Then I heard a crash behind me, and a clatter of falling glass; I turned to see a soldier, inside the Royal Hotel, engaged in chopping out the plate-glass window of the lobby with a chair.  There were twenty or thirty uniformed men behind him, who wanted to get out and see the fun; but the door of the hotel was blocked by the crowd, so they were seeking a direct route to the goal of their desires.

I knew, of course, there was nothing I could do; one might as well have tried to stop a hurricane by blowing one’s breath.  Carpenter had wanted martyrdom, and now he was going to get it—­of the peculiar kind and in the peculiar fashion of our free and independent and happy-go-lucky land.  We have had many agitators and disturbers of our self-satisfaction, and they have all “got theirs,” in one form or another; but there had never been one who had done quite so much to make himself odious as this “Bolsheviki prophet,” who was now “getting his.”  “Treat ’em rough!” runs the formula of the army; and I fell in step, watching, and thinking that later I might serve as one of the stretcher-bearers.

Half way down the block we came to the Palace Hotel, and uniformed men came pouring out of that.  I heard the shrieks of a woman, and put my foot on the edge of a store-window, and raised myself up by an awning, to see over the heads of the crowd.  Half a dozen rowdies had got hold of a girl; I don’t know what she had done—­maybe her skirts were too short, or maybe she had been saucy to one of the gang; anyhow, they were tearing her clothes to shreds, and having done this gaily, they took her on their shoulders, and ran her out to the wagon, and tossed her up beside the Red Prophet.  “There’s a girl for you!” they yelled; and the drunken fellow who wanted Carpenter to cure him, suddenly thought of a new witticism:  “Hey, you goddam Bolsheviki, why don’t you nationalize her?” Men laughed and whooped over that; some of them were so tickled that they danced about and waved their arms in the air.  For, you see, they knew all the details concerning the “nationalization of women in Russia,” and also they had read in the papers about Mary Magna, and Carpenter’s fondness for picture-actresses and other gay ladies.  He stretched out his hand to the girl, to save her from falling off; and at this there went up such a roar from the mob, that it made me think of wild beasts in the arena.  So to my whirling brain came back the words that Carpenter had spoken:  “It is Rome!  It is Rome!  Rome that never dies!”

The cortege came to the “Hippodrome,” which is our biggest theatre, and which, like everything else, had declared open house for Brigade members during the convention.  Some one in the crowd evidently knew the building, and guided the procession down a side street, to the stage-entrance.  They have all kinds of shows in the “Hippodrome,” and have a driveway by which they bring in automobiles, or war-chariots, or wild animals in cages, or whatever they will.  Now the mob stormed the entrance, and brushed the door-keepers to one side, and unbolted and swung back the big gates, and a swarm of yelling maniacs rushed the lumbering prairie-schooner up the slope into the building.