McGivney took him to Guffey’s office, and Guffey wasted no time upon
preliminaries, but turned to his desk, and took out a long
typewritten document, a complete account of what the prosecution
meant to prove against the seventeen I. W. Ws. First, Peter told
what he himself had seen and heard--not very much, but a beginning,
a hook to hang his story upon. The I. W. W. hall was the meeting
place for the casual and homeless labor of the country, the
“bindle-stiffs” who took the hardest of the world’s hard knocks, and
sometimes returned them. There was no kind of injustice these
fellows hadn’t experienced, and now and then they had given blow for
blow. Also there were loose talkers among them, who worked off their
feelings by threats of vengeance upon their enemies. Now and then a
real criminal came along, and now and then a paid inciter, a Peter
Gudge or a Joe Angell. Peter told the worst that he had heard, and
all he knew about the arrested men, and Guffey wrote it all down,
and then proceeded to build upon it. This fellow Alf Guinness had
had a row with a farmer in Wheatland County; there had been a barn
burned nearby, and Guffey would furnish an automobile and a couple
of detectives to travel with Peter, and they would visit the scene
of that fire and the nearby village, and familiarize themselves with
the locality, and Peter would testify how he had been with Guinness
when he and a half dozen of the defendants had set fire to that
barn.
Peter hadn’t intended anything quite so serious as that, but Guffey
was so business-like, and took it all so much as a matter of course,
that Peter was afraid to show the white feather. After all, this was
war-time; hundreds of men were giving up their lives every day in
the Argonne, and why shouldn’t Peter take a little risk in order to
put out of business his country’s most dangerous enemies?
So Peter and his two detectives blew themselves to a joy ride in the
country. And then Peter was brought back and made comfortable in a
room on the twelfth floor of the Hotel de Soto, where he diligently
studied the typewritten documents which McGivney brought him, and
thoroughly learned the story he was to tell. There was always one of
Guffey’s men walking up and down in the hallway outside with a gun
on his hip, and they brought Peter three meals a day, not forgetting
a bottle of beer and a package of cigarettes. Twice a day Peter read
in the newspapers about the heroic deeds of our boys over there, and
also about the latest bomb plots which had been discovered all over
the country, and about various trials under the espionage act.
Also, Peter had the thrill of reading about himself in a real
newspaper. Hitherto he had been featured in labor papers, and
Socialist papers like the “Clarion,” which did not count; but now
the American City “Times” came out with a long story of how the
district attorney’s office had “planted” a secret agent with the I.
W. W., and how this man, whose name was Peter Gudge, had been
working as one of them for the past two years, and was going to
reveal the whole story of I. W. W. infamy on the witness stand.
Two days before the trial Peter was escorted by McGivney and another
detective to the district attorney’s office, and spent the best part
of the day in conference with Mr. Burchard and his deputy, Mr.
Stannard, who were to try the case. McGivney had told Peter that the
district attorney was not in the secret, he really believed that
Peter’s story was all true; but Peter suspected that this was
camouflage, to save Mr. Burchard’s face, and to protect him in case
Peter ever tried to “throw him down.” Peter noticed that whenever he
left any gap in his story, the district attorney and the deputy told
him to fill it, and he managed to guess what to fill it with.
Henry Clay Burchard came from the far South, and followed a style of
oratory long since gone out of date. He wore his heavy black hair a
little long, and when he mounted the platform he would pull out the
tremulo stop, stretching out his hands and saying in tones of
quivering emotion: “The ladies, God bless them!” Also he would say:
“I am a friend of the common man. My heart beats with sympathy for
those who constitute the real backbone of America, the toilers of
the shop and farm.” And then all the banqueters of the Chamber of
Commerce and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association would
applaud, and would send their checks to the campaign fund of this
friend of the common man. Mr. Burchard’s deputy, Mr. Stannard, was a
legal fox who told his chief what to do and how to do it; a dried-up
little man who looked like a bookworm, and sat boring you thru with
his keen eyes, watching for your weak points and preparing to pierce
you thru with one of his legal rapiers. He would be quite friendly
about it--he would joke with you in the noon hour, assuming that you
would of course understand it was all in the line of business, and
no harm meant.