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.

** 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.*

* 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 a