T-S and I had exchanged a few whispered words, and decided that we would take Carpenter to his place, which was a few miles in the country from Eternal City. He would be as safe there as anywhere I could think of. When we had got to the studios, we discharged our Klansmen, and arranged to send Old Joe to his home, and the three disciples to a hotel for the night; then I invited Carpenter to step into T-S's car. He had not spoken a word, and all he said now was, “I wish to be alone.” I answered: “I am taking you to a place where you may be alone as long as you choose.” So he entered the car, and a few minutes later T-S and I were escorting him into the latter's showy mansion.
We were getting to be rather scared now, for Carpenter's silence was forbidding. But again he said: “I wish to be alone.” We took him upstairs to a bed-room, and shut him in and left him—but taking the precaution to lock the door.
Downstairs, we stood and looked at each other, feeling like two school-boys who had been playing truant, and would soon have to face the teacher. “You stay here, Billy!” insisted the magnate. “You gotta see him in de mornin'! I von't!”
“I'll stay,” I said, and looked at my watch. It was after one o'clock. “Give me an alarm-clock,” I said, “because Carpenter wakes with the birds, and we don't want him escaping by the window.”
So it came about that at daybreak I tapped on Carpenter's door, softly, so as not to waken him if he were asleep. But he answered, “Come in;” and I entered, and found him sitting by the window, watching the dawn.
I stood timidly in the middle of the room, and began: “I realize, of course, Mr. Carpenter, that I have taken a very great liberty with you—”
“You have said it,” he replied; and his eyes were awful.
“But,” I persisted, “if you knew what danger you were in—”
Said he: “Do you think that I came to Mobland to look for a comfortable life?”
“But,” I pleaded, “if you only knew that particular gang! Do you realize that they had planted an infernal machine, a dynamite bomb, in that room? And all the world was to read in the newspapers this morning that you had been conspiring to blow up somebody!”
Said Carpenter: “Would it have been the first time that I have been lied about?”
“Of course,” I argued, “I know what I have done—”
“You can have no idea what you have done. You are too ignorant.”
I bowed my head, prepared to take my punishment. But at once Carpenter's voice softened. “You are a part of Mobland,” he said; “you cannot help yourself. In Mobland it is not possible for even a martyrdom to proceed in an orderly way.”
I gazed at him a moment, bewildered. “What's the good of a martyrdom?” I cried.
“The good is, that men can be moved in no other way; they are in t............