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I had, once or twice before, heard a tone as repulsive a female dive-keeper hectoring her wretched white slaves. I looked at Anita. I expected to see her erect, defiant. Instead, she was again wearing that cowed look. "Don't judge me too harshly," she said pleadingly to me. "I know what is right and decent God planted that too deep in me for them to be able to uproot it.
Avail? Why, it was only the other day that Tammany was actually caught applauding Comptroller Coler's words in Plymouth Church, "Whenever the city builds a schoolhouse upon the site of a dive and creates a park, a distinct and permanent mental, moral, and physical improvement has been made, and public opinion will sustain such a policy, even if a dive-keeper is driven out of business and somebody's ground rent is reduced."
And last March when he came to Topeka, Kansas, he outraged every loyal citizen of the state by bringing into it a dive and all who wished an intoxicating drink could get it by tipping the waiter. Let his ministers deny this for him also. He ought to have been arrested as any other dive-keeper.
So, of course, the business of starting fires was a paying one, and the "fire-bug," like the "cadet" and the dive-keeper, was a part of the "system." So it was quite a possible thing that the man who had burned up this little girl's three sisters might have been allowed to escape. I happened to say this in the little girl's hearing, and I saw her pitiful strained eyes fixed upon Sylvia.
The trial brought out the fact that this dive-keeper, Stillings, had hired these women. To the gambler's wife he was to give twenty- five dollars, to use the raw-hide. Two women were prostitutes, whom this Stillings had brought to town for this purpose. They were fined a small sum, and the whole of them given a few hours to leave town. My body was bruised and sore.
I was invited to go home with a prohibitionist, Dr. Marshall. This Chapman was a noted dive-keeper, a rummy, and ran a representative rum-soaked republican hotel. He was angry, because I dared to expose him, in his sneaking way of drugging and robbing his guests. It was marvelous what rages these law-breakers used to have when I came around at first. It is not so now.
Men got rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath.
I confess I don't know all about this Colton, but I know enough to say he is an army deserter, a liar, a dive-keeper, a gambler, and, to my certain knowledge, the direct cause of the death of three men, one a soldier of my troop. Now isn't he a sweet specimen to lead in the avenging of a supposed crime?" Whatever else Colton might have failed in, he was a man of action.
Bob recognized him as one of the saloon keepers at Twin Falls, and his white-hot brain jumped to the correct conclusion that Roaring Dick, driven by some vague conscience-stirring in regard to his work, had insisted on going down river; and that this dive-keeper, loth to lose a profitable customer in the dull season, had offered transportation in the hopeful probability that he could induce the riverman to return with him.
Here it was before him, a courtroom and a judge, bowed down in subservience by the machine to a dive-keeper who swung a string of votes. Petty and sordid as it was, it was one face of the many-faced machine that loomed colossally, in every city and state, in a thousand guises overshadowing the land. A familiar phrase rang in his ears: "It is to laugh."
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