Also as Lizzie's eyes began to glow in his sky, Jared let his interest
lag in the talk at Casper Herdicker's shoe shop, though it was tall
talk, and Jared sitting on a keg in a corner with little Tom Williams,
the stone mason, beside him on a box, and Denny Hogan near him on a
vacant work bench and Ira Dooley on the window ledge would wrangle until
bed time many a night as Dick Bowman, wagging a warlike head, and Casper
pegging away at his shoes, tore society into shreds, smashed idols and
overturned civilization. Up to this point there was complete agreement
between the iconoclasts. They went so far together that they had no
quarrel about the route of the mob down Fifth Avenue in New York--which
Dick knew only as a legend but which Casper had seen; and they were one
in the belief that Dan Sands's bank and Wright & Perry's store should
fall early in the sack of Market Street. But when it came to
reconstructing society there was a clash that mounted to a cataclysm.
For Dick, shaking his head violently, demanded a government that should
regulate everything and Casper waving a vicious, flat-nosed hammer,
battered down all government and stood for the untrammeled and
unhampered liberty of the individual. Night after night they looted
civilization and stained the sky with their fires and the ground with
the oppressor's blood, only to sink their claws and tusks into each
other's vitals in mortal combat over the spoil.
About the time that Jared Thurston found the new stars that had ranged
across his ken, Tom Van Dorn, the handsome, cheerful, exquisite Tom Van
Dorn began to find the debates between Casper and Dick Bowman diverting.
So many a night when the society of the softer sex was either cloying or
inconvenient, the dapper young fellow would come dragging Henry Fenn
with him, to sit on a rickety chair and observe the progress of the
revolution and to enjoy the carnage that always followed the downfall of
the established order. He used to sit beside Jared Thurston who, being a
printer, was supposed to belong to the more intellectual of the crafts
and hence more appreciative than Williams or Dooley or Hogan, of his
young lordship's point of view; and as the debate waxed warm, Tom was
wont to pinch the lean leg of Mr. Thurston in lieu of the winks Tom
dared not venture. But a time came when Jared Thurston sat apart from
Van Dorn and stared coldly at him. And as Tom and Henry Fenn walked out
of the human slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a
particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn
walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while
Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his
face, looked at Tom with great, bright, sympathetic eyes and cut in:
"Tom--why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class
or of your kind. What's your idea in cutting in between Jared and her;
you'll only make trouble."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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