never occurred to me that they might have guessed wrong, while
the wise old world had guessed right. If the world was in step,
they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out of
step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must
be better than the judgment of the whole world because their
judgment pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just
like the judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red.

"Are there many of us where you come from?" the man asked.

"Many what?" I asked.

"Communists, communists," he said excitedly.

I wanted to please him, because we were now cracking the melons
and scooping out their luscious hearts. So I told him how many
comrades there were in each of the rolling mills where I had
worked. I had to invent the statistics out of my own head, but
that head was full of intellect, so I jokingly gave him a fine
array of figures. The fact was that there may have been an
addle-pated Red among the mill hands of that time, but if there
was I had never met him.

The figures that I furnished Comrade Bannerman surprised him. I
counted the seeds in each slice of watermelon and gave that as
the number of comrades in each mill. The number was too high.
Comrade Bannerman knew how many Reds there were in the country,
and it appeared that the few mills I had worked in contained
practically the whole communist party. He got rather excited and
said the numbers were growing faster than he had imagined. He had