The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 16

In front of the hall, men stood smoking in clusters of four or five, shuffling their feet, talking in low voices and foreign tongues. Most of them wore the faded clothes and work boots of floating workers, but Rye picked out Everett and another black porter, saw high-collared suffragettes and socialist women in hats, saw craggy old men with canes and eye patches—veterans of the mine wars.

He watched from across Front Street, ducking behind a produce wagon as the strike committee emerged from the hall, Walsh and Little in front, and right behind them, Gig, looking as nervous as Rye had ever seen him. Rye’s chest tightened, from fear or pride, he wasn’t sure. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he said again.

He felt another tug of misgiving when the last person came out of the hall—Jules walking out alone, black hair loose and falling between his shoulder blades.

The men huddled around Walsh as if he were saying a prayer, then dispersed like marbles in every direction, so they couldn’t all be arrested together. Walsh led five or six men down Front Street, Rye following in a pack of onlookers before he realized Gig wasn’t there.

“Fuckin’ Wobs!” said a man next to Rye, but most people just seemed curious. They lined both sidewalks as Walsh walked down the center of the street. He turned up Stevens and walked between streetcar tracks, Jules and a few others behind him.

On Stevens, the crowd was thick, the carnival in full swing, a man in a turban offering to “Foresee your shocking future!” next to a barker selling ginger ale and chestnuts. People leaned out of upper-floor windows as if they’d paid for balcony seats, and others pressed in on the street, businessmen from the west side, sporting girls and gamblers from the tenderloin, laborers and barmen, reporters, nurses and uniformed Salvation Army men, hats and coats as far as Rye could see. Wobblies mixed with the crowd, too, and Rye recognized one of the ranch hands Jules knew, muttering the words he must’ve been given to say when it was his turn, “Mah fella workers . . . mah fella workers . . .”

As Walsh marched down the middle of this wide street, Rye saw the security men hired by the mining and timber companies; they straightened up from brick walls and light poles, or stood on stoops with their arms crossed, clubs and rifle barrels peeking from beneath their long coats.

At the south end of the block stood another line of men, six uniformed cops led by big John Sullivan. All of them had some lesser version of the chief’s facial hair, bush beards or marmot sideburns, and Rye wondered if they’d chosen the force by sheer whiskers alone. If the chief had looked unhappy the day before, today he looked like he might rip the arms off the first man to speak.

That turned out to be Walsh, who took a National Biscuit crate from another man and set it on the street in front of the worst job shop, the notorious Red Line Agency. A buzz went through the crowd: Here it comes.

Sullivan was walking even before Walsh started speaking—“Brothers and sisters, fellow wor—!” The labor man stumbled on the box, nearly losing his balance until Frank Little caught him, patted his coat, and pushed him back up, a ripple of laughter passing through the crowd. In that moment, Rye thought Gig might be right about this being like a show at the Comique: The tramps would do their tramp thing and the cops their cop thing and everything could return to what it was, Gig with a good story to tell next time at Jimmy Durkin’s.

On the box, Walsh removed his hat and spread his arms like a preacher: “We are here to stand against injustice,” to cheers and boos, “in peaceful exercise of our right to speak out against the brutal tyranny of this city government and its corrupt bargain with these job agencies—”

Walsh was not a small man, and the crate made him a foot taller, but he seemed like a toy when Chief Sullivan marched up, two thick cops on either side. Rye recognized one of the cops as the bull goon Hub Clegg.

Sullivan yanked Walsh off the box and grabbed him by the neck like a chicken he might shake dead. He threw him to the ground and slammed a boot through the biscuit crate, Clegg wrestling Walsh’s arms behind his back.

“Disperse!” the chief yelled to the crowd. “Next man steps on a box gets it worse! And worse for each after.”

No one moved, neither Wobblies nor crowd, and the chief turned and said something to Clegg.

Then a voice in the crowd called out, “Hold the line!” and that brought a cheer, and more boos, a man calling, “Kill the bums!,” more cheers and chatter, the crowd speaking all at once, drowning out Sullivan—then the people in front of Rye snapped their attention to the left as if a baseball had been lined up the middle, and Rye stood on tiptoes to see over the hats: Another box had appeared in the street, half a block north, and Frank Little was climbing on. This was the union’s plan, after Walsh was arrested, to go up one after the other in different spots, force the cops to scramble one end of downtown to the other, arrest dozens of them, and fill the jail with the only weapon they had, their bodies.

“Brothers and sisters,” Little began, but before he could say another word, a cop was on him and threw him to the street. He disappeared in the crowd like someone slipping beneath waves.

“Disperse!” Sullivan yelled again, and the crowd took a few steps back but didn’t leave, Wobblies pressing forward, onlookers straining to see, every window on Stevens Street now full of people sticking their heads out and a man yelling from a second-story window of a lawyer’s office, “This is freedom? You call this