The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 21

“Sapienta et veritas,” said a tall man with a heavy accent, as if reading Rye’s mind. “Wisdom and truth.”

“Whiskey and trout,” said another, and a laugh went through the line of men.

“Wine and tomatoes,” said another, and more laughter.

“Women and trouble,” said another, and even the guards chuckled at this one.

“Water and turnips if you bums are lucky,” said a good-natured emergency jailer, who turned out to be a barber and held his rifle by the barrel like a walking stick.

The school was dark and cold, no furniture, no heat or light, only a single blanket for each prisoner on a hard wood floor—but at least it wasn’t a dungeon sweatbox. Rye got the best night’s sleep he’d had since being arrested. Brazier said they shouldn’t work at the school, either, so when they refused to cut their own firewood, Sullivan said fine, let them freeze, and he cut their rations in half. One cold night, they gave in and burned window sashes and doorframes to keep from freezing. They took the doors off cabinets and closets, and in one, they found a box of old books. They burned the box but not the books, and Rye leafed through them—Pearson’s Latin Prose Composition, the National Compendium for Penmanship, and Epochs in American History, from 1896. He ran his hands over the raised letters on the covers and felt, for the first time in his life, cheated by his lack of schooling. That night he used the thick history book as a pillow and, in the morning, read about the American Revolution in slanting sunlight through a school window.

The number of IWW men left to arrest was dwindling, but there still seemed to be four or five new men every day—the prosecutor slowly holding arraignments in front of a drunk judge named Mann who told the newspapers his job was to “rid the city of this filth.” The trials always went the same, charges read, objections overruled, Wobbly convicted of disorderly conduct and given thirty days. The leaders were held on disorderly charges but also conspiracy to incite a riot, six months in prison if convicted. The women suffragists and socialists were turned loose with citations, as were the progressive civilians who got caught up, and a few people too old or infirm to do jail time. Some days the drunk judge would feel compassion, and if a union man agreed to leave town, the charges would be dismissed. Most of those rode out on rails, but when one man climbed right back on a soapbox, Judge Mann stopped offering such leniency.

On Rye’s fourth day in the school, the Salvation Army came through to assess the prisoners’ treatment, and the guards lined Rye up with a dozen of the healthier-looking men in the school’s old gymnasium. What we called the Starvation Army grandees came in uniforms like a real army, and a man with a red birthmark on his face walked past Rye, then turned back, looking him up and down. “How old are you, son?”

Rye didn’t hear the full question, and he said, “Fine, sir.”

But the other prisoners all stepped forward in line to look back at Rye. The jailers, too. And the Salvation Army man got red-faced and turned back to the head jailer. “How old is this boy?”

It was quiet a moment, and then the quick-witted barber with the rifle walking stick said, “Rye, if you jump a train in Butte going forty miles an hour toward Spokane—” and he didn’t even finish the joke before the room was laughing.

“How old is this boy!” the flushed Salvation Army man asked again.

“That is, uh . . .” A jailer had the original booking list and he looked for Rye’s name on it. “Dolan, Ryan J. Sixty-one.”

The laughter was pealing now, and the Salvation Army man turned to Rye and asked more gently, “How old are you, son?”

Again Rye hesitated. “What is today?” he asked.

The man told him it was November tenth.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, in a week, I will be seventeen.”