The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 62
“Where is everyone?” Gurley asked.
They’d only been gone a few days. The door was open, but there was no one in the canteen or the newsstand. The big hall was empty, too. Finally, they found Charlie Filigno in the cold meeting room, playing cards with the cook and the newsstand clerk.
Filigno gave Gurley the grim update: union coffers depleted, membership flat, cops patrolling the streets and rail yards, picking up anyone with a foreign accent and running them out of town before they could protest. No one had been arrested in four days. The union was basically out of men, word having gone out among the floating class that railing to Spokane meant a beating. The last editor of the Worker had been arrested three days earlier and, like the editors before him, charged with conspiracy for luring protestors to Spokane.
Charlie shrugged. “We can’t run this without a paper.”
“I’ll edit the paper,” said Gurley. “We’ll publish this afternoon.”
Filigno looked at the other two men. “Publish what?”
Gurley tossed the articles she’d written on the table, the pages scattering the cards from their poker game. Rye had read them on the train—announcing the second free speech action and promising waves of support from Seattle, Idaho, and Montana. There was no mention of the robbery in Taft or the canceled speech in Missoula, just a story about full donation buckets and men promising to come fight. Filigno read aloud: “ ‘We welcome the ranks of organized labor in our battle against the corrupt Hibernian Police Chief Sullivan and his brutal bunkmate, the Drunken Judge Mann, these monstrous minions of the mining millionaires.’ Elizabeth—”
She smiled. “I know, the alliteration.”
She told the cook to fire up the canteen so that floaters could see they were open, and she told the newsstand clerk to take her stories to be typeset. She scribbled headlines on top: SECOND SPEECH ACTION IN SPOKANE! and GURLEY FLYNN TO SPEAK TONIGHT! The one-page paper would feature these two huge headlines, the second story announcing, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, is giving the first of a series of speeches leading up to Friday’s Free Speech Action tonight at 7 p.m. Will detail city’s brutality and the Union’s response. Free, at the IWW Hall, 240 Front Street, Spokane. Apple, cherry, mincemeat pie & coffee.”
“Tonight?” Filigno looked up at Rye as if to ask, Is she okay?
“It’s one o’clock,” she said. “If we get this typeset and run the press, there’s no reason we can’t get newsboys on the street by five.”
“And the pies?” asked the canteen cook.
“You have six hours to figure that out,” she said. She took the cards from the cook’s hand and tossed them on the table. A pair of eights. Rye couldn’t believe her energy, after all they’d been through, and more than that, how the hardship in Montana seemed to have fired her up even more. She sent Rye to gather newsboys to distribute the Worker and to get copies of the daily newspapers to see what news they’d missed while they were gone.
It was a cold and foggy afternoon, the sun skirting the hills and a snow so light and dry that Rye couldn’t tell if it was falling or blowing up from the street. He fixed his coat around his shoulders and buried his hands in his pockets, but still the cold took his breath. He walked to the train station first, where a regular clutch of newsboys was selling dailies.
They formed in crews around an older boy, and Rye recognized the leader of this crew, a kid named Lidle, who ran six younger newsboys and who liked to hang out in front of the union hall. Although he was a foot shorter than Rye, Lidle was only a year younger.
“Hey, Ryan. I like your bowler.” Lidle self-consciously patted his own nest of unruly brown hair.
Rye explained to Lidle what was happening. In a few hours, they’d need five newsboys to go out and sell a hundred papers each—a special edition of the Worker. They could keep the money they made, and they’d each get an additional nickel for putting posters on walls and light poles.
“I’ll take care of it, Rye,” Lidle said. He still had copies of the afternoon Chronicle and the morning Spokesman-Review, so Rye got one of each.
Rye hurried back to the hall, glad to be out of the cold. Through the front door, he saw the old cook in the canteen, busily stirring pie filling. He went through the doors into the main hall. At the end of the hall, the office door was open, and Gurley and Filigno were bent over the table, planning. Rye plopped down in the pews to look through the newspapers for IWW stories.
But the union’s fight was old news now, the front pages on to a brakemen’s strike and the announcement of a big heavyweight bout in New York between the old champ, Jim Jeffries, and the new one, Jack Johnson. A Chronicle cartoon portrayed Johnson as a baboon training with fried chicken, and a local story had the six hundred colored troops at Fort George Wright planning to bet heavy on Johnson.
Rye flipped to the Spokesman’s Labor News page and found a short bit headlined FOREIGN BUMS LEAVE; DISAVOW IWW. After being served bread and water for Thanksgiving, three men had told the judge they were no longer with the union. “We was tricked into this,” one of them was quoted as saying. The story gleefully pointed out that more than sixty men had now been released after agreeing to disavow the union and immediately leave town. After a high of five hundred in lockdown, the numbers were falling.
The Spokesman-Review also had a small story about the successful prosecutions of four union leaders on conspiracy charges. These were one-day