THE BOMB
_I become a packer on my own account--What there is in sausage--The
Duchess--The Piersons' again--At the Haymarket--The path of the
bomb--Another kind of evil_
Not long after my little deal in pork Carmichael promoted me. Instead of
running around the city to look after the markets, I was sent out on the
road to the towns that were building up all along the railroad lines
throughout the neighboring states. My business was to secure as many of
these new markets as I could, and, wherever it was possible, to
dispossess any rival that had got hold before. It gave me a splendid
chance to know a great section of our country which was teeming with
life.
That five thousand dollars in the bank burned worse than the first
thousand. I took no more chances on pork, however, but I managed to turn
a dollar here and there, and after a time something rather big came my
way. There were a couple of German Jews, the brothers Schunemann, who
were trying to run a packing business at Aurora. They had started as
small butchers, and had done well; but they wanted to get into the
packing business, and they were having a hard time to compete with the
big fellows in Chicago. Their little plant was covered with a mortgage,
and Dround and Strauss had taken away most of their trade. The
Schunemann brothers were such small fish that they could make no
agreements with the large companies, and they weren't important enough
to be bought out.
That was what I told one of the brothers when he asked me to say a good
word for him with Carmichael. His concern was pretty near bankruptcy
then, and it was plainly out of the question for them to go on as they
had been without capital. If they had tried to build up a small business
in _delicatessen_ and such things, they might have succeeded better. I
had never given up the idea of the money that might be made in putting
up sausages and preparing kosher meat for the city market. Here, I
thought, was just the opportunity. If I could buy out the Schunemann
brothers or get a controlling interest, I might try my experiment. The
scheme grew in my mind, and I went to Aurora several times to see the
brothers. After a while I made the man an offer, and then we talked
terms for several months. Slocum advised me and drew up the agreement. I
was ready to put my stake into the venture, all that I had in the world.
It hurt them to sell me the control of their business for seven thousand
dollars, which was all that I could scrape together--and part of that
was Slocum's savings, which he lent me.
At last we made the arrangement, and the Schunemann brothers put up the
"Duchess" brand of sausage after my plan, and we began to handle kosher
meat in a small way. I managed the sausage trade with Dround's
business, working the two together very well; for the retailers who
dealt with Dround's took to my idea and pushed our Duchess brand, which
was packed in nice little boxes. It was a new idea in those days, and
nothing takes like something that hasn't been tried before. We began to
make money--not a fortune all at once; but the business promised to
grow. Thus I became a packer, after a fashion!
* * * * *
In the years that immediately preceded the troublous times of 1886, I
was a very busy man and often out of the city, too much engrossed with
the growing business on my hands to consider very seriously the
disturbances of that period. The fight with labor, which seems to be a
necessary feature of our progress, had come a kind of crisis in that
year. But the events in Chicago during that crisis are still so near to
many of us that even with the rapid forgetfulness of our days they have
not quite escaped the memory of thoughtful men.
I remember that now and then, around Ma Pierson's table, the talk turned
on the strike over at the harvesting works. We were all on the same
side, I guess--the side of capital; there was enough for all of the good
things of life, we thought, if men would only stop their kicking and
keep at work. Slocum, for all that he was a lawyer, was the only easy
one on the strikers: so long as they respected the laws he was with them
in their struggle to get all they could from their employers.
"Mr. Renshaw says they're too well off now," Lou observed.
"Who is Mr. Renshaw?" I asked, surprised that Lou should take an
interest in such matters.
Slocum looked across the table at me, and Grace quickly began on
something else....
Well, on the night of the fourth of May I was on my way to the Piersons'
from the Union Station. It was very late, for I had just returned from
Aurora, where I had been during the afternoon on my own business. As I
got on the street car the men on the platform were talking excitedly
about the shooting over at the harvester works. When I reached home, I
was surprised to find no one on the steps, the door wide open, and a
kind of emptiness in the whole place.
"What's up?" I asked old Pierson.
"That Cox girl's got her cheek blowed open with a bomb or suthin'. Times
like this folks can't go gallivantin' about the streets," the old man
snarled.
Slocum came in at the sound of my voice and told me what had happened.
His face was white, and his long arms still twitched with the horror of
what he had seen that night. It seems that Dick Pierson had come home to
supper full of the news about the row between the police and the
strikers. His talk had worked up the girls,--that is, Hillary Cox and
Grace,--for Lou hadn't come home,--until all of them had started off
after supper in the direction of the harvester works, where the trouble
was reported to be.
[Illustration: _His long arms twitched with horror._]
Then they had strolled down to the Haymarket, where, instead of the
great crowd they had expected to find, there were only some hundreds of
men and women listening quietly to several workingmen who were
speechifying from a cart. It didn't look very lively, and as a thunder
storm was coming up in the north Sloco was for going home. But Ed, who,
like a country galoot, was curious to hear what the orator in the cart
had to say, pressed up close to the truck, in the front of the crowd,
with Hillary Cox on his arm. Suddenly, so Slocum said, there was a shout
from somewhere behind them:--
"The police! Look out for the police!"
In the rush that followed, Slocum and Grace were jammed back by the
press and separated from the others. He remembered only a little of what
happened those next moments. And what he did remember didn't tally with
the stories that were told later at the trial. In the darkness of the
lowering storm, above the heads of the close-packed, swaying mass in the
square, there sounded a dull whir. Then came a terrific explosion. The
next thing Slocum knew he was crawling on his hands and knees, groping
in the darkness for Grace, while all around them crackled the pistol
shots of the police. Then he heard Ed's voice shrieking:--
"The bloody brutes have shot her!"...
"And Hillary?" I asked. "Is it bad?"
"A piece of iron ploughed across her cheek."
"Scar?"
Slocum nodded. (The truth is that if it hadn't been for the ignorant
doctor who got hold of the girl first her looks might have been saved.
But he took eleven stitches, and there was left a long, ugly, furrowed
scar across her pretty face!)
We went up to Slocum's room, and sat there far into the night,
discussing what had happened.
"Oh, I suppose you law pills will mouse around in it considerable," I
said. "The way to do is to string 'em up to the nearest lamp-post, as
they do out West."
As I was saying that, a cab drove up hurriedly in the quiet street and
stopped at our door. Slocum and I put our heads out of his window,
curious to know what was happening now at two o'clock in the morning. We
saw a man get out, then turn and lift a woman from the cab to the
street. The woman staggered as she started to walk across the sidewalk.
"It's Lou Pierson!" Slocum exclaimed. He drew in his head suddenly and
bolted from the room. I waited long enough to see the man who was with
Lou pull the doorbell, and then leave the poor girl half-fallen on the
steps, while he went back to the cab and spoke to the driver. Then I
followed Slocum downstairs, two steps at a time. Slocum had wrenched
open the house door and leaped down the long flight of steps, not
pausing at the girl, who was making feeble attempts to rise and calling:
"Fred! Fred!" But the man, having given his directions to the driver,
paid no attention and got into the cab.
I helped Lou to her feet; she was still calling in a drowsy voice:
"Fred! Fred!" I could see Slocum with his hand on the door of the cab.
He spoke to the man inside, but I could not hear what he said. Suddenly
his hand shot out; there was a tussle, half in and half out of the cab;
the driver whipped up his horses, and Slocum was thrown to his knees.
He picked himself up holding in his fist something that looked like a
necktie.
As Slocum helped me carry the girl up the steps, he said:--
"That's who Renshaw is. A bit of a bomb would be about the right thing
for him!"
Generalizations, I have learned, are silly things to play with. But
there are some experiences in a man's life that tempt him to make them.
It was only a mere accident that the man who was Lou Pierson's companion
in the cab that night had taken a prominent part against the striking
workmen. But when, later, I was called upon to sit in judgment on some
hot-headed fools because they, in their struggle to get an eight-hour
day, fomented strife, my thoughts would go back sourly to this example
of the men I was expected to side with.