In the beginning
the shop irritated him, because it seemed an incongruous background
for the fiery young orator. But later on he joined the small open
forum in the back room, and perhaps for the first time in his idle
years he began to think. He had made the sacrifice of his luxurious
young life to go to war, had slept in mud and risked his body and
been hungry and cold and often frightfully homesick. And now it
appeared that a lot of madmen were going to try to undo all that he
had helped to do. He was surprised and highly indignant. Even a
handful of agitators, it seemed, could do incredible harm.
One night he and Willy Cameron slipped into a meeting of a Russian
Society, wearing old clothes, which with Willy was not difficult,
and shuffling up dirty stairs without molestation. They came away
thoughtful.
"Looks like it's more than talk," Pink said, after a time.
"They're not dangerous," Willy Cameron said. "That's talk. But it
shows a state of mind. The real incendiaries don't show their hand
like that."
"You think it's real, then?"
"Some boils don't come to a head. But most do."
It was after a mob of foreigners had tried to capture the town of
Donesson, near Pittsburgh, and had been turned back by a hastily
armed body of its citizens, doctors, lawyers and shop-keepers, that
a nebulous plan began to form in Willy Cameron's active mind.
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