THE BOMB

I become a packer on my own account—What there is in sausage—The Duchess—The Piersons' again—At the Haymarket—The path of the bomb—Another kind of evil

Not long after my little deal in pork Carmichael promoted me. Instead of running around the city to look after the markets, I was sent out on the road to the towns that were building up all along the railroad lines throughout the neighboring states. My business was to secure as many of these new markets as I could, and, wherever it was possible, to dispossess any rival that had got hold before. It gave me a splendid chance to know a great section of our country which was teeming with life.

That five thousand dollars in the bank burned worse than the first thousand. I took no more chances on pork, however, but I managed to turn a dollar here and there, and after a time something rather big came my way. There were a couple of German Jews, the brothers Schunemann, who were trying to run a packing business at Aurora. They had started as small butchers, and had done well; but they wanted to get into the packing business, and they were having a hard time to compete with the big fellows in Chicago. Their little plant was covered with a mortgage, and Dround and Strauss had taken away most of their trade. The Schunemann brothers were such small fish that they could make no agreements with the large companies, and they weren't important enough to be bought out.

That was what I told one of the brothers when he asked me to say a good word for him with Carmichael. His concern was pretty near bankruptcy then, and it was plainly out of the question for them to go on as they had been without capital. If they had tried to build up a small business in delicatessen and such things, they might have succeeded better. I had never given up the idea of the money that might be made in putting up sausages and preparing kosher meat for the city market. Here, I thought, was just the opportunity. If I could buy out the Schunemann brothers or get a controlling interest, I might try my experiment. The scheme grew in my mind, and I went to Aurora several times to see the brothers. After a while I made the man an offer, and then we talked terms for several months. Slocum advised me and drew up the agreement. I was ready to put my stake into the venture, all that I had in the world. It hurt them to sell me the control of their business for seven thousand dollars, which was all that I could scrape together—and part of that was Slocum's savings, which he lent me.

At last we made the arrangement, and the Schunemann brothers put up the "Duchess" brand of sausage after my plan, and we began to handle kosher meat in a small way. I managed the sausage trade with Dround's business, working the two together very well; for the retailers who dealt with Dround's took to my idea and pushed our Duchess brand, which was packed in nice little boxes. It was a new idea in those days, and nothing takes like something that hasn't been tried before. We began to make money—not a fortune all at once; but the business promised to grow. Thus I became a packer, after a fashion!

In the years that immediately preceded the troublous times of 1886, I was a very busy man and often out of the city, too much engrossed with the growing business on my hands to consider very seriously the disturbances of that period. The fight with labor, which seems to be a necessary feature of our progress, had come a kind of crisis in that year. But the events in Chicago during that crisis are still so near to many of us that even with the rapid forgetfulness of our days they have not quite escaped the memory of thoughtful men.

I remember that now and then, around Ma Pierson's table, the talk turned on the strike over at the harvesting works. We were all on the same side, I guess—the side of capital; there was enough for all of the good things of life, we thought, if men would only stop their kicking and keep at work. Slocum, for all that he was a lawyer, was the only easy one on the strikers: so long as they respected the laws he was with them in their struggle to get all they could from their employers.

"Mr. Renshaw says they're too well off now," Lou observed.

"Who is Mr. Renshaw?" I asked, surprised that Lou should take an interest in such matters.

Slocum looked across the table at me, and Grace quickly began on something else....

Well, on the night of the fourth of May I was on my way to the Piersons' from the Union Station. It was very late, for I had just returned from Aurora, where I had been during the afternoon on my own business. As I got on the street car the men on the platform were talking excitedly about the shooting over at the harvester works. When I reached home, I was surprised to find no one on the steps, the door wide open, and a kind of emptiness in the whole place.

"What's up?" I asked old Pierson.

"That Cox girl's got her cheek blowed open with a bomb or suthin'. Times like this folks can't go gallivantin' about the streets," the old man snarled.

Slocum came in at the sound of my voice and told me what had happened. His face was white, and his long arms still twitched with the horror of what he had seen that night. It seems that Dick Pierson had come home to supper full of the news about the row between the police and the strikers. His talk had worked up the girls,—that is, Hillary Cox and Grace,—for Lou hadn't come home,—until all of them had started off after supper in the direction of the harvester works, where the trouble was reported to be.

Then they had strolled down to the Haymarket, where, instead of the great crowd they had expected to find, there were only some hundreds of men and women listening quietly to several workingmen who were speechifying from a cart. It didn't look very lively, and as a thunder storm was coming up in the north Sloco was for going home. But Ed, who, like a country galoot, was curious to hear what the orator in the cart had to say, pressed up close to the truck, in the front of the crowd, with Hillary Cox on his arm. Suddenly, so Slocum said, there was a shout from somewhere behind them:—

"The police! Look out for the police!"

In the rush that followed, Slocum and Grace were jammed back by the press and separated from the others. He remembered only a little of what happened those next moments. And what he did remember didn't tally with the stories that were told later at the trial. In the darkness of the lowering storm, above the heads of the close-packed, swaying mass in the square, there sounded a dull whir. Then came a terrific explosion. The next thing Slocum knew he was crawling on his hands and knees, groping in the darkness for Grace, while all around them crackled the pistol shots of the police. Then he heard Ed's voice shrieking:—

"The bloody brutes have shot her!"...

"And Hillary?" I asked. "Is it bad?"

"A piece of iron ploughed across her cheek."

"Scar?"

Slocum nodded. (The truth is that if it hadn't been for the ignorant doctor who got hold of the girl first her looks might have been saved. But he took eleven stitches, and there was left a long, ugly, furrowed scar across her pretty face!)

We went up to Slocum's room, and sat there far into the night, discussing what had happened.

"Oh, I suppose you law pills will mouse around in it considerable," I said. "The way to do is to string 'em up to the nearest lamp-post, as they do out West."

As I was saying that, a cab drove up hurriedly in the quiet street and stopped at our door. Slocum and I put our heads out of his window, curious to know what was happening now at two o'clock in the morning. We saw a man get out, then turn and lift a woman from the cab to the street. The woman staggered as she started to walk across the sidewalk.

"It's Lou Pierson!" Slocum exclaimed. He drew in his head suddenly and bolted from the room. I waited long enough to see the man who was with Lou pull the doorbell, and then leave the poor girl half-fallen on the steps, while he went back to the cab and spoke to the driver. Then I followed Slocum downstairs, two steps at a time. Slocum had wrenched open the house door and leaped down the long flight of steps, not pausing at the girl, who was making feeble attempts to rise and calling: "Fred! Fred!" But the man, having given his directions to the driver, paid no attention and got into the cab.

I helped Lou to her feet; she was still calling in a drowsy voice: "Fred! Fred!" I could see Slocum with his hand on the door of the cab. He spoke to the man inside, but I could not hear what he said. Suddenly his hand shot out; there was a tussle, half in and half out of the cab; the driver whipped up his horses, and Slocum was thrown to his knees. He picked himself up holding in his fist something that looked like a necktie.

As Slocum helped me carry the girl up the steps, he said:—

"That's who Renshaw is. A bit of a bomb would be about the right thing for him!"

Generalizations, I have learned, are silly things to play with. But there are some experiences in a man's life that tempt him to make them. It was only a mere accident that the man who was Lou Pierson's companion in the cab that night had taken a prominent part against the striking workmen. But when, later, I was called upon to sit in judgment on some hot-headed fools because they, in their struggle to get an eight-hour day, fomented strife, my thoughts would go back sourly to this example of the men I was expected to side with.