y; another
poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from
the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which
he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while
others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And
at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey
marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were
using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town
knew that a plague was upon them.

Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of
life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new
lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke
the sound of hurrying feet--always the feet of the young men. For Youth
goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade.
So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when
existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when
a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over,
there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with
archaic ideas of morality--ideas perhaps of property and morals that
were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust,
and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden,
golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our
civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and
the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these
hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger,
played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found
their danger in fighting for free speech, and free assemblage. They were
tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with
his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult
which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war
comes.

And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of
Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad
sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men
laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon
on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Constitution of the United
States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of