100%: The Story of a Patriot | Page 2

her pantry?
And it was only that one ridiculous circumstance which had brought
Peter to his present misery. But for that he might have had his lunch of
bread and dried herring and weak tea in the home of the shoe-maker's
wife, and might have still been busy with his job of stirring up
dissension in the First Apostolic Church, otherwise known as the Holy
Rollers, and of getting the Rev. Gamaliel Lunk turned out, and
Shoemaker Smithers established at the job of pastor, with Peter Gudge
as his right hand man.
Always it had been like that, thru Peter's twenty years of life. Time
after time he would get his feeble clutch fixed upon the ladder of
prosperity, and then something would happen--some wretched thing
like the stealing of a fried doughnut--to pry him loose and tumble him
down again into the pit of misery.
So Peter walked along, with his belt drawn tight, and his restless blue
eyes wandering here and there, looking for a place to get a meal. There
were jobs to be had, but they were hard jobs, and Peter wanted an easy
one. There are people in this world who live by their muscles, and
others who live by their wits; Peter belonged to the latter class; and had
missed many a meal rather than descend in the social scale.
Peter looked into the faces of everyone he passed, searching for a

possible opening. Some returned his glance, but never for more than a
second, for they saw an insignificant looking man, undersized,
undernourished, and with one shoulder higher than the other, a weak
chin and mouth, crooked teeth, and a brown moustache too feeble to
hold itself up at the corners. Peters' straw hat had many straws missing,
his second-hand brown suit was become third-hand, and his shoes were
turning over at the sides. In a city where everybody was "hustling,"
everybody, as they phrased it, "on the make," why should anyone take a
second glance at Peter Gudge? Why should anyone care about the
restless soul hidden inside him, or dream that Peter was, in his own
obscure way, a sort of genius? No one did care; no one did dream.
It was about two o'clock of an afternoon in July, and the sun beat down
upon the streets of American City. There were crowds upon the streets,
and Peter noticed that everywhere were flags and bunting. Once or
twice he heard the strains of distant music, and wondered what was
"up." Peter had not been reading the newspapers; all his attention bad
been taken up by the quarrels of the Smithers faction and the Lunk
faction in the First Apostolic Church, otherwise known as the Holy
Rollers, and great events that had been happening in the world outside
were of no concern to him. Peter knew vaguely that on the other side of
the world half a dozen mighty nations were locked together in a grip of
death; the whole earth was shaken with their struggles, and Peter had
felt a bit of the trembling now and then. But Peter did not know that his
own country had anything to do with this European quarrel, and did not
know that certain great interests thruout the country had set themselves
to rouse the public to action.
This movement had reached American City, and the streets had broken
out in a blaze of patriotic display. In all the windows of the stores there
were signs: "Wake up, America!" Across the broad Main Street there
were banners: "America Prepare!" Down in the square at one end of the
street a small army was gathering--old veterans of the Civil War, and
middle-aged veterans of the Spanish War, and regiments of the state
militia, and brigades of marines and sailors from the ships in the harbor,
and members of fraternal lodges with their Lord High Chief Grand
Marshals on horseback with gold sashes and waving white plumes, and

all the notables of the city in carriages, and a score of bands to stir their
feet and ten thousand flags waving above their heads. "Wake up
America!" And here was Peter Gudge, with an empty stomach, coming
suddenly upon the swarming crowds in Main Street, and having no
remotest idea what it was all about.
A crowd suggested one thing to Peter. For seven years of his young life
he had been assistant to Pericles Priam, and had traveled over America
selling Priam's Peerless Pain Paralyzer; they had ridden in an
automobile, and wherever there was a fair or a convention or an
excursion or a picnic, they were on hand, and Pericles Priam would
stop at a place where the crowds were thickest, and ring a dinner bell,
and deliver his super-eloquent message to humanity--the elixir of life