Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/402

 mentalists Witch Hunters?" at Central Labor Hall, auspices of the League for Free Science.

"Bully! Fighting again! I've found that religion I've been looking for!"

He peered out for other posters. . . . They were all defaced.

At his hotel was a note, typed, anonymous: "We don't want you and your hellish atheism here. We can think for ourselves without any imported 'liberals.' If you enjoy life, you'd better be out of this decent Christian city before evening. God help you if you aren't! We have enough mercy to give warning, but enough of God's justice to see you get yours right if you don't listen. Blasphemers get what they ask for. We wonder if you would like the feeling of a blacksnake across your lying face? The Committee."

Frank had never known physical conflict more violent than boyhood wrestling. His hand shook. He tried to sound defiant with: "They can't scare me!"

His telephone, and a voice: "This Shallard? Well this is a brother preacher speaking. Name don't matter. I just want to tip you off that you'd better not speak tonight. Some of the boys are pretty rough."

Then Frank began to know the joy of anger.

The hall of his lecture was half filled when he looked across the ice-water pitcher on the speaker's table. At the front were the provincial intellectuals, most of them very eager, most of them dreadfully poor: a Jewish girl librarian with hungry eyes, a crippled tailor, a spectacled doctor sympathetic to radical disturbances but too good a surgeon to be driven out of town. There was a waste of empty seats, then, and at the back a group of solid, prosperous, scowling burghers, with a leonine man who was either an actor, a congressman, or a popular clergyman.

This respectable group grumbled softly, and hissed a little as Frank nervously began.

America, he said, in its laughter at the "monkey trial" at Dayton, did not understand the veritable menace of the Fundamentalists' crusade. ("Outrageous!" from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches. We might live to see