The Iron Heel

N THE SHADOW OF SONOMA

Of myself, during this period, there is not much to say. For six months
I was kept in prison, though charged with no crime. I was a suspect—a
word of fear that all revolutionists were soon to come to know. But our
own nascent secret service was beginning to work. By the end of my
second month in prison, one of the jailers made himself known as a
revolutionist in touch with the organization. Several weeks later,
Joseph Parkhurst, the prison doctor who had just been appointed, proved
himself to be a member of one of the Fighting Groups.

Thus, throughout the organization of the Oligarchy, our own
organization, weblike and spidery, was insinuating itself. And so I was
kept in touch with all that was happening in the world without. And
furthermore, every one of our imprisoned leaders was in contact with
brave comrades who masqueraded in the livery of the Iron Heel. Though
Ernest lay in prison three thousand miles away, on the Pacific Coast, I
was in unbroken communication with him, and our letters passed
regularly back and forth.

The leaders, in prison and out, were able to discuss and direct the
campaign. It would have been possible, within a few months, to have
effected the escape of some of them; but since imprisonment proved no
bar to our activities, it was decided to avoid anything premature.
Fifty-two Congressmen were in prison, and fully three hundred more of
our leaders. It was planned that they should be delivered
simultaneously. If part of them escaped, the vigilance of the oligarchs
might be aroused so as to prevent the escape of the remainder. On the
other hand, it was held that a simultaneous jail-delivery all over the
land would have immense psychological influence on the proletariat. It
would show our strength and give confidence.

So it was arranged, when I was released at the end of six months, that
I was to disappear and prepare a secure hiding-place for Ernest. To
disappear was in itself no easy thing. No sooner did I get my freedom
than my footsteps began to be dogged by the spies of the Iron Heel. It
was necessary that they should be thrown off the track, and that I
should win to California. It is laughable, the way this was
accomplished.

Already the passport system, modelled on the Russian, was developing. I
dared not cross the continent in my own character. It was necessary
that I should be completely lost if ever I was to see Ernest again, for
by trailing me after he escaped, he would be caught once more. Again, I
could not disguise myself as a proletarian and travel. There remained
the disguise of a member of the Oligarchy. While the arch-oligarchs
were no more than a handful, there were myriads of lesser ones of the
type, say, of Mr. Wickson—men, worth a few millions, who were adherents
of the arch-oligarchs. The wives and daughters of these lesser
oligarchs were legion, and it was decided that I should assume the
disguise of such a one. A few years later this would have been
impossible, because the passport system was to become so perfect that
no man, woman, nor child in all the land was unregistered and
unaccounted for in his or her movements.

When the time was ripe, the spies were thrown off my track. An hour
later Avis Everhard was no more. At that time one Felice Van Verdighan,
accompanied by two maids and a lap-dog, with another maid for the
lap-dog,[1] entered a drawing-room on a Pullman,[2] and a few minutes
later was speeding west.

[1] This ridiculous picture well illustrates the heartless conduct of
the masters. While people starved, lap-dogs were waited upon by maids.
This was a serious masquerade on the part of Avis Everhard. Life and
death and the Cause were in the issue; therefore the picture must be
accepted as a true picture. It affords a striking commentary of the
times.

[2] Pullman—the designation of the more luxurious railway cars of
the period and so named from the inventor.

The three maids who accompanied me were revolutionists. Two were
members of the Fighting Groups, and the third, Grace Holbrook, entered
a group the following year, and six months later was executed by the
Iron Heel. She it was who waited upon the dog. Of the other two, Bertha
Stole disappeared twelve years later, while Anna Roylston still lives
and plays an increasingly important part in the Revolution.[3]

[3] Despite continual and almost inconceivable hazards, Anna Roylston
lived to the royal age of ninety-one. As the Pococks defied the
executioners of the Fighting Groups, so she defied the executioners of
the Iron Heel. She bore a charmed life and prospered amid dangers and
alarms. She herself was an executioner for the Fighting Groups, and,
known as the Red Virgin, she became one of the inspired figures of the
Revolution. When she was an old woman of sixty-nine she shot “Bloody”
Halcliffe down in the midst of his armed escort and got away
unscathed. In the end she died peaceably of old age in a secret refuge
of the revolutionists in the Ozark mountains.

Without adventure we crossed the United States to California. When the
train stopped at Sixteenth Street Station, in Oakland, we alighted, and
there Felice Van Verdighan, with her two maids, her lap-dog, and her
lap-dog’s maid, disappeared forever. The maids, guided by trusty
comrades, were led away. Other comrades took charge of me. Within half
an hour after leaving the train I was on board a small fishing boat and
out on the waters of San Francisco Bay. The winds baffled, and we
drifted aimlessly the greater part of the night. But I saw the lights
of Alcatraz where Ernest lay, and found comfort in the thought of
nearness to him. By dawn, what with the rowing of the fishermen, we
made the Marin Islands. Here we lay in hiding all day, and on the
following night, swept on by a flood tide and a fresh wind, we crossed
San Pablo Bay in two hours and ran up Petaluma Creek.

Here horses were ready and another comrade, and without delay we were
away through the starlight. To the north I could see the loom of Sonoma
Mountain, toward which we rode. We left the old town of Sonoma to the
right and rode up a canyon that lay between outlying buttresses of the
mountain. The wagon-road became a wood-road, the wood-road became a
cow-path, and the cow-path dwindled away and ceased among the upland
pastures. Straight over Sonoma Mountain we rode. It was the safest
route. There was no one to mark our passing.

Dawn caught us on the northern brow, and in the gray light we dropped
down through chaparral into redwood canyons deep and warm with the
breath of passing summer. It was old country to me that I knew and
loved, and soon I became the guide. The hiding-place was mine. I had
selected it. We let down the bars and crossed an upland meadow. Next,
we went over a low, oak-covered ridge and descended into a smaller
meadow. Again we climbed a ridge, this time riding under red-limbed
madronos and manzanitas of deeper red. The first rays of the sun
streamed upon our backs as we climbed. A flight of quail thrummed off
through the thickets. A big jackrabbit crossed our path, leaping
swiftly and silently like a deer. And then a deer, a many-pronged buck,
the sun flashing red-gold from neck and shoulders, cleared the crest of
the ridge before us and was gone.

We followed in his wake a space, then dropped down a zigzag trail that
he disdained into a group of noble redwoods that stood about a pool of
water murky with minerals from the mountain side. I knew every inch of
the way. Once a writer friend of mine had owned the ranch; but he, too,
had become a revolutionist, though more disastrously than I, for he was
already dead and gone, and none knew where nor how. He alone, in the
days he had lived, knew the secret of the hiding-place for which I was
bound. He had bought the ranch for beauty, and paid a round price for
it, much to the disgust of the local farmers. He used to tell with
great glee how they were wont to shake their heads mournfully at the
price, to accomplish ponderously a bit of mental arithmetic, and then
to say, “But you can’t make six per cent on it.”

But he was dead now, nor did the ranch descend to his children. Of all
men, it was now the property of Mr. Wickson, who owned the whole
eastern and northern slopes of Sonoma Mountain, running from the
Spreckels estate to the divide of Bennett Valley. Out of it he had made
a magnificent deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopes
and glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. The
people who had owned the soil had been driven away. A state home for
the feeble-minded had also been demolished to make room for the deer.

To cap it all, Wickson’s hunting lodge was a quarter of a mile from my
hiding-place. This, instead of being a danger, was an added security.
We were sheltered under the very ægis of one of the minor oligarchs.
Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned aside. The last
place in the world the spies of the Iron Heel would dream of looking
for me, and for Ernest when he joined me, was Wickson’s deer-park.

We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool. From a cache behind
a hollow rotting log my companion brought out a variety of things,—a
fifty-pound sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils,
blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing material, a great
bundle of letters, a five-gallon can of kerosene, an oil stove, and,
last and most important, a large coil of stout rope. So large was the
supply of things that a number of trips would be necessary to carry
them to the refuge.

But the refuge was very near. Taking the rope and leading the way, I
passed through a glade of tangled vines and bushes that ran between two
wooded knolls. The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream.
It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the hottest summer
never dried it up. On every hand were tall wooded knolls, a group of
them, with all the seeming of having been flung there from some
careless Titan’s hand. There was no bed-rock in them. They rose from
their bases hundreds of feet, and they were composed of red volcanic
earth, the famous wine-soil of Sonoma. Through these the tiny stream
had cut its deep and precipitous channel.

It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed,
we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet. And then we came to the
great hole. There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor was
it a hole in the common sense of the word. One crawled through
tight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge,
peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet
in length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of
some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and
certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in
the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth
appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and
gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great
trees even sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some leaned over at
angles as great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered
straight up from the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.

It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came there, not even the
village boys of Glen Ellen. Had this hole existed in the bed of a
canyon a mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well
known. But this was no canyon. From beginning to end the length of the
stream was no more than five hundred yards. Three hundred yards above
the hole the stream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat
meadow. A hundred yards below the hole the stream ran out into open
country, joining the main stream and flowing across rolling and
grass-covered land.

My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast on
the other end lowered away. In no time I was on the bottom. And in but
a short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and
lowered them down to me. He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before
he went away called down to me a cheerful parting.

Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, John Carlson, a
humble figure of the Revolution, one of the countless faithful ones in
the ranks. He worked for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting
lodge. In fact, it was on Wickson’s horses that we had ridden over
Sonoma Mountain. For nearly twenty years now John Carlson has been
custodian of the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever
entered his mind during all that time. To betray his trust would have
been in his mind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a
degree that one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning
to him at all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in
his dim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and
imaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey orders, and he was
neither curious nor garrulous. Once I asked how it was that he was a
revolutionist.

“When I was a young man I was a soldier,” was his answer. “It was in
Germany. There all young men must be in the army. So I was in the army.
There was another soldier there, a young man, too. His father was what
you call an agitator, and his father was in jail for lese majesty—what
you call speaking the truth about the Emperor. And the young man, the
son, talked with me much about people, and work, and the robbery of the
people by the capitalists. He made me see things in new ways, and I
became a socialist. His talk was very true and good, and I have never
forgotten. When I came to the United States I hunted up the socialists.
I became a member of a section—that was in the day of the S. L. P. Then
later, when the split came, I joined the local of the S. P. I was
working in a livery stable in San Francisco then. That was before the
Earthquake. I have paid my dues for twenty-two years. I am yet a
member, and I yet pay my dues, though it is very secret now. I will
always pay my dues, and when the cooperative commonwealth comes, I will
be glad.”

Left to myself, I proceeded to cook breakfast on the oil stove and to
prepare my home. Often, in the early morning, or in the evening after
dark, Carlson would steal down to the refuge and work for a couple of
hours. At first my home was the tarpaulin. Later, a small tent was put
up. And still later, when we became assured of the perfect security of
the place, a small house was erected. This house was completely hidden
from any chance eye that might peer down from the edge of the hole. The
lush vegetation of that sheltered spot make a natural shield. Also, the
house was built against the perpendicular wall; and in the wall itself,
shored by strong timbers, well drained and ventilated, we excavated two
small rooms. Oh, believe me, we had many comforts. When Biedenbach, the
German terrorist, hid with us some time later, he installed a
smoke-consuming device that enabled us to sit by crackling wood fires
on winter nights.

And here I must say a word for that gentle-souled terrorist, than whom
there is no comrade in the Revolution more fearfully misunderstood.
Comrade Biedenbach did not betray the Cause. Nor was he executed by the
comrades as is commonly supposed. This canard was circulated by the
creatures of the Oligarchy. Comrade Biedenbach was absent-minded,
forgetful. He was shot by one of our lookouts at the cave-refuge at
Carmel, through failure on his part to remember the secret signals. It
was all a sad mistake. And that he betrayed his Fighting Group is an
absolute lie. No truer, more loyal man ever labored for the Cause.[4]

[4] Search as we may through all the material of those times that has
come down to us, we can find no clew to the Biedenbach here referred
to. No mention is made of him anywhere save in the Everhard
Manuscript.

For nineteen years now the refuge that I selected had been almost
continuously occupied, and in all that time, with one exception, it has
never been discovered by an outsider. And yet it was only a quarter of
a mile from Wickson’s hunting-lodge, and a short mile from the village
of Glen Ellen. I was able, always, to hear the morning and evening
trains arrive and depart, and I used to set my watch by the whistle at
the brickyards.[5]

[5] If the curious traveller will turn south from Glen Ellen, he will
find himself on a boulevard that is identical with the old country
road seven centuries ago. A quarter of a mile from Glen Ellen, after
the second bridge is passed, to the right will be noticed a barranca
that runs like a scar across the rolling land toward a group of wooded
knolls. The barranca is the site of the ancient right of way that in
the time of private property in land ran across the holding of one
Chauvet, a French pioneer of California who came from his native
country in the fabled days of gold. The wooded knolls are the same
knolls referred to by Avis Everhard.
The Great Earthquake of 2368 A.D. broke off the side of one of
these knolls and toppled it into the hole where the Everhards made
their refuge. Since the finding of the Manuscript excavations have
been made, and the house, the two cave rooms, and all the
accumulated rubbish of long occupancy have been brought to light.
Many valuable relics have been found, among which, curious to
relate, is the smoke-consuming device of Biedenbach’s mentioned in
the narrative. Students interested in such matters should read the
brochure of Arnold Bentham soon to be published.
A mile northwest from the wooded knolls brings one to the site of
Wake Robin Lodge at the junction of Wild-Water and Sonoma Creeks.
It may be noticed, in passing, that Wild- Water was originally
called Graham Creek and was so named on the early local maps. But
the later name sticks. It was at Wake Robin Lodge that Avis
Everhard later lived for short periods, when, disguised as an
agent-provocateur of the Iron Heel, she was enabled to play with
impunity her part among men and events. The official permission to
occupy Wake Robin Lodge is still on the records, signed by no less
a man than Wickson, the minor oligarch of the Manuscript.