In company such as this Peter’s education for the role of detective was completed by force, as it were. He listened to everything, and while he did not dare make any notes, he stored away treasures in his mind, and when he came out of the jail he was able to give McGivney a pretty complete picture of the various radical organizations in American City, and the attitude of each one toward the war. Peter found that McGivney’s device had worked perfectly. Peter was now a martyr and a hero; his position as one of the “left wingers” was definitely established, and anyone who ventured to say a word against him would be indignantly rebuked. As a matter of fact, no one desired to say much. Pat McCormick, Peter’s enemy, was out on an organizing trip among the oil workers.
Duggan had apparently taken a fancy to Peter, and took him to meet some of his friends, who lived in an old, deserted warehouse, which happened to have skylights in the roof; this constituted each room a “studio,” and various radicals rented the rooms, and lived here a sort of picnic existence which Peter learned was called “Bohemian.” They were young people, most of them, with one or two old fellows, derelicts; they wore flannel shirts, and soft ties, or no ties at all, and their fingers were always smeared with paint. Their life requirements were simple; all they wanted was an unlimited quantity of canvas and paint, some cigarettes, and at long intervals a pickle or some sauer-kraut and a bottle of beer. They would sit all day in front of an easel, painting the most inconceivable pictures—pink skies and green-faced women and purple grass and fantastic splurges of color which they would call anything from “The Woman with a Mustard Pot” to “A Nude Coming Downstairs.” And there would be others, like Duggan, writing verses all day; pounding away on a typewriter, if they could manage to rent or borrow one. There were several who sang, and one who played the flute and caused all the others to tear their hair. There was a boy fresh from the country, who declared that he had run away from home because the family sang hymns all day Sunday, and never sang in tune.
From people such as these you would hear the most revolutionary utterances; but Peter soon realized that it was mostly just talk with them. They would work off their frenzies with a few dashes of paint or some ferocious chords on the piano. The really dangerous ones were not here; they were hidden away in offices or dens of their own, where they were prompting strikes and labor agitations, and preparing incendiary literature to be circulated among the poor.
You met such people in the Socialist local, and in the I. W. W. headquarters, and in numerous clubs and propaganda societies which Peter investigated, and to which he was welcomed as a member. In the Socialist local there was a fierce struggle going on over the war. What should be the attitude of the part............