Joe Hill Read Free Page B

this he sketched in the figure of a woman with a shawl over her head and one hand stretched out beseechingly. Then between the two his pencil made a tall severe figure with a pistol in its hand, aimed at the pot-bellied man, and out of the muzzle of the gun he drew a puff of smoke.
    Just for an instant, when he moved the paper more into the faint light and studied what he had drawn, the old hatred leaped in him like the explosion of a match, but it went out as quickly as it had come to life, and he sat quietly with the paper in his hand. It was a long time since he had dreamed that murder-dream, a long time since he had even thought of the well-dressed stranger with the intent, half-puzzled eyes that he had once seen at a public meeting and known for the man rumor called his father. It seemed to him that he had spent months and years of his boyhood dreaming of how he would pay back that man, but the hatred was cold now. There was only a faint bitterness like quinine under the tongue, and a brief flare of anger that licked out not so much against the wrongs of his past as against the emptiness of the present. He felt as gutted as a codfish.
    He brought his mind around to the kid inside, still writing his endless letter to the sister who worked in a laundry and dreamed of romantic adventures like her brother’s. He imagined meeting a girl like that, one who had never been out of her home town, and thought of the things he might say to her and the places he might tell her about. She would love to hear of strange places and exciting things. She would have light curly hair like her brother’s, and good teeth. Underpaid and poor, she would live in a boardinghouse, maybe, a single room in a house with mechanics and traveling men and clerks who parted their hair in the middle.
    For a while, tall and quiet and strong, a man who had liveda rough life but had stayed clean, he was her protector through a series of carefully composed scenes. He visited her greedy boss, a fat soft man in a peppermint-striped shirt, and cowed him into raising her wages. He destroyed several clerks with little mustaches, noting carefully how they fell when he hit them, working out the encounters detail by detail, varying a point here or there, going back and starting over, altering by a slight sneering word the contemptuous thing he said just before he swung. She was an unprotected working girl, at the mercy of bosses, mashers, white slavers. Indignation grew in him at the thought of the punk inside spending his time bumming on the road. He’d go bad, or get himself killed, and there would be no one to look after the girl.
    Whistling abstractedly through his teeth, he stared out over the lake and imagined what might happen. The tune that passed between his lips was “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” and it got wound up in his speculations until it began to take them over and guide them. Suppose she got hard up and couldn’t pay her rent, or lost her job, or got sick. There was only one way she could wind up. Her situation began to unravel as the words of a song, set to the tune he was whistling, and he let it unravel until he had a whole verse and a chorus that he could write out in a careful round hand.
    One little girl, fair as a pearl
    Worked every day in a laundry;
    All that she made for food she paid
    And she slept on a park bench so soundly.
    An old procuress spied her there,
    She came and whispered in her ear:
    CHORUS
    Come with me now, my girlie,
    Don’t sleep out in the cold;
    Your face and tresses curly
    Will bring you fame and gold.
    Automobiles to ride in,
    Diamonds and silks to wear,
    You’ll be a star bright
    Down in the red light,
    You’ll make your fortune there.
    Feet clomped on the deck, the floathouse moved a little, slugglishly, something fell with a clatter and Bottles’ voice, muffled with liquor, said “Sonofabitchl” His footsteps came along the deck to the door and stopped. There was a moment’s silence before his voice