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Before long they had got acetylene torches, and were working all night-gangs of labourers who lived in tents on vacant lots outside the city and kept their canvas cots warm with double shifts of sleepers. Jimmie Higgins realized the dreadful truth, that in spite of all the agitation of Socialists, the war had actually come to Leesville!
He had been discharged and blacklisted at the motor-truck factory in Ironton, his last job; he had been discharged and black-listed at the Empire Shops; he had been arrested and sent to jail for "soap-boxing" on the streets of Leesville; he had been arrested in the bomb-conspiracy of Kumme and Heinrich von Holst.
We face a new era, when labour is coming into its own. If we do not want to be left behind as derelicts, we shall have to get busy and do our part to bring in this new era, which otherwise will come with bloodshed and destruction." "For the love of Mike!" said Jimmie. "It's just about knocked Leesville out," said Emil. "You ought to have seen the papers that reported the speech!
Perhaps there was really more to the country than Wall Street speculators and grafting politicians, policemen with clubs and militiamen with bayonets to stick into the bodies of working-men who tried to improve their lot in life! In the course of the summer Jimmie had to take several days off and go into Leesville to attend the trial of the German plotters.
He bought a copy of the Leesville Herald, and read the thrilling story of the German plot which had been unearthed in Leesville. There were half a dozen conspirators under arrest, and more than a dozen bombs had been found, all destined to be set off in the Empire Shops.
"An' have their votes thrown out by some rotten political gang, like they got here in Leesville? Don't talk to me about votin' they told me I'd moved into a new district an' lost my vote lost it because I lost my job! So it's old man Granitch has the say whether I can vote or not!
At least, that was what you had seen if you read the Leesville Worker; if on the other hand you read the Herald which nine out of ten people did then you learned that the forces of decency and order had at last prevailed in Leesville, the propaganda of the Hun was stifled for ever, the mouthers of sedition had felt the heavy hand of public indignation.
"All right, you fight!" shouted Comrade Schneider, the brewer, his purple face more purple than ever before in the history of Local Leesville. "I'm going to fight all right," answered the young lawyer. "This is my last speech here or anywhere else I'm leaving for an officers' training-camp to-morrow. I have come here to do my duty, to warn you comrades even though I know it will be in vain.
Comrade Jack Smith, a reporter on the Herald, the capitalist paper of Leesville, was to resign and become editor of the Worker, and he already had his editorials written had been showing them about in the local for the past month! Jimmie and Meissner set out for home, happy in the feeling that they had accomplished more for Socialism on that one night than in all the rest of their lives.
So the Jimmie Higginses worked out their campaign-slogan: "Starve the War and Feed America!" In the third month of the war, disturbing rumours began to run about Leesville. Old Abel Granitch had taken on a contract with the Belgian government, and the Empire Machine Shops were going to make shells.
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