Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/118

 place. (A shiver runs through her at the recollection.) Once I saw a picture of an execution in a prison yard It lasted only a few seconds. Then Olsen said a few words to his comrades and walked away, looking white as a ghost. The crowd opened up to let him pass through. Then the rest stood there for a while looking so strangely depressed and not knowing what to do. And at last they went in, one by one, bent and broken.


 * —Olsen wasn't allowed to go back to work?

leader, and it was his fault that they had held out as long as they did. And then Olsen began to look for work elsewhere, but none of the other companies would have anything to do with him.
 * —It was he who had been their

(shrugging his shoulders):—War is war.

a walk, I was stopped on the street by Olsen's wife. I tell you, the way she looked made my heart shrink within me. Her husband was completely broken down, she told me. And on top of it all he had taken to drink. Everything she and the children could scrape together, he spent on whiskey. She herself was so far gone with her eighth child that she would soon have to quit work Then I went home to my husband and begged and prayed him to take Olsen back and make a man of him again. It was the first time during our marriage that I saw him beside himself with rage. There came into his eyes such an evil expression that I wish I had never seen it, for I have never since been able to forget it entirely. But, of course, I guessed who was back of it. (With emphasis.) Then I did the most humiliating thing I have ever done: I went in secret to Heymann and pleaded for that discharged workman.
 * —A few months later, as I was taking