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
It happened that fate had placed me next to James, so I listened to
more asceticism. “He oughtn't to do things like this! People will
say he likes to eat rich food and to drink. It's bad for the
movement for such things to be said.”
“Cheer up, my friend!” I laughed. “Even the Bolsheviks have a feast
now and then, when they can get it.”
“You'll see what the newspapers do with this tomorrow,” growled the
other; “then you won't think it so funny.”
“Forget it!” I said. “There aren't any reporters here.”
“No,” said he, “but there are spies here, you may be sure. There are
spies everywhere, nowadays. You'll see!”
Presently Carpenter called on some of the company for speeches.
Would Bartholomew tell about the unemployed, what their organization
was doing, and what were their plans? And after that he asked John
Colver, who sat on his right hand, to recite some of his verses.
John and his friend Philip, a blue eyed, freckle-faced lad who
looked as if he might be in high school, told stories about the
adventures of outlaw agitators. For several months these two had
been traveling the country as “blanket stiffs,” securing employment
in lumber-camps and mines, gathering the workers secretly in the
woods to listen to the new gospel of deliverance. The employers were
organized on a nation-wide scale everywhere throughout the country,
and the workers with their feeble craft unions were like men using
bows and arrows against machine-guns. There must be One Big
Union--that was the slogan, and if you preached it, you went every hour
in peril of such a fate that you counted fourteen years in jail as
comparatively a happy ending.
Said Carpenter: “It is not such a bad thing for a cause to have its
preachers go to jail.”
“Well,” said the lad of the blue eyes and the freckled face, “we try
to keep a few outside, to tell what the rest are in for!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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