The motor purred softly, and the car sped as if upon wings thru the
suburbs of American City, and to the country beyond. There were cars
in front, and other cars behind, a long stream of white lights
flying out into the country. They came to a grove of big pine trees,
which rose two or three feet thick, like church arches, and covered
the ground beneath them with a soft, brown carpet. It was a
well-known picnic place, and here all the cars were gathering by
appointment. Evidently it had all been pre-arranged, with that
efficiency which is the pride of 100% Americans. A man with a black
mask over his face stood in the center of the grove, and shouted his
directions thru a megaphone, and each car as it swept in ranged
itself alongside the next car in a broad circle, more than a hundred
feet across. These cars of the younger members of the Chamber of
Commerce and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association were well
behaved--they were accustomed to sliding precisely into place
according to orders of a megaphone man, when receptions were being
given, or when the younger members and their wives and
fiancees, clad in soft silks and satins, came rolling up to
their dinner-parties and dances.
The cars came and came, until there was just room enough for the
last one to slide in. Then at a shouted command, “Number one!” a
group of men stepped out of one of the cars, dragging a handcuffed
prisoner. It was Michael Dubin, the young Jewish tailor who had
spent fifteen days in jail with Peter. Michael was a student and
dreamer, and not used to scenes of violence; also, he belonged to a
race which expresses its emotions, and consequently is offensive to
100% Americans. He screamed and moaned while the masked men
un-handcuffed him, and took off his coat and tore his shirt in the
back. They dragged him to a tree in the center of the ring, a
somewhat smaller tree, just right for his wrists to meet around and
be handcuffed again. There he stood in the blinding glare of thirty
or forty cars, writhing and moaning, while one of the black-masked
men stripped off his coat and got ready for action. He produced a
long black-snake whip, and stood poised for a moment; then in a
booming voice the man with the megaphone shouted, “Go!” and the whip
whistled thru the air and was laid across the back of Michael, and
tore into the flesh so that the blood leaped into sight. There was a
scream of anguish, and the victim began to twist and turn and kick
about as if in his death-throes. Again the whip whistled, and again
you heard the thud as it tore into the flesh, and another red stripe
leaped to view.
Now the younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the
Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association were in excellent
condition for this evening’s labor. They were not pale and thin,
underfed and overworked, as were their prisoners; they were sleek
and rosy, and ashine with health. It was as if long years ago their
fathers had foreseen the Red menace, and the steps that would have
to be taken to preserve 100% Americanism; the fathers had imported a
game which consisted of knocking little white balls around a field
with various styles and sizes of clubs. They had built magnificent
club-houses out here in the suburbs, and had many hundreds of acres
of ground laid out for this game, and would leave their occupations
of merchanting and manufacturing early in the afternoon, in order to
repair to these fields and keep their muscles in condition. They
would hold tournaments, and vie with one another, and tell over the
stories of the mighty strokes which they had made with their clubs,
and of the hundreds of strokes they had made in a single afternoon.
So the man with the black-snake whip was “fit,” and didn’t need to
stop for breath. Stroke after stroke he laid on, with a splendid
rhythmic motion; he kept it up easily, on and on. Had he forgotten?
Did he think this was a little white ball he was swinging down upon?
He kept on and on, until you could no longer count the welts, until
the whole back of Michael Dubin was a mass of raw and bleeding
flesh. The screams of Michael Dubin died away, and his convulsive
struggling ceased, and his head hung limp, and he sunk lower and
lower upon the tree.
At last the master of ceremonies stepped forward and ordered a halt,
and the man with the whip wiped the sweat from his forehead with his
shirt-sleeve, and the other men unchained the body of Michael Dubin,
and dragged it a few feet to one side and dumped it face downward in
the pine-leaves.
“Number two!” called the master of ceremonies, in a clear,
compelling voice, as if he were calling the figures of a quadrille;
and from another car another set of men emerged, dragging another
prisoner. It was Bert Glikas, a “blanket-stiff” who was a member of
the I. W. W.’s executive committee, and had had two teeth knocked
out in a harvest-strike only a couple of weeks previously. While
they were getting off his coat, he managed to get one hand free, and
he shook it at the spectators behind the white lights of the
automobiles. “God damn you!” he yelled; and so they tied him up, and
a fresh man stepped forward and picked up the whip, and spit on his
hands for good luck, and laid on with a double will; and at every
stroke Glikas yelled a fresh curse; first in English, and then, as
if he were delirious, in some foreign language. But at last his
curses died away, and he too sank insensible, and was unhitched and
dragged away and dumped down beside the first man. “Number three!”
called the master of ceremonies.