accepted as a true picture. It affords a striking commentary of the times.
** Pullman--the designation of the more luxurious railway cars of the period and so named from the inventor.
The three maids who accompanied me were revolutionists. Two were membersof the Fighting Groups, and the third, Grace Holbrook, entered a groupthe following year, and six months later was executed by the Iron Heel.She it was who waited upon the dog. Of the other two, Bertha Stoledisappeared twelve years later, while Anna Roylston still lives andplays an increasingly important part in the Revolution.*
* Despite continual and almost inconceivable hazards, Anna Roylston lived to the royal age of ninety-one. As the Pococks defied the executioners of the Fighting Groups, so she defied the executioners of the Iron Heel. She bore a charmed life and prospered amid dangers and alarms. She herself was an executioner for the Fighting Groups, and, known as the Red Virgin, she became one of the inspired figures of the Revolution. When she was an old woman of sixty-nine she shot "Bloody" Halcliffe down in the midst of his armed escort and got away unscathed. In the end she died peaceably of old age in a secret refuge of the revolutionists in the Ozark mountains.
Without adventure we crossed the United States to California. When thetrain stopped at Sixteenth Street Station, in Oakland, we alighted, andthere Felice Van Verdighan, with her two maids, her lap-dog, andher lap-dog's maid, disappeared forever. The maids, guided by trustycomrades, were led away. Other comrades took charge of me. Within halfan hour after leaving the train I was on board a small fishing boatand out on the waters of San Francisco Bay. The winds baffled, and wedrifted aimlessly the greater part of the night. But I saw the lights ofAlcatraz where Ernest lay, and found comfort in the thought of nearnessto him. By dawn, what with the rowing of the fishermen, we made theMarin Islands. Here we lay in hiding all day, and on the followingnight, swept on by a flood tide and a fresh wind, we crossed San PabloBay in two hours and ran up Petaluma Creek.
Here horses were ready and another comrade, and without delay we wereaway through the starlight. To the north I could see the loom of SonomaMountain, toward which we rode. We left the old town of Sonoma to theright and rode up a canyon that lay between outlying buttresses of themountain. The wagon-road became a wood-road, the wood-road became acow-path, and the cow-path dwindled away and ceased among the uplandpastures. Straight over Sonoma Mountain we rode. It was the safestroute. There was no one to mark our passing.
Dawn caught us on the northern brow, and in the gray light we droppeddown through chaparral into redwood canyons deep and warm with thebreath of passing summer. It was old country to me that I knew andloved, and soon I became the guide. The hiding-place was mine. I hadselected it. We let down the bars and crossed an upland meadow. Next, wewent over a low, oak-covered ridge and descended into a smaller meadow.Again we climbed a ridge, this time riding under red-limbed madronos andmanzanitas of deeper red. The first rays of the sun streamed uponour backs as we climbed. A flight of quail thrummed off through thethickets. A big jackrabbit crossed our path, leaping swiftly andsilently like a deer. And then a deer, a many-pronged buck, the sunflashing red-gold from neck and shoulders, cleared the crest of theridge before us and was gone.
We followed in his wake a space, then dropped down a zigzag trail thathe disdained into a group of noble redwoods that stood about a pool ofwater murky with minerals from the mountain side. I knew every inch ofthe way. Once a writer friend of mine had owned the ranch; but he, too,had become a revolutionist, though more disastrously than I, for he wasalready dead and gone, and none knew where nor how. He alone, in thedays he had lived, knew the secret of the hiding-place for which I wasbound. He had bought the ranch for beauty, and paid a round price forit, much to the disgust of the local farmers. He used to tell with greatglee how they were wont to shake their heads mournfully at the price, toaccomplish ponderously a bit of mental arithmetic, and then to say, "Butyou can't make six per cent on it."
But he was dead now, nor did the ranch descend to his children. Of allmen, it was now the property of Mr. Wickson, who owned the whole easternand northern slopes of Sonoma Mountain, running from the Spreckelsestate to the divide of Bennett Valley. Out of it he had made amagnificent deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopesand glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. Thepeople who had owned the soil had been driven away. A state home for thefeeble-minded had also been demolished to make room for the deer.
To cap it all, Wickson's huntin
g lodge was a quarter of a mile from myhiding-place. This, instead of being a danger, was an added security.We were sheltered under the very aegis of one of the minor oligarchs.Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned aside. The lastplace in the world the spies of the Iron Heel would dream of looking forme, and for Ernest when he joined me, was Wickson's deer-park.
We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool. From a cache behinda hollow rotting log my companion brought out a variety of things,--afifty-pound sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils,blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing material, a great bundleof letters, a five-gallon can of kerosene, an oil stove, and, last andmost important, a large coil of stout rope. So large was the supply ofthings that a number of trips would be necessary to carry them to therefuge.
But the refuge was very near. Taking the rope and leading the way, Ipassed through a glade of tangled vines and bushes that ran between twowooded knolls. The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream.It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the hottest summernever dried it up. On every hand were tall wooded knolls, a group ofthem, with all the seeming of having been flung there from some carelessTitan's hand. There was no bed-rock in them. They rose from their baseshundreds of feet, and they were composed of red volcanic earth, thefamous wine-soil of Sonoma. Through these the tiny stream had cut itsdeep and precipitous channel.
It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed,we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet. And then we came to thegreat hole. There was no warning of the existence of the hole, norwas it a hole in the common sense of the word. One crawled throughtight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge,peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet inlength and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because ofsome fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, andcertainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out inthe course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earthappear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair andgold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great treeseven sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some leaned over at anglesas great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered straight upfrom the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.
It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came there, not even thevillage boys of Glen Ellen. Had this hole existed in the bed of a canyona mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well known. Butthis was no canyon. From beginning to end the length of the stream wasno more than five hundred yards. Three hundred yards above the hole thestream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow. A hundredyards below the hole the stream ran out into open country, joining themain stream and flowing across rolling and grass-covered land.
My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast onthe other end lowered away. In no time I was on the bottom. And in buta short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and loweredthem down to me. He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before he wentaway called down to me a cheerful parting.
Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, John Carlson, ahumble figure of the Revolution, one of the countless faithful ones inthe ranks. He worked for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting lodge.In fact, it was on Wickson's horses that we had ridden over SonomaMountain. For nearly twenty years now John Carlson has been custodianof the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered hismind during all that time. To betray his trust would have been in hismind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree thatone could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him atall. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in hisdim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty andimaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey orders, and he wasneither curious nor garrulous. Once I asked how it was that he was arevolutionist.
"When I was a young man I was a soldier," was his answer. "It was inGermany. There all young men must be in the army. So I was in the army.There was another soldier there, a young man, too. His father was whatyou call an agitator, and his father was in jail for lese majesty--whatyou call speaking the truth about the Emperor. And the young man, theson, talked with me much about people, and work, and the robbery ofthe people by the capitalists. He made me see things in new ways, andI became a socialist. His talk was very true and good, and I have neverforgotten. When I came to the United States I hunted up the socialists.I became a member of a section--that was in the day of the S. L. P.Then later, when the split came, I joined the local of the S. P. I wasworking in a livery stable in San Francisco then. That was before theEarthquake. I have paid my dues for twenty-two years. I am yet a member,and I yet pay my dues, though it is very secret now. I will always paymy dues, and when the cooperative commonwealth comes, I will be glad."
Left to myself, I proceeded to cook breakfast on the oil stove and toprepare my home. Often, in the early morning, or in the evening afterdark, Carlson would steal down to the refuge and work for a couple ofhours. At first my home was the tarpaulin. Later, a small tent was putup. And still later, when we became assured of the perfect security ofthe place, a small house was erected. This house was completely hiddenfrom any chance eye that might peer down from the edge of the hole. Thelush vegetation of that sheltered spot make a natural shield. Also, thehouse was built against the perpendicular wall; and in the wall itself,shored by strong timbers, well drained and ventilated, we excavated twosmall rooms. Oh, believe me, we had many comforts. When Biedenbach,the German terrorist, hid with us some time later, he installed asmoke-consuming device that enabled us to sit by crackling wood fires onwinter nights.
And here I must say a word for that gentle-souled terrorist, than whomthere is no comrade in the Revolution more fearfully misunderstood.Comrade Biedenbach did not betray the Cause. Nor was he executed bythe comrades as is commonly supposed. This canard was circulated bythe creatures of the Oligarchy. Comrade Biedenbach was absent-minded,forgetful. He was shot by one of our lookouts at the cave-refuge atCarmel, through failure on his part to remember the secret signals. Itwas all a sad mistake. And that he betrayed his Fighting Group is anabsolute lie. No truer, more loyal man ever labored for the Cause.*
* Search as we may through all the material of those times that has come down to us, we can find no clew to the Biedenbach here referred to. No mention is made of him anywhere save in the Everhard Manuscript.
For nineteen years now the refuge that I selected had been almostcontinuously occupied, and in all that time, with one exception, it hasnever been discovered by an outsider. And yet it was only a quarter ofa mile from Wickson's hunting-lodge, and a short mile from the villageof Glen Ellen. I was able, always, to hear the morning and eveningtrains arrive and depart, and I used to set my watch by the whistle atthe brickyards.*
* If the curious traveller will turn south from Glen Ellen, he will find himself on a boulevard that is identical with the old country road seven centuries ago. A quarter of a mile from Glen Ellen, after the second bridge is passed, to the right will be noticed a barranca that runs like a scar across the rolling land toward a group of wooded knolls. The barranca is the site of the ancient right of way that in the time of private property in land ran across the holding of one Chauvet, a French pioneer of California who came from his native country in the fabled days of gold. The wooded knolls are the same knolls referred to by Avis Everhard.
The Great Earthquake of 2368 A.D. broke off the side of one of these knolls and toppled it into the hole where the Everhards made their refuge. Since the finding of the Manuscript excavations have been made, and the house, the two cave rooms, and all the accumulated rubbish of long occupancy have been brought to light. Many valuable relics have been found, among which, curious to relate, is the smoke-consuming device of Biedenbach's mentione
d in the narrative. Students interested in such matters should read the brochure of Arnold Bentham soon to be published.
A mile northwest from the wooded knolls brings one to the site of Wake Robin Lodge at the junction of Wild-Water and Sonoma Creeks. It may be noticed, in passing, that Wild- Water was originally called Graham Creek and was so named on the early local maps. But the later name sticks. It was at Wake Robin Lodge that Avis Everhard later lived for short periods, when, disguised as an agent-provocateur of the Iron Heel, she was enabled to play with impunity her part among men and events. The official permission to occupy Wake Robin Lodge is still on the records, signed by no less a man than Wickson, the minor oligarch of the Manuscript.
CHAPTER XIX
TRANSFORMATION
"You must make yourself over again," Ernest wrote to me. "You must ceaseto be. You must become another woman--and not merely in the clothes youwear, but inside your skin under the clothes. You must make yourselfover again so that even I would not know you--your voice, your gestures,your mannerisms, your carriage, your walk, everything."
This command I obeyed. Every day I practised for hours in buryingforever the old Avis Everhard beneath the skin of another woman whom Imay call my other self. It was only by long practice that such resultscould be obtained. In the mere detail of voice intonation I practisedalmost perpetually till the voice of my new self became fixed,automatic. It was this automatic assumption of a role that wasconsidered imperative. One must become so adept as to deceive oneself.It was like learning a new language, say the French. At first speech inFrench is self-conscious, a matter of the will. The student thinksin English and then transmutes into French, or reads in French buttransmutes into English before he can understand. Then later, becomingfirmly grounded, automatic, the student reads, writes, and THINKS inFrench, without any recourse to English at all.
And so with our disguises. It was necessary for us to practise until ourassumed roles became real; until to be our original selves would requirea watchful and strong exercise of will. Of course, at first, much wasmere blundering experiment. We were creating a new art, and we had muchto discover. But the work was going on everywhere; masters in theart were developing, and a fund of tricks and expedients was beingaccumulated. This fund became a sort of text-book that was passed on, apart of the curriculum, as it were, of the school of Revolution.*
* Disguise did become a veritable art during that period. The revolutionists maintained schools of acting in all their refuges. They scorned accessories, such as wigs and beards, false eyebrows, and such aids of the theatrical actors. The game of revolution was a game of life and death, and mere accessories were traps. Disguise had to be fundamental, intrinsic, part and parcel of one's being, second nature. The Red Virgin is reported to have been one of the most adept in the art, to which must be ascribed her long and successful career.
It was at this time that my father disappeared. His letters, which hadcome to me regularly, ceased. He no longer appeared at our Pell Streetquarters. Our comrades sought him everywhere. Through our secret servicewe ransacked every prison in the land. But he was lost as completely asif the earth had swallowed him up, and to this day no clew to his endhas been discovered.*
* Disappearance was one of the horrors of the time. As a motif, in song and story, it constantly crops up. It was an inevitable concomitant of the subterranean warfare that raged through those three centuries. This phenomenon was almost as common in the oligarch class and the labor castes, as it was in the ranks of the revolutionists. Without warning, without trace, men and women, and even children, disappeared and were seen no more, their end shrouded in mystery.
Six lonely months I spent in the refuge, but they were not idle months.Our organization went on apace, and there were mountains of work alwayswaiting to be done. Ernest and his fellow-leaders, from their prisons,decided what should be done; and it remained for us on the outside todo it. There was the organization of the mouth-to-mouth propaganda;the organization, with all its ramifications, of our spy system; theestablishment of our secret printing-presses; and the establishment ofour underground railways, which meant the knitting together of all ourmyriads of places of refuge, and the formation of new refuges wherelinks were missing in the chains we ran over all the land.
So I say, the work was never done. At the end of six months myloneliness was broken by the arrival of two comrades. They were younggirls, brave souls and passionate lovers of liberty: Lora Peterson, whodisappeared in 1922, and Kate Bierce, who later married Du Bois,* andwho is still with us with eyes lifted to to-morrow's sun, that heraldsin the new age.
* Du Bois, the present librarian of Ardis, is a lineal descendant of this revolutionary pair.
The two girls arrived in a flurry of excitement, danger, and suddendeath. In the crew of the fishing boat that conveyed them across SanPablo Bay was a spy. A creature of the Iron Heel, he had successfullymasqueraded as a revolutionist and penetrated deep into the secretsof our organization. Without doubt he was on my trail, for we had longsince learned that my disappearance had been cause of deep concern tothe secret service of the Oligarchy. Luckily, as the outcome proved, hehad not divulged his discoveries to any one. He had evidently delayedreporting, preferring to wait until he had brought things to asuccessful conclusion by discovering my hiding-place and capturing me.His information died with him. Under some pretext, after the girls hadlanded at Petaluma Creek and taken to the horses, he managed to get awayfrom the boat.
Part way up Sonoma Mountain, John Carlson let the girls go on, leadinghis horse, while he went back on foot. His suspicions had been aroused.He captured the spy, and as to what then happened, Carlson gave us afair idea.
"I fixed him," was Carlson's unimaginative way of describing the affair."I fixed him," he repeated, while a sombre light burnt in his eyes, andhis huge, toil-distorted hands opened and closed eloquently. "He made nonoise. I hid him, and tonight I will go back and bury him deep."
During that period I used to marvel at my own metamorphosis. At times itseemed impossible, either that I had ever lived a placid, peaceful lifein a college town, or else that I had become a revolutionist inured toscenes of violence and death. One or the other could not be. One wasreal, the other was a dream, but which was which? Was this presentlife of a revolutionist, hiding in a hole, a nightmare? or was I arevolutionist who had somewhere, somehow, dreamed that in some formerexistence I have lived in Berkeley and never known of life more violentthan teas and dances, debating societies, and lectures rooms? But then Isuppose this was a common experience of all of us who had rallied underthe red banner of the brotherhood of man.
I often remembered figures from that other life, and, curiously enough,they appeared and disappeared, now and again, in my new life. There wasBishop Morehouse. In vain we searched for him after our organization haddeveloped. He had been transferred from asylum to asylum. We traced himfrom the state hospital for the insane at Napa to the one in Stockton,and from there to the one in the Santa Clara Valley called Agnews, andthere the trail ceased. There was no record of his death. In some way hemust have escaped. Little did I dream of the awful manner in which Iwas to see him once again--the fleeting glimpse of him in the whirlwindcarnage of the Chicago Commune.
Jackson, who had lost his arm in the Sierra Mills and who had been thecause of my own conversion into a revolutionist, I never saw again;but we all knew what he did before he died. He never joined therevolutionists. Embittered by his fate, brooding over his wrongs, hebecame an anarchist--not a philosophic anarchist, but a mere animal, madwith hate and lust for revenge. And well he revenged himself. Evadingthe guards, in the nighttime while all were asleep, he blew thePertonwaithe palace into atoms. Not a soul escaped, not even the guards.And in prison, while awaiting trial, he suffocated himself under hisblankets.
Dr. Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford achieved quite different fates f
romthat of Jackson. They have been faithful to their salt, and they havebeen correspondingly rewarded with ecclesiastical palaces wherein theydwell at peace with the world. Both are apologists for the Oligarchy.Both have grown very fat. "Dr. Hammerfield," as Ernest once said, "hassucceeded in modifying his metaphysics so as to give God's sanction tothe Iron Heel, and also to include much worship of beauty and to reduceto an invisible wraith the gaseous vertebrate described by Haeckel--thedifference between Dr. Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford being that thelatter has made the God of the oligarchs a little more gaseous and alittle less vertebrate."
Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman at the Sierra Mills whom I encounteredwhile investigating the case of Jackson, was a surprise to all of us. In1918 I was present at a meeting of the 'Frisco Reds. Of all our FightingGroups this one was the most formidable, ferocious, and merciless. Itwas really not a part of our organization. Its members were fanatics,madmen. We dared not encourage such a spirit. On the other hand, thoughthey did not belong to us, we remained on friendly terms with them. Itwas a matter of vital importance that brought me there that night. I,alone in the midst of a score of men, was the only person unmasked.After the business that brought me there was transacted, I was ledaway by one of them. In a dark passage this guide struck a match, and,holding it close to his face, slipped back his mask. For a moment Igazed upon the passion-wrought features of Peter Donnelly. Then thematch went out.
"I just wanted you to know it was me," he said in the darkness. "D'youremember Dallas, the superintendent?"
I nodded at recollection of the vulpine-face superintendent of theSierra Mills.
"Well, I got him first," Donnelly said with pride. "'Twas after that Ijoined the Reds."
"But how comes it that you are here?" I queried. "Your wife andchildren?"
"Dead," he answered. "That's why. No," he went on hastily, "'tis notrevenge for them. They died easily in their beds--sickness, you see,one time and another. They tied my arms while they lived. And now thatthey're gone, 'tis revenge for my blasted manhood I'm after. I wasonce Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman. But to-night I'm Number 27 of the'Frisco Reds. Come on now, and I'll get you out of this."
More I heard of him afterward. In his own way he had told the truthwhen he said all were dead. But one lived, Timothy, and him his fatherconsidered dead because he had taken service with the Iron Heel in theMercenaries.* A member of the 'Frisco Reds pledged himself to twelveannual executions. The penalty for failure was death. A member whofailed to complete his number committed suicide. These executions werenot haphazard. This group of madmen met frequently and passed wholesalejudgments upon offending members and servitors of the Oligarchy. Theexecutions were afterward apportioned by lot.
* In addition to the labor castes, there arose another caste, the military. A standing army of professional soldiers was created, officered by members of the Oligarchy and known as the Mercenaries. This institution took the place of the militia, which had proved impracticable under the new regime. Outside the regular secret service of the Iron Heel, there was further established a secret service of the Mercenaries, this latter forming a connecting link between the police and the military.
In fact, the business that brought me there the night of my visit wassuch a trial. One of our own comrades, who for years had successfullymaintained himself in a clerical position in the local bureau of thesecret service of the Iron Heel, had fallen under the ban of the 'FriscoReds and was being tried. Of course he was not present, and of coursehis judges did not know that he was one of our men. My mission had beento testify to his identity and loyalty. It may be wondered how we cameto know of the affair at all. The explanation is simple. One of oursecret agents was a member of the 'Frisco Reds. It was necessary for usto keep an eye on friend as well as foe, and this group of madmen wasnot too unimportant to escape our surveillance.
But to return to Peter Donnelly and his son. All went well with Donnellyuntil, in the following year, he found among the sheaf of executionsthat fell to him the name of Timothy Donnelly. Then it was that thatclannishness, which was his to so extraordinary a degree, asserteditself. To save his son, he betrayed his comrades. In this he waspartially blocked, but a dozen of the 'Frisco Reds were executed, andthe group was well-nigh destroyed. In retaliation, the survivors metedout to Donnelly the death he had earned by his treason.
Nor did Timothy Donnelly long survive. The 'Frisco Reds pledgedthemselves to his execution. Every effort was made by the Oligarchy tosave him. He was transferred from one part of the country to another.Three of the Reds lost their lives in vain efforts to get him. The Groupwas composed only of men. In the end they fell back on a woman, oneof our comrades, and none other than Anna Roylston. Our InnerCircle forbade her, but she had ever a will of her own and disdaineddiscipline. Furthermore, she was a genius and lovable, and we couldnever discipline her anyway. She is in a class by herself and notamenable to the ordinary standards of the revolutionists.
Despite our refusal to grant permission to do the deed, she went on withit. Now Anna Roylston was a fascinating woman. All she had to do wasto beckon a man to her. She broke the hearts of scores of our youngcomrades, and scores of others she captured, and by their heart-stringsled into our organization. Yet she steadfastly refused to marry. Shedearly loved children, but she held that a child of her own would claimher from the Cause, and that it was the Cause to which her life wasdevoted.
It was an easy task for Anna Roylston to win Timothy Donnelly. Herconscience did not trouble her, for at that very time occurred theNashville Massacre, when the Mercenaries, Donnelly in command, literallymurdered eight hundred weavers of that city. But she did not killDonnelly. She turned him over, a prisoner, to the 'Frisco Reds.This happened only last year, and now she had been renamed. Therevolutionists everywhere are calling her the "Red Virgin."*
* It was not until the Second Revolt was crushed, that the 'Frisco Reds flourished again. And for two generations the Group flourished. Then an agent of the Iron Heel managed to become a member, penetrated all its secrets, and brought about its total annihilation. This occurred in 2002 A.D. The members were executed one at a time, at intervals of three weeks, and their bodies exposed in the labor-ghetto of San Francisco.
Colonel Ingram and Colonel Van Gilbert are two more familiar figuresthat I was later to encounter. Colonel Ingram rose high in the Oligarchyand became Minister to Germany. He was cordially detested by theproletariat of both countries. It was in Berlin that I met him, where,as an accredited international spy of the Iron Heel, I was received byhim and afforded much assistance. Incidentally, I may state that in mydual role I managed a few important things for the Revolution.
Colonel Van Gilbert became known as "Snarling" Van Gilbert. Hisimportant part was played in drafting the new code after the ChicagoCommune. But before that, as trial judge, he had earned sentence ofdeath by his fiendish malignancy. I was one of those that tried him andpassed sentence upon him. Anna Roylston carried out the execution.
Still another figure arises out of the old life--Jackson's lawyer. Leastof all would I have expected again to meet this man, Joseph Hurd. It wasa strange meeting. Late at night, two years after the Chicago Commune,Ernest and I arrived together at the Benton Harbor refuge. This wasin Michigan, across the lake from Chicago. We arrived just at theconclusion of the trial of a spy. Sentence of death had been passed, andhe was being led away. Such was the scene as we came upon it. The nextmoment the wretched man had wrenched free from his captors and flunghimself at my feet, his arms clutching me about the knees in a vicelikegrip as he prayed in a frenzy for mercy. As he turned his agonized faceup to me, I recognized him as Joseph Hurd. Of all the terrible thingsI have witnessed, never have I been so unnerved as by this franticcreature's pleading for life. He was mad for life. It was pitiable. Herefused to let go of me, despite the hands of a dozen comrades. And whenat last he was dragged shrieking away, I sank down fainting upon thefloor. It is far easie
r to see brave men die than to hear a coward begfor life.*
* The Benton Harbor refuge was a catacomb, the entrance of which was cunningly contrived by way of a well. It has been maintained in a fair state of preservation, and the curious visitor may to-day tread its labyrinths to the assembly hall, where, without doubt, occurred the scene described by Avis Everhard. Farther on are the cells where the prisoners were confined, and the death chamber where the executions took place. Beyond is the cemetery--long, winding galleries hewn out of the solid rock, with recesses on either hand, wherein, tier above tier, lie the revolutionists just as they were laid away by their comrades long years agone.