The old plutocrat was feeble and sick, but his mind was all there,
and his eyes seemed to be boring Peter through. Peter realized that
he would have to be very careful--the least little slip would be
fatal here.
“Now, Gudge,” the old man began, “I want you to tell me all about
it. To begin with, how did you come to be among these Reds? Begin at
the beginning.”
So Peter told how he had happened to get interested in the radical
movement, laying particular stress upon the dangerousness of these
Reds, and his own loyalty to the class which stood for order and
progress and culture in the country. “It ought to be stopped, Mr.
Ackerman!” he exclaimed, with a fine show of feeling; and the old
banker nodded. Yes, yes, it ought to be stopped!
“Well,” said Peter, “I said to myself, `I’m going to find out about
them fellows.’ I went to their meetings, and little by little I
pretended to get converted, and I tell you, Mr. Ackerman, our police
are asleep; they don’t know what these agitators are doing, what
they’re preaching. They don’t know what a hold they’ve got on the
mobs of the discontented!”
Peter went on to tell in detail about the propaganda of social
revolution, and about conspiracies against law and order, and the
property and even the lives of the rich. Peter noticed that when the
old man took a sip of water his hand trembled so that he could
hardly keep the water from spilling; and presently, when the phone
rang again, his voice became shrill and imperious. “I understand
they’re applying for bail for those men. Now Angus, that’s an
outrage! We’ll not hear to anything like that! I want you to see the
judge at once, and make absolutely certain that those men are held
in jail.”
Then again the old banker had a coughing fit. “Now, Gudge,” he said,
“I know more or less about all that. What I want to know is about
this conspiracy against me. Tell me how you came to find out about
it.”
And Peter told; but of course he embellished it, in so far as it
related to Mr. Ackerman--these fellows were talking about Mr.
Ackerman all the time, they had a special grudge against him.
“But why?” cried the old man. “Why?”
“They think you’re fighting them, Mr. Ackerman.”
“But I’m not! That’s not true!”
“Well, they say you put up money to hang Goober. They call
you--you’ll excuse me?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“They call you the `head money devil.’ They call you the financial
king of American City.”
“King!” cried the banker. “What rubbish! Why, Gudge, that’s fool
newspaper talk! I’m a poor man today. There are two dozen men in
this city richer than I am, and who have more power. Why--” But the
old man fell to coughing and became so exhausted that he sank back
into his pillows until he recovered his breath. Peter waited
respectfully; but of course he wasn’t fooled. Peter had carried on
bargaining many times in his life, and had heard people proclaim
their poverty and impotence.
“Now, Gudge,” the old man resumed. “I don’t want to be killed; I
tell you I don’t want to be killed.”
“No, of course not,” said Peter. It was perfectly comprehensible to
him that Mr. Ackerman didn’t want to be killed. But Mr. Ackerman
seemed to think it necessary to impress the idea upon him; in the
course of the conversation he came back to it a number of times, and
each time he said it with the same solemn assurance, as if it were a
brand new idea, and a very unusual and startling idea. “I don’t want
to be killed, Gudge; I tell you I don’t want to let those fellows
get me. No, no; we’ve got to circumvent them, we’ve got to take
precautions--every precaution--I tell you every possible
precaution.”
“I’m here for that purpose, Mr. Ackerman,” said Peter, solemnly.
“I’ll do everything. We’ll do everything, I’m sure.”
“What’s this about the police?” demanded the banker. “What’s this
about Guffey’s bureau? You say they’re not competent?”
“Well now, I’ll tell you, Mr. Ackerman,” said Peter, “It’s a little
embarrassing. You see, they employ me--”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed the other. “_I_ employ you! I’m putting up the
money for this work, and I want the facts!--I want them all.”
“Well,” said Peter, “they’ve been very decent to me--”
“I say tell me everything!” exclaimed the old man. He was a most
irritable old man, and couldn’t stand for a minute not having what
he asked for. “What’s the matter with them?”
Peter answered, as humbly as he could: “I could tell you a great
deal that’d be of use to you, Mr. Ackerman, but you got to keep it
between you and me.”
“All right!” said the other, quickly. “What is it?”
“If you give a hint of it to anybody else,” persisted Peter, “then
I’ll get fired.”
“You’ll not get fired, I’ll see to that. If necessary I’ll hire you
direct.”
“Ah, but you don’t understand, Mr. Ackerman. It’s a machine, and you
can’t run against it; you gotta understand it, you gotta handle it
right. I’d like to help you, and I know I can help you, but you
gotta let me explain it, and you gotta understand some things.”
“All right,” said the old man. “Go ahead, what is it?”
“Now,” said Peter, “it’s like this. These police and all these
fellows mean well, but they don’t understand; it’s too complicated,
they ain’t been in this movement long enough. They’re used to
dealing with criminals; but these Reds, you see, are cranks.
Criminals ain’t organized, at least they don’t stand together; but
these Reds do, and if you fight ‘em, they fight back, and they make
what they call `propaganda.’ And that propaganda is dangerous--if
you make a wrong move, you may find you’ve made ‘em stronger than
they were before.”
“Yes, I see that,” said the old man. “Well?”
“Then again, the police dunno how dangerous they are. You try to
tell them things, they won’t really believe you. I’ve known for a
long time there was a group of these people getting together to kill
off all the rich men, the big men all over the country. They’ve been
spying on these rich men, getting ready to kill them. They know a
lot about them that you can’t explain their knowing. That’s how I
got the idea they had somebody in your house, Mr. Ackerman.”
“Tell me what you mean. Tell me at once.”
“Well, sir, every once in a while I pick up scraps of conversation.
One day I heard Mac--”
“Mac?”
“That’s McCormick, the one who’s in jail. He’s an I. W. W. leader,
and I think the most dangerous of all. I heard him whispering to
another fellow, and it scared me, because it had to do with killing
a rich man. He’d been watching this rich man, and said he was going
to shoot him down right in his own house! I didn’t hear the name of
the man--I walked away, because I didn’t want him to think I was
trying to listen in. They’re awful suspicious, these fellows; if you
watch Mac you see him looking around over his shoulder every minute
or two. So I strolled off, and then I strolled back again, and he
was laughing about something, and I heard him say these words; I
heard him say, `I was hiding behind the curtain, and there was a
Spanish fellow painted on the wall, and every time I peeked out that
bugger was looking at me, and I wondered if he wasn’t going to give
me away.’”
And Peter stopped. His eyes had got used to the twilight now, and he
could see the old banker’s eyes starting out from the crescents of
dark, puffy flesh underneath. “My God!” whispered Nelse Ackerman.
“Now, that was all I heard,” said Peter. “And I didn’t know what it
meant. But when I learned about that drawing that Mac had made of
your house, I thought to myself, Jesus, I bet that was Mr. Ackerman
he was waiting to shoot!”
“Good God! Good God!” whispered the old man; and his trembling
fingers pulled at the embroidery on the coverlet. The telephone
rang, and he took up the receiver, and told somebody he was too busy
now to talk; they would have to call him later. He had another
coughing spell, so that Peter thought he was going to choke, and had
to help him get some medicine down his throat. Peter was a little
bit shocked to see such obvious and abject fear in one of the gods.
After all, they were just men, these Olympians, as much subject to
pain and death as Peter Gudge himself!
Also Peter was surprised to find how “easy” Mr. Ackerman was. He
made no lofty pretence of being indifferent to the Reds. He put
himself at Peter’s mercy, to be milked at Peter’s convenience. And
Peter would make the most of this opportunity.
“Now, Mr. Ackerman,” he began, “You can see it wouldn’t be any use
to tell things like that to the police. They dunno how to handle
such a situation; the honest truth is, they don’t take these Reds
serious. They’ll spend ten times as much money to catch a plain
burglar as they will to watch a whole gang like this.”
“How can they have got into my home?” cried the old man.
“They get in by ways you’d never dream of, Mr. Ackerman. They have
people who agree with them. Why, you got no idea, there’s some
preachers that are Reds, and some college teachers, and some rich
men like yourself.”
“I know, I know,” said Ackerman. “But surely--”
“How can you tell? You may have a traitor right in your own family.”
So Peter went on, spreading the Red Terror in the soul of this old
millionaire who did not want to be killed. He said again that he did
not want to be killed, and explained his reluctance in some detail.
So many people were dependent upon him for their livings, Peter
could have no conception of it! There were probably a hundred
thousand men with their families right here in American City, whose
jobs depended upon plans which Ackerman was carrying, and which
nobody but Ackerman could possibly carry. Widows and orphans looked
to him for protection of their funds; a vast net-work of
responsibilities required his daily, even his hourly decisions. And
sure enough, the telephone rang, and Peter heard Nelse Ackerman
declare that the Amalgamated Securities Company would have to put
off a decision about its dividends until tomorrow, because he was
too busy to sign certain papers just then. He hung up the receiver
and said: “You see, you see! I tell you, Gudge, we must not let them
get me!”