By next morning these pamphlets had all been left in the post boxes of farmers beyond Keezmet, a dozen miles away.
Late the next night, Julian Falck drove Dr. Olmsted to the same Truman Webb's. Now Mr. Webb had an ailing aunt. Up to a fortnight ago she had not needed the doctor often, but as all the countryside could, and decidedly did, learn from listening in on the rural party telephone line, the doctor had to come every three or four days now.
"Well, Truman, how's the old lady?" Dr. Olmsted called cheerily.
From the front stoop Webb answered softly, "Safe! Shoot! I've kept a good lookout."
Julian rapidly slid out, opened the rumble seat of the doctor's car, and there was the astonishing appearance from the rumble of a tall man in urban morning coat and striped trousers, a broad felt hat under his arm, rising, rubbing himself, groaning with the pain of stretching his cramped body. The doctor said:
"Truman, we've got a pretty important Eliza, with the bloodhounds right after him, tonight! Congressman Ingram—Comrade Webb."
"Huh! Never thought I'd live to be called one of these 'Comrades.' But mighty pleased to see you, Congressman. We'll put you across the border in Canada in two days—we've got some paths right through the woods along the border—and there's some good hot beans waiting for you right now."
The attic in which Mr. Ingram slept that night, an attic approached by a ladder concealed behind a pile of trunks, was the "underground station" which, in the 1850's, when Truman's grandfather was agent, had sheltered seventy-two various black slaves escaping to Canada, and on the wall above Ingram's weary threatened head was still to be seen, written in charcoal long ago, "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies."
It was a little after six in the evening, near Tasbrough & Scarlett's quarries. John Pollikop, with his wrecker car, was towing Buck Titus, in his automobile. They stopped now and then, and John looked at the motor in Buck's car very ostentatiously, in the sight of M.M. patrols, who ignored so obvious a companionship. They stopped once at the edge of Tasbrough's deepest pit. Buck strolled about, yawning, while John did some more tinkering. "Right!" snapped Buck. Both of them leaped at the over-large toolbox in the back of John's car, lifted out each an armful of copies of Vermont Vigilance and hurled them over the edge of the quarry. They scattered in the wind.
Many of them were gathered up and destroyed by Tasbrough's foremen, next morning, but at least a hundred, in the pockets of quarrymen, were started on their journey through the world of Fort Beulah workmen.
Sissy came into the Jessup dining room wearily rubbing her forehead. "I've got the story, Dad. Sister Candy helped me. Now we'll have something good to send on to other agents. Listen! I've been quite chummy with Shad. No! Don't blow up! I know just how to yank his gun out of his holster if I should ever need to. And he got to boasting, and he told me Frank Tasbrough and Shad and Commissioner Reek were all in together on the racket, selling granite for public buildings, and he told me—you see, he was sort of boasting about how chummy he and Mr. Tasbrough have become—how Mr. Tasbrough keeps all the figures on the graft in a little red notebook in his desk—of course old Franky would never expect anybody to search the house of as loyal a Corpo as him! Well, you know Mrs. Candy's cousin is working for the Tasbroughs for a while, and damn if—"
("Sis-sy!")
"—these two old gals didn't pinch the lil red notebook this afternoon, and I photographed every page and had 'em stick it back! And the only comment our Candy makes is, 'That stove t' the Tasbroughs' don't draw well. Couldn't bake a decent cake in a stove like that!'"
27
Mary Greenhill, revenging the murdered Fowler, was the only one of the conspirators who seemed moved more by homicidal hate than by a certain incredulous feeling that it was all a good but slightly absurd game. But to her, hate and the determination to kill were tonic. She soared up from the shadowed pit of grief, and her eyes lighted, her voice had a trembling gayety. She threw away her weeds and came out in defiant colors—oh, they had to economize, these days, to put every available penny into the missionary fund of the New Underground, but Mary had become so fire-drawn that she could wear Sissy's giddiest old frocks.
She had more daring than Julian, or even Buck—indeed led Buck into his riskiest expeditions.
In mid-afternoon, Buck and Mary, looking very matrimonial, domestically accompanied by David and the rather doubtful Foolish, ambled through the center of Burlington, where none of them were known—though a number of dogs, city slickers and probably con-dogs, insisted to the rustic and embarrassed Foolish that they had met him somewhere.
It was Buck who muttered "Right!" from time to time, when they were free from being observed, but it was Mary who calmly, a yard or two from M.M.'s or policemen, distributed crumpled-up copies of:
A Little Sunday-school Life of
JOHN SULLIVAN REEK
Second-class Political Crook, &
Certain Entertaining Pictures of
Col. Dewey Haik, Torturer.
These crumpled pamphlets she took from a specially made inside pocket of her mink coat; one reaching from shoulder to waist. It had been recommended by John Pollikop, whose helpful lady had aforetime used just such a pocket for illicit booze. The crumpling had been done carefully. Seen from two yards away, the pamphlets looked like any waste paper, but each was systematically so wadded up that the words, printed in bold red type, "Haik himself kicked an old man to death" caught the eye. And, lying in corner trash baskets, in innocent toy wagons before hardware stores, among oranges in a fruit store where they had gone to buy David a bar of chocolate, they caught some hundreds of eyes in Burlington that day.
On their way home, with David sitting in front beside Buck and Mary in the back, she cried, "That will stir 'em up! But oh, when Daddy has finished his booklet on Swan—God!"
David peeped back at her. She sat with eyes closed, with hands clenched.
He whispered to Buck, "I wish Mother wouldn't get so excited."
"She's the finest woman living, Dave."
"I know it, but—She scares me so!"
One scheme Mary devised and carried out by herself. From the magazine counter in Tyson's drugstore, she stole a dozen copies of the Readers' Digest and a dozen larger magazines. When she returned them, they looked untouched, but each of the larger magazines contained a leaflet, "Get Ready to Join Walt Trowbridge," and each Digest had become the cover for a pamphlet: "Lies of the Corpo Press."
To serve as center of their plot, to be able to answer the telephone and receive fugitives and put off suspicious snoopers twenty-four hours a day, when Buck and the rest might be gone, Lorinda chucked her small remaining interest in the Beulah Valley Tavern and became Buck's housekeeper, living in the place. There was scandal. But in a day when it was increasingly hard to get enough bread and meat, the town folk had little time to suck scandal like lollipops, and anyway, who could much suspect this nagging uplifter who so obviously preferred tuberculin tests to toying with Corydon in the glade? And as Doremus was always about, as sometimes he stayed overnight, for the first time these timid lovers had space for passion.
It had never been their loyalty to the good Emma—since she was too contented to be pitied, too sure of her necessary position in life to be jealous—so much as hatred of a shabby hole-and-corner intrigue which had made their love cautious and grudging. Neither of them was so simple as to suppose that, even with quite decent people, love is always as monogamic as bread and butter, yet neither of them liked sneaking.
Her room at Buck's, large and square and light, with old landscape paper showing an endlessness of little mandarins daintily stepping out of sedan chairs beside pools laced with willows,