HOW IN THE LATTER PART OF JULY BLACK HAWK BOONE IS OPENLY LYNCHED AND JAMES KOPENSKY MYSTERIOUSLY STABBED ON THE SAME EVENING. HOW THREE MONTHS LATER THERE IS NO SIGN THAT EITHER MURDER WILL BE PUNISHED. HOW THE GOLDEN BOOK APPEARS ON THE MYSTIC DAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2018 AND HOW, WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO THE MOURNING AVANEL, SHE TAKES COURAGE AND LEADS HER PEOPLE AGAINST SINGAPORE, THAT WICKED NATION, THAT HAS DECLARED WAR ON THE WORLD FLAG.  
July 22, 2018:—This morning owing to new utterances on the part of Sparrow Short and two others, more venomous than himself, brothers of “Beau Nash,” he and they are put into the International Prison for world treason, with all further bail and bond refused. Therefore tonight there is a great torch-parade and ritual by St. Friend and his followers in the cathedral. Debs, John Brown, Lovejoy, Liebknecht, are invoked. Springfield’s fury, glory, and devotion are in every face and eye. St. Friend, with unaccustomed 288fire for these his days of feebler health, reviles the opinions of Short and his companions. But he demands their liberation in the name of the Constitution of the United States and Free Speech. St. Friend cries from the pulpit: “We preach not the low revolution, but the high revolution, not the massacre in the street, but the high unquenched torch of freedom and free speech in the unconsumed cathedral.”
The smoke of those torches comes between me and St. Friend. Everything on this day happens to me in such a fashion. There is much dust on the dustless streets, at least when I pass by. And many streets are unaccountably deserted, morning and afternoon, though there is a World’s Fair crowd roaring somewhere near, I know. And the dust that sweeps up with the autumn leaves from these streets has the taste of old years in it, and the grave. It seems, some moments, as though I can keep my eyes open no longer. I am not to take one step further. Some fate has forbidden me to glimpse more of my City. But there is that in my will and my soul that commands me to go forward one step further, and open my eyes for one moment longer.
And so through this evening I realize that, dimly and dizzily, the torches are being uplifted 289at the beginning of the star chiming hour.
Now the great Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is himself speaking in the cathedral, and, if he testifies for old Sparrow Short, who shall say that Short is a danger to the World Flag?
Michael says that just as freedom resides in the Declaration of Independence, in trial by jury, and the like, which are immemorial, crystallized institutions of the radicalism of ancient times, so radicals with new thoughts should have every chance with their torch in the church and not be forced to wave it in the street, and that “he is indeed glad this meeting is being held in this place, etc., etc.”
July 23:—Sparrow Short is left locked up and forgotten, for today there is a great war-music in the streets.
All Singapore is running amuck. The Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons are drilling double hours. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is firing his clan like an Arab Mahdi, preaching a new holy war. A new group of trumpeters are to the fore, blowing slender trumpets, all of them silver white, to frighten the Lord of Cocaine, trumpets whose cry is that of birds that the Singaporians 290hold accursed; the eagle, the turkey and the wild swan.
And to that music, there at Camp Lincoln, the maelstrom of cavalry goes on, round and round their gigantic mechanical toy, their simple childlike image of the earth, and its glow is turning to a glare as of a smelter-furnace door, or the blaze of a little planet, newly whirled off from the sun.
July 24:—War talk dies down and the whole town is full of hatred of its leaders and feverish silly rumors against them. More and more openly the small fry politicians of all factions seem to be justifying with reminiscent emphasis the lynching of Surto Hurdenburg as an heroic act of defiance of both the City Hall and the Board of Education. The actual responsibility for the lynching is shifted from this one to that one, but, whoever it was that led (if we are to believe the tone of the coffee houses) is a hero.
The fairly well-meaning leaders of the town, comprising the majority of both the Board of Education and the City Hall, are in new tremendous offices, administering the growing responsibilities of the World’s Fair and the war preparations also, and a gulf has been made between them and the people with 291whom they have been on gossiping terms heretofore.
The old war between the town and the gown seems revived, with this difference, that the natives of Springfield act like the University students, and the finest World’s Fair visitors seem the real citizens of the place, insulted at the deeds of the freshmen. The habit of turning every spare village green into a summer camp ground for passing tourists in automobiles, that has prevailed through the United States for a long time, has established in all the counties adjoining Springfield an enormous circle of village grounds, and here the great part of the Fair visitors camp by their own machines and come in to the show by day, by local transportation of all sorts. Their resentment of the frivolity of the rank and file of the city grows, and nightly they are the more appalled at the rumor as they chatter in their camps, that the Springfield mob intends to lynch wholesale the only people who have treated the Fair visitors with any degree of courtesy, namely:—the City Council and the Board of Education.
Whole streets of the city are suddenly deserted and the business houses closed, for this or that lightly given reason, and the next 292hour that street, under obscure leaders may be filled with a howling mob, that seems to be howling about nothing.
The slander still persists, with infinite variations, that the man who poisoned Drug Store Smith and Coffee House Kusuko did it at the direct instigation of old Boone. Such an action is indeed far from Boone’s nature. And this, all discredited leaders, in a panic for their personal safety, steadily maintain.
July 25:—I am again the Malay servant at the house of the Man from Singapore.
The death of Drug Store Smith and Coffee House Kusuko was exacted of the Mayor’s son by Montague Rock. It was an earnest of the sincerity of his conversion to the Singaporian cult. The Man from Singapore had nothing to do with it and, in fact, does not approve of the use of such a drastic initiation, “But who can control these zealous proselytes, these foreigners?” he says. The slandering of Boone, it appears, by the talk of the Man from Singapore with his daughter, is also the work of this fanatical convert, Montague Rock. It is not exactly the Singaporian way. But again “who can control these foreigners?”
July 26:—About the beginning of July, four men come to town, who took part in 293the burning alive of a negro in Chicago. The burning was provoked by a yellow journal’s account, giving hear-say evidence against the negro. Disturbing their minds not at all over the subsequent vindication of the black man, his executioners come to Springfield, intoxicated with their recent leadership, the first taste of public power they have ever known, the smell of burning flesh delighting their cannibal nostrils. They take odd jobs from Boone and profess to be his violent partizans. They are more violent than he desires or uses.
And so tonight, while I am chained in the body of the Malay body-servant, the news comes over the phone, particularly grieving the Man from Singapore, that Boone has been hanged from the same tree at the northwest corner of the State House ground, where Surto Hurdenburg was hanged on the twentieth of June. The four men from Chicago, who lead the mob, want to burn Boone to death, but the rest of the crowd insist on a hanging. The crowd is not composed of partizans of the City Hall. There are few people who were at the murder of Hurdenburg; according to the report over the phone, equally obscure members of all factions are represented.
294The Man from Singapore says he deeply regrets the death of Boone who was an honorable and open foe of Singapore. He almost weeps before the beautiful Mara and, as to what she thinks, I know not. He says that if he had had his way, Boone should have lived several years longer, but the fashions, even of proselytes in Springfield, are past finding out. “They are WHITE people, you know,” he says to Mara, “even if they are converted.”
Then he is gone to his writing room in the white tower of his house, and Mara sits waiting for Crawling Jim, who is due later this evening.
And here let it be recorded that, the Singaporian issue becoming more bitter, the towers of Springfield and all the principal cities of the United States have been painted white this last month, to drive out the more fanatical Singaporians. In complete harmony with this hysterical and fantastic and humorous procedure, Crawling Jim has been under the necessity of wearing a small white plume in his hat, or resigning his place as President of the Robin Redbreast Flying Club. Nothing is said among the members. Plumes begin to appear one at a time. Soon a majority have them. Jim put on his plume late yesterday. 295He values his supremacy in that flying club more than any victory in love or any dogma of religion.
But having had a part in the Judas tricks which have ended in the hanging of Boone, he knocks most confidently on the door tonight, when it is almost midnight, and I let him in. He carries in his hand the hat with the white plume.
He walks into the book-room most jauntily. There the deep eyed Mara awaits him with love. She is nestled among her books, just below her mother’s languid picture. She lifts slow eyes that are heavy with love. But she sees that white plume. And Jim has little time left in life to have the Malay nature explained to him, the brief tale of how they may run “amuck” without reason.
Mara cannot wait. Her dagger is out, and she is indeed running “amuck.” They reach the hall together, and she stabs him before the eyes of the green Glass Buddha. She stands stark and lonely above him, and screams for her father to come down from his writing room.
October 29:—The body of Crawling Jim was found in a shadow, near the tree where 296Boone was hanged, by the group of young Boones who came to take away the body of their kinsman............