‘You a wobbly?'

‘You a wobbly?’
‘Sure I am, you dirty yellow…,’he began.
The sheriff came up and hauled off to hit him. ‘Look out, he’s got glasses on.’ A big hand pulled his glasses off. ‘We’ll fix that. ‘Then the sheriff punched him in the nose with his fist. ‘Say you ain’t.?
Ben’s mouth was full of blood . He set his jaw. ?He’s a kike, hit him a again for me.’
‘Say you ain’t a wobbly.? Somebody whacked a rifle barrel against his shins and fell forward. ‘Run for it,’ they were yelling. Blows with clubs and rifle buts were splitting his ears.
He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped on a rail and fell, cutting his arm on something sharp. There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn’t see. A heavy boot was kicking him again and again on the side. He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Somebody was holding him up under the arms and was dragging him free of the cattle guard on the track. Another fellow began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief . He heard Bram’s voice way off somewhere, ‘We’re over the county line, boys.’ What with losing his glasses and the rain and the night and the shooting pain all up and his back Ben couldn’t see anything. He heard shots behind them and yells from where other guys were running the gantlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of wobblies making their way down the railroad track. ?Fellow workers.’ Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, ‘we must never forget this night.’
At he interurban trolley station they took up a collection among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk the thirty miles back to Seattle.
Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so dopey he barely knew what was happening when they brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Evertett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At General Delivery he found a letter from Gladys, enclosing fifty dollars and saying his father wanted him to come home.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos