They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second ComingSinclair, Upton
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They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming
Sinclair, Upton
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) -- Fiction; Jesus Christ -- Fiction
They had got hold of a canvas-covered wagon, of the type of the old
“prairie-schooner.” You still find these camped by our roadsides now
and then, with nomad families in them; and evidently one of these
families had been so ill advised as to come to town for the
convention. The rioters had hoisted their victim on top of the
wagon, having first dumped a gallon of red paint over his head, so
that everyone might know him for the Red Prophet they had been
reading about in the papers. They had tied a long rope to the shaft
of the wagon, and one or two hundred men had hold of it, and were
hauling it through the streets, dancing and singing, shouting
murder-threats against the “reds.” Some ran ahead, to clear the
traffic; and then came the wagon, lumbering and rocking, so that the
prophet was thrown from side to side. Fortunately there was a hole
in the canvas, and he could hold to one of the wooden ribs.
The cortege came opposite to me. On each side was a guard of honor,
a line of men walking in lock-step, each with his hands on the
shoulders of the one in front; they had got up a sort of chant: “Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet! Hi! Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet!” And
others would yell, “I won't work! I won't work!”--this being our
Mobland nickname for the I.W.W. Some one had daubed the letters on
the sides of the wagon, using the red paint; and a drunken fellow
standing near me shook his clenched fist at the wretch on top and
bellowed in a fog-horn voice: “Hey, there, you goddam Arnychist, if
you're a prophet, come down from that there wagon and cure my
venereal disease!” There was a roar of laughter from the throng, and
the drunken fellow liked the sensation so well that he walked
alongside, shouting his challenge again and again.
Then I heard a crash behind me, and a clatter of falling glass; I
turned to see a soldier, inside the Royal Hotel, engaged in chopping
out the plate-glass window of the lobby with a chair. There were
twenty or thirty uniformed men behind him, who wanted to get out and
see the fun; but the door of the hotel was blocked by the crowd, so
they were seeking a direct route to the goal of their desires.
I knew, of course, there was nothing I could do; one might as well
have tried to stop a hurricane by blowing one's breath. Carpenter
had wanted martyrdom, and now he was going to get it--of the
peculiar kind and in the peculiar fashion of our free and
independent and happy-go-lucky land. We have had many agitators and
disturbers of our self-satisfaction, and they have all “got theirs,”
in one form or another; but there had never been one who had done
quite so much to make himself odious as this “Bolsheviki prophet,”
who was now “getting his.” “Treat 'em rough!” runs the formula of
the army; and I fell in step, watching, and thinking that later I
might serve as one of the stretcher-bearers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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