The wagon rolled on; the
advance guard swept everything out of the way, scenery as well as
stage-hands and actors, and to the vast astonishment of an audience
of a couple of thousand people, the long string of rope-pullers
marched across the stage, and after them came the canvas-covered
vehicle with the red-painted letters, and the red-painted victim
clinging to the top. The khaki-clad swarm gathered about him,
raising their deafening chant: "Hi! Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet. Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet!"
I had got near enough so that I could see what happened. I don't
know whether Carpenter fainted; anyhow, he slipped from his perch,
and a score of upraised hands caught him. Some one tore down a
hanging from the walls of the stage set, and twenty or thirty men
formed a cirfcle about it, and put the prophet in the middle of it,
and began to toss him ten feet up into the air and catch him and
throw him again.
And that was all I could stand--I turned and went out by the rear
entrance of the theatre.
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