‘What makes you think he’s gone?’

‘My daughter saw him off at the train.’

‘Oh, that’s so! She was mixed up in this.’

‘She just worked here — she talked it over with my friend, the mayor, before she took the job. She has no responsibility.’

‘Well, I don’t want her, anyway. Get busy, boys!’

It was appalling to the placid Fred, the gloating frenzy with which the boys ‘got busy’. From somewhere out in the hall axes were brought, and they gleefully went to work. There is no greater bliss than to be destructive as hell while being moral as heaven. The guardians of the law smashed tables, threw a typewriter through a closed window, with hysterical laughter. Reporters and news photographers were somehow suddenly there, very cheerful, and it was the glare of a flashlight bulb that startled Fred into action. He rose; he faced the sergeant as he would have faced a chronic dead beat.

‘Stop this business or I’ll have the whole bunch of you kicked off the force! I represent the creditors, and you have no court order . . .’

‘Don’t need none.’

‘I’ll sue you, personally, for every cent of damage! Look, Sergeant — chase all these roughnecks out of here, and I’ll explain.’

‘Outside youse,’ said the sergeant, wiping his hand on the seat of his trousers, that it might be clean to receive the dirty money.

Fred’s argument was brief: it consisted entirely in a twenty-dollar bill and the reminder that, already, the sergeant had been photographed enough to ensure publicity.

‘I would like to get hold of that there atheist Silga, though. Hate to have the cops in the next town find we let him go without marking him,’ mourned the faithful sergeant, as he departed, after giving his inspiring lesson in How to Make Communists.

Fred sat down, unsteadily. As Gene and Sara crept back into the room, he, who had hated all Reds, was positively loving in his address:

‘Son, better get going quick — get out of town. They want to beat you. I finagled the cops out, but they might come back.’

Sara said sniffily, ‘I suppose you bribed them! I suppose you were humble to them!’

‘I certainly was — I bribed and humbled and I lied, you little prig, you Soviet Salvation Army lassie, you . . . Grrrr! Gene, got any compromising papers here? Get ’em out quick.’

‘Only the C.P. telegram this morning. I burn ’em.’

That telegram Gene was taking from a telephone book and tucking into his pocket.

‘Want to hide out at my house, Gene? Seeing Sara was in this with . . .’

‘I do not! I’m leaving town.’

‘You probably aren’t very flush. Can you use this ten bucks?’

Gene took the bill disdainfully — oh, he took it, just the same! — and without thanks headed for the door.

‘Gene!’ wailed Sara.

‘Well?’

‘Can’t we help you with your baggage?’

‘Baggage? You’re very funny, Comrade Cornplow!’ Gene snarled. ‘My baggage consists of two suitcasefuls — one of them books — which is what I have to show for my twenty-seven years — six of ’em spent in either being beaten by cops, or enduring middle-class females playing at being free souls, like you!’