Free Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner

bum,
    And his engine and its bearings they were all out of plumb …
    But now Joe is jerked out of the embarrassment that has held him stiffly, for like a chorus that has been rehearsed, a dozen people in the audience come in.
    CASEY JONES kept his junkpile running,
    CASEY JONES was working double time …
    “See?” McGibbeney says in Joe’s ear. “By God, I knew it the minute I heard it first!”
    Davis roars out the second chorus. The whole theater is coming in, even Joe Hillstrom, having the song dragged out of him by the exuberant will of the people in the dark around him and the waving arms of the two vaudevillians.
    But Joe is sweating, and almost before the last chorus he is standing, sidling his way to the aisle. Davis and McGibbeney are behind him, and out in the glare of the afternoon street they look at him curiously. “We should’ve stuck,” McGibbeney says. “They encored those guys twice last night.”
    “How’d they get it?” Joe says.
    But the railroader lifts his hands. “I guess they just picked it out of the air. These vaudeville boys are sympathizers, but they just been in town four days.”
    “Damnedest thing I ever heard of,” Davis says. “You only wrote it a week ago.” He looks at Joe quickly. “I s’pose you could sue, if you wanted.”
    But McGibbeney looks at Joe with a wrinkled forehead. “Jesus, then they’d stop singin’ it. You don’t want them to do that.”
    In the popcorn-smelling entrance, his back against the posters advertising the Three Alegrettis, he stands apart from his own presence and his own laughter and his own companions, and through slightly narrowed eyes looks at something else. Something had been stirring in him ever since last Sunday, when they whistled and gave him a hand at the trainmen’s meeting. He knows perfectly what it is that he feels: pride, and a sense of power. There are things he can do and things he can be. He is already out in some current, and he can feel his bows swinging, his engines coming to life.
    Davis has said something. Joe looks at him and McGibbeney, opening his eyes wide, and what he says surprises him with the way it rings. “I didn’t write it for money,” he says. “I wrote it for the good of the working class.”
    Davis has hold of his hand, shaking it. “All right!” he says belligerently. “All right now, by God! I been laying off of you, but I’m not laying off any more. It’s just a bunch of god damn baloney that you ain’t wearing a button and carrying a card. How about it?”
    “I told you, I don’t like jails well enough to join the Wobblies.”
    “Horseshit,” Davis says. “You don’t have to work in any free-speech fights. There’s plenty of us that can’t do nothing else. You can do more good staying home and writing songs.”
    “Look what this one’s done in a week,” McGibbeney says.
    Davis is still shaking his hand. “The Wobblies are a singing outfit. You can stir up a hell of a lot of solidarity just with a good song, one with real militancy in it.”
    Joe is pretending to consider, but the current is already shoving him along. “Well, I’ve got no big objection,” he says, and instantly they have hold of him, steering him. It is pleasant to him to seehow they gloat over landing him; he is a prize, a triumph for them, somebody. The sense of being on the verge of something remarkable, and of being made for what is now to happen, is as palpable as the heat beating up from the sidewalk, but almost before he recognizes it for what it is he is hiding it, not to show it to the others. He walks quietly, smiling, and when Davis offers him the makings he makes a little foolish rhyme. He says,
    Smoke and snus I never use,
    I live on straight tobacco yuice,
    and is rewarded by their soft snorts that pretend to indicate disgust but actually indicate their recognition of his superior powers, their unenvious admiration. They take him on to the Wobbly hall, something special.
    It was late when he