THE RISING OF THE TIDE
THE STORY OF SABINSPORT
BY
IDA M. TARBELL
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
All rights reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1919
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1919
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THE RISING OF THE TIDE
HOW THE WAR CAME TO SABINSPORT
CHAPTER I
"The town is going to the Devil, and the worst of it is nobody will
admit it. You won't. You sit there and smile at me, as if you didn't
mind having Jake Mulligan and Reub Cowder pry open ballot boxes. You
know those two birds are robbing this village every hour of the day.
Nobody with pep enough to sit up and fight 'em. Rotten selfishness,
that's what ails this town. People getting rich here and spending their
money in the city. Women won't even buy their hats here--starving the
stores. Can't support a decent theater--don't bring a good singer once
a year. Everybody goes to the city, and we have to feed on movies.
"Try to raise an issue, and you get laughed at. Treated like a kid.
Tell me to 'cut it out,' not disturb things. Nice place for a man who'd
like to help a community! I'm going to get out. Can't stand it. Honest,
Dick, I'm losing my self-respect."
"Wrong, Ralph. You're spoiling for a fresh turn with the muck rake. You
can't make a garden with one tool. You must have several. I'm serious.
You're like the men in the mines that will tackle but one job, always
swing a pick. The muck rake did its job in Sabinsport for some time.
You've got to pass on to the next tool."
"I don't get you. You're like all the rest. You're lying down. I'm
ashamed of you, Parson. Get out of here. You'll end in corrupting me."
"No, only persuading you that taking a city calls for more weapons than
one."
Silence fell for a moment. Ralph Gardner was tired. Getting out the
daily issue of the Sabinsport _Argus_ was, as he often said, "Some
job." To be your own editor-in-chief, leader writer, advertising agent
and circulation manager for the only daily in a town of 15,000 or more
means hard work and a lot of it. Ralph loved it, "ate it up," they said
in the shop. It was only when calm settled over Sabinsport and he felt
no violent reaction from his spirited attacks on town iniquities that
he was depressed. This was one of these periods. The year before he had
fought and won for the Progressive Party of the District a smashing
victory. He was eager to follow it up with attacks on the special
grafts of the two men who for years had run the town and vicinity. He
had ousted their candidates from the County and State tickets. He meant
to wrest the town from them, but he couldn't get the support he needed.
The town had lain down on him. He didn't understand it and it fretted
him.
Now here was his best and wisest friend, advising waiting. He hung his
handsome head in sulky silence.
"What a boy!" thought the Reverend Richard Ingraham. They were the best
of friends, this eager, active, confident young editor and this cool,
humorous-eyed, thoughtful young parson. Wide apart in birth, in type of
education, in their contacts with the world, they were close in a love
of decency and justice, in contempt for selfishness and vulgarity. Both
were accidents in Sabinsport, and so looked at the town in a more or
less detached way. This fact, their instinctive trust and liking for
each other, and the clinching force of the great tragedy in which they
had first met had made them friends.
Ralph Gardner was only 28. He had graduated six years before at a
Western university where for the moment the sins of contemporary
business and politics absorbed the interest of the greater part of
faculty and students. There was a fine contempt for all existing
expressions of life, a fine confidence in their power to create social
institutions as well as forms of art which would sweep the world of
what they called the "worn out." Whatever their professions, they went
forth to lay bare the futility and selfishness and greed of the present
world. They had no perspective, no charity, no experience, but they had
zeal, courage, and the supporting vision of a world where no man knew
want, no woman dragged a weary life through factory or mill, no child
was not busy and happy.
Never has there poured into the country a group more convinced of its
own righteousness and the essential selfishness of all who did not see
with their eyes or share their confidence in the possibility of
regeneration through system. Like revolutionists in all ages they felt
in themselves the power to make over the world and like them they
carried their plans carefully diagramed in their pockets.
Gardner was one of the first of the crop of St. Georges in his
university. He had chosen journalism for his profession. He began at
the bottom on an important Progressive journal of a big Western city.
He worked up from cub reporter to a desk in the editor's room. But he
chafed at the variety of things which occupied the editorial attention,
at the tendency to confine reform to an inside page or even drop it
altogether. There were moments when he suspected his crusading spirit
was regarded as a nuisance. And finally in a fit of disgust and zeal he
put his entire inheritance into the Sabinsport _Argus_.
Ralph had a real reason in buying the _Argus_. The town was ruled by
two of the cleverest men in the State, giving him a definite enemy. It
was not so large but what, as he planned it, he could know every man,
woman and child in it. It had the varied collection of problems common
to a prosperous Middle-West town, settled at the end of the eighteenth
century, and later made rich by coal mines and iron mills. Ralph saw in
Sabinsport a perfect model of the dragon he was after, a typical union
of Business and Politics, a typical disunion of labor and capital. It
was to be his laboratory. His demonstration of how to make a perfect
town out of a rotten one should be a model for the world.
In his ambitions and his attacks Richard Ingraham had been his steady
backer, and at the same time his surest brake. It would be too much to
say that he had always kept him from running his head into stone walls,
but the Parson had never failed Ralph even when he made a fool of
himself. He never had shown or felt less interest because often the
young editor ignored his advice. The relation between the two had grown
steadily in confidence and affection. A regular feature of their day
was an hour together in Ralph's office after the paper was on the
press, and he was getting his breath. They were spending this hour
together now, a late afternoon hour of July 28, 1914. It was a pleasant
place to talk on a hot afternoon. The second floor back of the
three-story building which housed the _Argus_ opened by long windows on
to a wide veranda, a touch of the Southern influence in building which
was still to be seen in several places in the town. The Parson had been
quick to see that this veranda properly latticed would make a capital
workroom for Ralph in the summer, and had by insistence overcome the
young editor's indifference to his surroundings, and secured for him a
cool and quiet office and a delightful summer lounging room. Here they
were sitting now, Ralph's feet on the veranda railing, his head
hanging--dejection in every muscle.
"Ralph," said the Rev. Richard, "it's your method of attack not your
cause, I doubt. I don't believe you can win by going at this thing in
your usual way. You must find a new approach. Mulligan and Cowder are
no fools, and if you open on them from your old line, they'll be ready
for you."
"There's only one way to do this thing," Ralph shouted hotly. "Show 'em
up. Shame the town for tolerating them, fight them to a finish. If I
could get the proofs that they opened those ballot boxes, do you
suppose I'd be quiet? Not on your life."
"You won't get the proof."
"You mean you won't help me to get it?"
"I do."
The Rev. Richard could be very final and very disarming. Ralph knew he
could not count on him for help in tracing the gossip. He did not
suspect what was true, that his friend knew even the details of the bit
of law-breaking Jake Mulligan had carried out. It had come to him by
the direct confession of one of his young Irish friends, Micky
Flaherty. Micky had listened at the Boys' Club, which Ingraham ran, to
a clear and forceful explanation of why the ballot box must be sacred.
He had given the talk at the first rumor that there had been a raid on
the ballot box by Jake, for the direct purpose of finding exactly how
the town stood towards giving him and Reuben Cowder in perpetuity the
water, gas and electric light franchises, which they had secured long
before Sabinsport dreamed of their importance. He had thought it
entirely probable that the rumor was founded on truth, also quite
probable that one or more of the likely young politicians in his club
had been used as a go-between.
His talk did more than he had even dreamed. Micky was struck with
guilt. He was a good Catholic, and confession was necessary to his
peace of mind. It was not to the priest, but to Dick, he went; telling
him in detail, and with relish too, it must be acknowledged, how at
midnight he alone had stolen from the clerk's office in the town hall
the ballot boxes, and how he had worked with Jake and two or three
faithful followers, carefully piecing together the torn ballots, until
a complete roster of the election was tabulated. When this nice piece
of investigation was finished and thoroughly finished, Micky had
returned the boxes.
Ingraham had never for a moment considered a betrayal of Micky's
confession. For one reason, he was keen enough to know it would be
useless. Micky's sense of guilt might recognize the confessional, but
it did not, and would not, recognize the witness stand. He had no
intention of giving his friend the slightest help in unearthing the
scandal. He was convinced, as he told him, that a new form of attack
must be found.
"You're a queer one, Dick," fretted Ralph. "You don't believe for a
moment that Jake and Reub are anything but a pair of pirates. You
aren't afraid. What is it?"
"I suppose, Ralph, it is partly because I _like_ Jake and don't despair
of him."
"Like him! Like him! Do you know what he calls your mission over on the
South Side--sacrilegious rascal. He calls it the Holy Coal Bin. Nice
way to talk about a man who saved a neighborhood from freezing to death
because he's too blamed obstinate and narrow to listen to the leaders
of his own workingmen. 'Runs his business to suit himself!' Think of
that in this day! Those men and women would have died of cold if you
hadn't turned your club basement into coal bins. And now he laughs at
you."
"Do you know who paid for that coal; most of it at least?" asked
Ingraham.
"You did, confound you. Of course you did. Everybody knows that."
"No, three quarters of it Jake paid for, on condition I wouldn't tell
the men. Couldn't see them suffer. Jake has possibilities. And then
there is Jack. You know how he loves that boy. You know how fine and
able Jack is. He has already swung the old man into modernizing the
'Emma.' If we will stand by him, I believe in time he will have
reformed his father. Give him a chance at least. If you don't do that,
I am certain that eventually you will drive Jack himself away from you,
and we must not lose Jack. Moreover, you have got to remember that Jake
and Reuben made this town."
"Nothing to recommend them in that," Ralph growled. "They own it from
the ground to the electric wires; and they use it twenty-four hours out
of the day--and then some."
"Listen, Ralph. It was Jake Mulligan who opened the coal mines, and for
years almost starved while he brought them to a paying point. It was
Reuben Cowder that brought in the railroad to carry out the coal. This
town never would have had the railroad if it had not been for Cowder.
You know perfectly well how little help either man has had from the old
timers. Everything that is modern here has come through those two men.
Moreover, they love Sabinsport. Did you ever hear of Jake's celebration
when the water works were finished in the '90's? He is never done
talking about the water works. His wife used to say he celebrated them
every time he turned a tap--water for turning a tap to a man who had
carried every gallon in buckets from a spring by the barn for years and
years! Pure water to a man who had seen a town he loved swept by
typhoid! You ought to realize what it took for him to bring that about;
you who are trying to do things here now. He could not budge the town.
He and Reuben practically put up the money for the water. They had
learned by the epidemic what bad water meant. They argued that towns
subject to typhoid would finally be shunned, and they put through the
waterworks with nine-tenths of the respectable men and women against
them. Afraid of taxes! The town argued that it would not happen again,
and that anyway it was the will of the Lord! Of course they bought
votes to put it through, and of course they own the franchise, and of
course they have made money. I don't defend their methods, but I can't
help feeling that Sabinsport owes them something.
"It is the same story about gas and electricity and trolleys. These two
men have planned and fought and bought and put things through, while
the respectable have been afraid to go ahead, lest they should lose
something. Now the respectable grumble. I must think that
respectability and thrift are largely responsible for Jake and Reuben."
"Confound your historical sense, Dick; it is always slowing you up. If
you would concentrate on the present, you would be the greatest asset
this town ever had."
"Drop it, Ralph. What's the news?"
"There it is--more interested in a pack of quarreling Dagoes 5,000
miles away than living things at home. What's the use when your best
friend's like that? What has it got to do with us in Sabinsport if
Austria has declared war on Serbia--what's Serbia anyhow? A little
worn-out, scrappy country without a modern notion in its head."
"Do you mean," cried Dick, springing up, "that Austria has declared
war?"
"That's what this says. It just came in,"--flinging a yellow sheet
across the table.
"My God! Man, don't you know what that means?"
"Well, I suppose it might mean a good-sized war, but I don't believe
it. They'll pull things out; always have before, ever since I can
remember. What if Germany gets in, as you said it would be the other
day; what's that? They'll clean up a little affair like Serbia quick
enough; teach her to stop running around with a chip on her shoulder.
And no matter, I tell you, Parson; it's nothing to Sabinsport, and
Sabinsport is our business. If the world is to be made decent, you've
got to begin at home. Don't come bothering me about wars in Europe!
I've got war enough if I root out Mulligan and Cowder."
But the parson wasn't listening. His face was whiter than usual, and
its lines had grown stern. "Good night, Ralph," he said curtly; "just
telephone me to-night, will you, if there's more news. I think I'll go
out to the 'Emma' after supper."
The Reverend Richard walked down the street without seeing
people--something unheard of for him.
Tom Sabins, going home, said to his wife, "The parson is worried. Met
him and he didn't see me. Has anything happened at the mines, do you
know?"
But Mrs. Sabins said she hadn't heard of trouble. Maybe Micky had been
up to mischief again.
And they both laughed affectionately. The parson never looked worried,
they often had noticed, unless somebody had been very bad or there had
been an accident in mill or mine.
But it was not things at home that sent the parson blind and deaf down
the street. He was the one man in Sabinsport, outside of the keeper of
the fruit store and a half dozen miners over the hill, who had some
understanding of the awful possibilities of Austria's declaration of
war. His knowledge came from the years he had lived as a student in
England--the summers he had spent tramping through Middle Europe.
If Richard Ingraham's education had taken a different turn from that of
the average American youth, like Ralph Gardner, it still was a kind
common enough among us. What had been exceptional about it was the way
in which it had been intensified and lengthened by circumstances of
health and family. Dick was an orphan, whose youth had been spent with
his guardian, an elderly and scholarly man of means, in one of those
charming, middle-west towns settled early in the nineteenth century by
New Englanders, their severity tempered by a sprinkling of Virginians
and Kentuckians. Great Rock, as the town was called from a conspicuous
bluff on the river, was planned for a big city; but the railroad failed
it, and it remained a quiet town, where a few men and women ripened
into happy, dignified old age, but from which youth invariably fled.
Dick had lived there, until he entered college at seventeen, in one of
the finest of the old houses, set in big lawns, shaded by splendid,
sweeping elms. "The most beautiful elms in the United States are not in
New England," Dick used to tell his college friends, when they
exclaimed over campus elms. "They're in the Middle West." And he was
right.
Dick's guardian had set out to give the boy a thorough training in
those things he thought made for happiness and usefulness. He had read
with him from babyhood until Dick could no more go without books than
without food. He had started him early in languages. He had given him
horses, and, an unusual accomplishment, as Dick afterwards learned, had
trained him to walking. A tramping trip by the two of them had been one
of Dick's joys from the time he could remember. He did not know then
that his guardian had more than pleasure in view by these trips. It was
only later that he discovered that the regular outside life into which
he had been trained was the older man's wise way of counteracting a
possible development of the disease of which both his parents had died,
and which it was believed he had inherited.
When the time came, Dick had gone East to college, and from there he
was sent for two years or more of Europe, as his taste might dictate.
At the end of his first year his guardian had died. It left the boy
quite alone and wholly bewildered. He had never thought of life without
this firm, kind, wise, counseling power. He had done what had been
suggested, and always found joy in it. He had never really wanted
anything in life, as he could remember. His guardian had foreseen
everything. And now what was he? A boy of 23, with comfortable means, a
passion for reading, for travel and for people, and that was all. He
must have a profession. It was his need of a backing, as well as a
combination of æsthetic and the æsthete in him, with possibly something
of environment--for he happened to be at Oxford when news of his
guardian's death came--that decided him to go into the Church.
Dick worked hard in term time, but all his long and short holidays he
spent tramping Central Europe. This had been his guardian's request.
"You will come back some day to your own land to work, Richard. My own
judgment of you is that you will find your greatest interest in shaping
whatever profession you choose to meet the new forms of social progress
which each generation works out. I think this because you so love
people. You'll never be content, as I have been, with books and
solitude. I don't think you realize how full your life has been of
human relations, or how you have depended on them, so I urge you to go
among people in your holidays, common people, to be one of them; and do
not hurry your return. You are young. Take time to find your place."
Dick had faithfully followed this advice. He had spent six years in
Europe without returning to the United States. He was thirty when he
came back to take a church in a prosperous and highly energetic
community. One year had been enough. They kept him busy from morning
until night with their useful activities. To this he did not object;
but while so active he had been chilled to the bone by his failure to
get spiritual reactions from his parishioners. Moreover, he had been
unable to establish anything like companionship, as he had known it,
with any one in his church. He resigned, giving as his reason: "I am
not earning your money. I don't know how." It was a sad blow to more
than one member of St. Luke's, for while they were a little afraid of
him (which, if Dick had known, would have made a difference), they were
also enormously proud of him.
His failure turned him to Great Rock, which he had never had the heart
to visit since his guardian's death. There was a girl there he had
always carried in a shadowy way in his heart, the only girl he ever saw
in the dreams which sometimes disturbed him--a fair, frank, lovely
thing, he remembered her to have been, Annie Dunne. For the first time
in his life he wanted his mate. He couldn't face life again without
one. He would go and find her. Why, why, he asked himself, had he not
done this before? It was so clear that it was she that he needed. He
did not ask himself if he loved her. He knew he did. As for Annie's
loving him? Had he waited too long? Every mile of his journey westward
was filled with recollections of their youth, the summer evenings on
the veranda, the winter evenings by the fireside. And her letters,
never many, but how dear and friendly and intimate they had been! He
felt so sure of her, almost as if she were telling him, "I knew you
would come."
It was night when he reached Great Rock. He was always thankful that it
was in the dark that he heard the words at her door, "Miss Annie? Miss
Annie is dead. She was buried a week ago."
There was a blank space after that which Dick never tried to fill. All
he knew was that he pulled his courage together and took to the road,
Swiss bag on his back. He seemed to have no friend now but the road,
and more than once he caught himself announcing to the long winding
highways he followed eastward, "You're all I have."
He was in the hills that roll up from the Ohio in long, smooth billows,
forming lovely, varied valleys for the great streams that feed the
mighty river, and mounting always higher as you go toward the rising
sun, until finally they are mountains. A fine, old post road from the
East, one that had been fought over by French and Indians and British
and trod by Washington, was Dick's main route. He knew it well, for as
a boy he had more than once walked it with his guardian. Moreover, it
was by that road that half of Great Rock, his own family included, had
made their pioneer trip into what was then the West.
He often spent his night in an old inn, a relic of those days, with
thick walls, splendid woodwork and great rooms, but low and narrow
doors, built at a time when it was not wise to have too generous
entrances or too many windows.
Now and then he found one of the old places transformed into a modern
road-house, for the automobile was creating a demand for a kind of
accommodation the country had not needed since the passing of the stage
coach. Often he struck off the highway and made detours over wooded
hills and along little traveled roads. It was in returning from one of
these excursions that, late one September afternoon, he discovered
Sabinsport.
He had been quite lost all day and walking hard. As he came across a
valley and mounted a long winding hill, he saw by the growing thickness
of the settlement that he was approaching a town. He came upon it
suddenly as he went over the brow of the hill. It lay to right and
left, stretching down and over two natural terraces to a river which
formed here a great half moon. The whole beautiful, crystal curve was
visible from where Dick stood in charmed surprise. The town that filled
the mounting semicircle, in spite of its wealth of trees, could be
roughly traced. On the high slope which ran gently down from where he
stood were scores of comfortable houses of well-to-do folk, all of them
with generous lawns. They ran the American architectural gamut, Dick
guessed, for he could see from where he stood a big, square brick with
ancient white pillars, the front of a dark-brown, Washington Irving
Gothic, and the highly ornamental cupola which he knew meant the
fashionable style of the sixties. He was quite sure, if he looked, he
would find the whole succession. "There's a _nouveau_ art concealed
somewhere," he thought to himself, and later he found he was right.
The big houses became smaller as the slope descended, giving way for
what Dick guessed was a red brick business section. "It was once a
port," he said to himself. "The Ohio boats came up here, I wager."
From the south and opposite bank of the stream rose a steep bluff
perhaps two hundred feet high. Rows of unpainted houses ran along the
river bank and were scattered in a more or less haphazard way over the
face of the bluff; their ugliness softened by trees which grew in
abundance on the steep slopes. The most striking feature of the picture
was a great iron mill to the left. It filled acres of land along the
south river bank, its huge black stacks, from which smoke streamed
straight to the east, rose formal and imperative. They were amazingly
decorative in the soft, late September day, against the green of the
south bluff, and curiously dominating. "We are the strong things here,"
they said to him,--"the things to be reckoned with."
As Dick walked down the long hill looking for a hotel, he felt more of
his old joy in discovery, more of his old zestful curiosity than in
many a day. The beauty of the place, the strong note of distinction the
mills made in the picture, had finally stirred him. His interest was
further aroused when he walked straight up to the quaint front of the
Hotel Paradise. It was like things he had seen years before in the
South; a long, brick building with steep roof and tiny gables fronted
by narrow verandas with slender, girlish, iron pillars. The arched door
was perfect in its proportions, and the big stone hall was cool and
inviting. But once inside, Dick suddenly realized that somebody had had
the sense, while preserving all the quaintness of a building of at
least a hundred years before, so to fashion and enlarge it as to make a
thoroughly comfortable, modern hotel. His curiosity was piqued, though
it happened to be years before he learned how the Paradise had been
preserved.
The night brought Dick rest, but the morning found his flare of
interest dead. He made his pack with a dull need of moving on, and he
would have done so if, when he came into the office, he had not found
there a group of white-faced, horrified men. He caught the words, "On
fire." "One hundred and fifty men shut in." "No hope." A word of
inquiry and he learned that at a near-by coal mine, they spoke of as
the "Emma," there had been a terrible disaster. He learned too that
help of all sorts was being hurried to the place by the "spur," which,
as he rightly guessed, was the road connecting the mine with the main
line of the railroad which he had traced the night before along the
south bank of the river.
Dick drank a cup of coffee and followed a hurrying crowd to where an
engine and two coal cars rapidly filling with all the articles of
relief that on the instant could be gathered, were just ready to leave.
Quickly sensing the leader, a young man of not over twenty-five, Dick
said, "I'm a stranger, but I might be useful. I understand something of
relief work. I speak languages. I would be glad to go."
The man gave him an appraising look. "Jump in," he said curtly. A
moment later they were off.
The coal road ran from the river to the top of the bluff by a steep and
perilous grade. It came out on the plateau at least three miles from
the mines, but a mile and a half away they first saw the point of the
steel tipple of the power house over the main shaft. It all looked
peaceful enough to the straining eyes of the men on the flat car. It
was not until they were within a quarter of a mile of the place itself
that they caught the outline of the crowd that had gathered. Dick's
first thought was, "How quiet they are!" They were quiet, and there was
not a sound as the men bounded from the car and raced through to the
shaft itself. There a dreadful sight met their eyes. A dozen men were
being lifted from a cage that had just come up. It took but a glance to
see that they were dead or dying.
It was days later before Dick learned what had really happened. Like so
many ghastly mine accidents, the fire, for they found out it was fire
which was ravaging the mine, had come from a trivial cause, so trivial
that the miners themselves who were within reach and might easily have
put out the first flame had not taken the trouble. An open torch had
come in contact with a bit of oily rag. It had fallen, setting fire to
the refuse on a passing car. To that no one paid attention, for over it
were bundles of pressed hay; and the tradition in the mine is that
pressed hay will not burn.
The whole thing was ablaze before the men had realized what was
happening. There was no water on that level, and they had been ordered
to run the car into the escape shaft and dump it to the bottom, and
there to turn on the hose. So great was the smoke and heat from the
blazing stuff that the men below, who had promptly enough attacked it,
were driven back. The shaft was timbered, and before they knew it the
timbers were blazing. The smoke spread through the levels. A thing, so
easy to stop at the beginning, was now taking appalling proportions.
Men who had passed by the flames on their way to the 1:30 cage and had
not even stopped to lend a hand to put it out, so little had they
thought it necessary, felt the smoke before they reached the top. The
men below on the second and third levels began to run hither and yon,
trying to notify the diggers in the side shafts. A man more intelligent
than the others urged that the fan be stopped. It was done, but it was
too late. The fire was master.
A second load of men, the last to escape, had given the people at the
top a sense of the disaster. The mine manager had called for
volunteers. There had not been a minute's hesitation. Men crowded into
the cage, not all miners. Among them was a little-thought-of chap, an
Italian street vender. Another, the driver, who moved everybody who
came and went to the mines. They had gone down without hesitation.
Halfway down the smoke began to overpower them, but they went on. The
probability is that they were unconscious before they reached the
bottom, for only a feeble signal was given, and the engineer, not
understanding, did not respond. It was only when signals did not come,
and the now thoroughly frightened crowd had pleaded and then threatened
the engineer that he had brought up the cage. And now they were taking
them out--twelve dead men.
It was four days later when, through the combined efforts of both state
and federal mine experts, a picked body of men fitted out with the most
approved life-saving apparatus made their first trip into the burning
mine. The hours of waiting, Dick remembered as long as he lived. The
whole mining village, a motley collection of nationalities now fused
into one, stood around the shaft for four hours before the first signal
was given, a peremptory call to raise the cage. As it came up and the
few that were allowed at the shaft saw who were in it, such a shout of
exultant joy as Dick had never heard came from them, "They are alive!"
"They are alive!" And certainly here were men, believed to be dead,
alive, twelve of them, their pallor and wanness showing through their
blackened faces, too weak to walk; yet almost unaided, they tottered
out, and one after another dropped into the arms of women and children
who sobbed and shouted over them.
The news quickly spread, twenty men, who had walled themselves up had
been found alive after four days of waiting. They believed they would
get them all out alive. The cage descended and shortly after the signal
was given to raise, and eight more came up alive. Such a tremendous
burst of hope and joy as it is rarely given men to see spread through
the stricken crowd. If twenty were alive, might it not be that the
other hundred were? But it was not to be! The draft had aroused the
smoldering flames, and when the cage attempted again to descend sharp
signals were soon given. This time it was only the rescue party that
came up, and they were in various stages of collapse. The cry went out,
"She has broken out!" "She has broken out!" The reaction on the
stricken crowd, after its hours of hope and joy, was prostrating. Men
and women sobbed aloud. They knew too well that the reviving fire meant
that there was nothing to do but to seal the main shaft. No other way
to smother the fire. White-faced, heavy-hearted men did the work; and
it was not until ten days later that the experts on the ground
pronounced it safe to open the mine.
Through this long fortnight of agony and waiting, Dick stayed in the
settlement. From the time that he had bounded from the flat car with
the relief party there had never been a moment that he had not been
busy. The fact that he knew a little of everybody's language, enough to
make himself understood at least; the fact that he understood their
customs, had made many of the miners open their hearts to him in a way
which otherwise would have been impossible. Dick had that wonderful
thing, the ability to be at home with people of any sort or of any
nation. He seemed at once to the miners to be one of them in a way that
not even those in authority whom they had known longest could be.
But it was not only to the people that he had made himself a helpful
friend. In a hundred ways he had instinctively and unconsciously worked
with Jack Mulligan, the stern young man who had bid him to jump on the
flat car the morning that they had started from Sabinsport. Jack, he
had found, was the son of the man who had opened the mines, a man known
as "Jake," and, as Dick was to discover, a man notorious, but beloved.
Mining had been in the blood of Jack Mulligan. If he had had his way he
would have taken a pick at sixteen, and worked his way up. His mother,
long dead, had extracted a promise from her devoted but riotous husband
that Jack should have the best education the country would afford, if
he would take it. And because it was his mother's wish, he had taken
it; but he had turned it into the way of his own tastes. He had thrown
himself heartily into the work of the great technological institute to
which he had been sent. He had taken all of the special training as a
mining engineer that the country afforded, and he had studied the best
work of foreign mines. When he had come back at twenty-four to his own
home, it was the understanding that he was to be employed as a general
manager, not in any way to supplant the educated but tried men that had
grown up under his father, but, as he planned it, to modernize the mine.
Jack's heart was set on making the mines safe. No serious accident had
ever happened in them and to his father's mind that was proof enough
that no serious accident would ever happen, and the plans for lighting,
supporting and airing that Jack brought back he treated first with
contempt, then with a sort of fatherly tolerance, only yielding inch by
inch as he saw how much this boy, whom he adored and in whom his pride
was so great, had them at heart. Jack had finally brought his father to
consent to electrify the mines completely. The whole equipment had been
ordered. In a few months at least it would be in place, and now this
fearful thing had happened. No wonder that day after day as he went
about white and silent among the people, his heart was bitter, not
against his father, but against the horrible set of circumstances that
had led to the thing he had always feared and which he believed that he
was going to prevent. Dick little by little got the story, and his
sympathy with the boy was hardly more than he felt for the rugged, old
man, who, like Jack, never left the mining settlement, but followed his
son about in a beaten, dogged silent way which at times brought tears
to Dick's eyes.
The horror of the disaster brought scores of people to Sabinsport, and
every day they filled the little settlement. There were the Union
organizers; there was a score or more of reporters; there were
investigators of all degrees of intelligence and hysteria. Among these
Ralph circulated. He had bought the _Argus_ but a few months before the
disaster. His very lack of personal acquaintance with the stockholders,
officers or active managers of the mine left him without any of the
moderating personal feeling which a man who had long known the town
might have had. Ralph saw just one thing, that the two leading
stockholders in the "Emma," the men who had always run it, were the two
most unscrupulous and adroit politicians in that part of the world--the
two that he had set out from the start to "get." He felt that in the
mine disaster he had, as he said, "the goods." They, particularly Jake,
were responsible for this awful thing. And never a day that he did not
in the _Argus_ publish wrathful and indignant articles, trying to
arouse the community. He received no protest from his victims. Jake was
so overwhelmed by the disaster itself, so absorbed in what he knew his
son was going through, that the _Argus_ was hardly a pin prick to him.
It was Dick that discovered how hard it was for the old man. In that
hundred men who never came back alive there had been a full score that
had grown up with him, that had stood by always in the development of
the "Emma." They were the trusted men, the permanent, responsible men,
who, if they had not made money, were still in Jake's opinion his
greatest asset. And then they were his friends. With these burdens on
his heart, why should he mind a little thing like the _Argus_?
Almost immediately after the disaster, Dick found that the place was
swarming with claim agents, some of whom he instinctively felt were
untrustworthy. Familiar as he was with the whole theory of accident
compensation, he immediately informed himself about the laws of the
State. They were practically null. It was then that he went to Ralph
and laid before him the possibility of using this disaster as a means
of securing in the State a fair compensation law. And he said to him
very frankly, "I believe that if the Union leaders here, the better
class of investigators, you yourself, would but put this thing before
the officers of this mine, that they would take the lead and
voluntarily accept a liberal system of compensation. If they would do
this, it probably would clinch the campaign for a state compensation
law."
It was a wise suggestion. Ralph, who had been spending his force in
violent and personal attack, immediately began to work on something
like a program. In the meantime Dick, who by this time had won the
entire confidence of Jack, opened the matter. It needed no argument. He
lost no time in putting it before his father, who at the moment was
ready to agree to anything that the boy wanted.
The various interests of the mine were called together with expert
labor men and others who were informed and influential. It did not go
through without a fight. There were stockholders in Sabinsport and
elsewhere who, hearing of the liberal plans that were being discussed,
wrote anonymous notes, protesting against the diversion of the
stockholders' dividends in sentimental and Utopian plans. Reuben Cowder
stood steadfastly against the scheme. To him it was utterly
impractical, an un-heard-of thing. While the matter was being
discussed, Ralph hammered daily, wisely and unwisely. It touched Dick
to the heart that Jack never but once spoke of this, and that was one
day when he said, "He is right in the main, but it would be easier for
me if he would be a little less bitter against Cowder and my father."
In the end the whole generous plan was adopted. It came about by Reuben
Cowder's sudden withdrawal of opposition. It was years before Dick
learned the reason of this unexplained and unexpected change of front.
It was not until the struggle over compensation was ended that Dick
suddenly remembered that he was only a wayfarer in Sabinsport, a
traveler delayed en route. With the remembrance came the realization of
what these people had come to mean to him, that he was actually more
interested in this community than in any other spot on earth.
Unconsciously he seemed to have grown into the town, to belong to it.
In the end it came about naturally enough that he should stay on. A
little church in the town had lost by death a clergyman, twenty years
in its service. The little band of communicants were fastidious and
conservative. In the disaster which had for a time swept down all the
barriers in the community they had become deeply interested in Dick.
His hallmarks were so much finer than any they had ever dreamed
possible to secure for their church, that it was with some trepidation
that they suggested that he stay on with them. They were even willing
to wink at what their richest member, a grumbling stockholder in the
Emma mine, called his "revolutionary notions."
The Bishop was willing to wink at them too. "They need you, boy," he
had told him, "even more than they want you. They are in a fair way to
die of respectability. You can perhaps resurrect them; but don't try to
do it by shock treatment. You have the advantage of not being an
applicant."
And, consenting only for an accommodation, Dick accepted, and remained.
He soon came to call Sabinsport home. Moreover, he was happy. He
realized in his leisure moments, of which he had few enough, that he
was happy without several things that he had supposed essential to
happiness--without a home, a wife, a child, companions of similar
training and outlook to his own.
The town interested him profoundly. It was his first close contact with
an old American town which had undergone industrial treatment. He felt
its cosmopolitan character, something of which the inhabitants
themselves were quite unconscious. As a matter of fact, all sorts of
people were blending in Sabinsport. A thin pioneer stream of Scotch,
Irish and English had settled the original lands, and early in the
nineteenth century had selected as their trading post the point on the
river which had afterwards become Sabinsport.
The port had prospered amazingly in those first days. After forty years
and more it looked as if it were destined to be the metropolis of that
part of the world. Then the first railroad came across country, and it
left Sabinsport out. A smaller, poorer rival, some twenty-five miles
away, secured the prize. Slowly but surely the trade that had so long
put into Sabinsport changed its course to what only too soon they began
to call the City. Fewer and fewer boats came up the river, fewer and
fewer coaches and laden wagons came from the up-country. The town
submitted with poor grace to its inevitable decline. To this day Dick
found that the older families particularly were jealous of the city and
resented its unconscious patronage. It had become the habit in
Sabinsport to sneer at the city as vulgar, pushing and brutal, though
these feelings did not prevent her from patronizing its shops and
amusements.
This early disappointment had not by any means prevented the steady
growth of the town. Coal had been discovered, adding a second layer of
the rich to Sabinsport. The coal had brought the railroad and
factories, but it was still those early settlers who had first come
into the town and built the splendid old houses, with their spacious
grounds, that considered themselves the aristocracy. It was an
aristocracy a little insistent with newcomers on its superiority, a
little scornful of its successors. It considered itself the backbone of
Sabinsport, which was natural; and it was quite unconscious that the
facts were every day disputing its pretensions.
Slowly and inevitably Sabinsport had been and was digesting successive
waves of peoples. When the mines first opened there had been an
incoming of Welsh. Only a few of them were left in the mines now. They
had saved their money and had come into the town. Their children had
learned trades, indeed there was a corner of the high land known as
Welsh Hill; a place where one found reliable workmen of all sorts, and
a place too which was famous for its music; indeed, Welsh Hill sent a
famous chorus every year to the annual musical festival in the City. On
Christmas morning they still promenaded the streets, waking people out
of their sleep with their Christmas carols.
The Germans had come into the mines soon after the Welsh. They too had
been thrifty--bought property. There were several of them that were
counted among the best citizens; among them was a man, Rupert Littman,
who once had milked his father's cows and raked his hay and now was
president of one of the richest banks, a stockholder in every
enterprise. They had been much more thoroughly absorbed into the social
and business life than any other people, and much that was good in
Sabinsport was due to them.
As the years had gone on, as more mines had been opened, and as mills
had been built, a motley of people had come: Austrians, Serbs,
Russians, Greeks, Italians, and now and then an Armenian. With all of
these Dick felt himself very much at home. They seemed familiar to him,
more familiar, he sometimes thought, than the smiling, busy, competent
Americans of his church. There was a small group of Serbians at the
mines with whom he had been especially intimate in the years of the
Balkan War. More than one had left the mines to go back to Serbia to
fight. They had been most exultant with the outcome of the war. The
most intelligent of this group was Nikola Petrovitch, a thoughtful
fellow of thirty-five or forty, an ardent Pan-Slavist. It was only
because of an injury he had sustained in the mine at the time of the
great disaster that he had not gone out in 1912. He had followed with
Dick every step of the war, chafing bitterly that it was impossible for
him to be in the fight. When at the end of June, 1914, the news of the
murder of the Grand Duke had come, Nikola had been terribly cast down.
"If our people did it," he said, "it was a mistake." Every line of news
from that day he had discussed with Dick. He had believed from the
first that Austria intended now to use all her power to crush Serbia;
and "Germany will help her," he used to say. The practical acceptance
of Austria's ultimatum had given Dick hope in the situation. It did not
seem possible to him that any country, however autocratic and greedy,
could push demand beyond the point which the Serbians had accepted.
Dick had other friends. There was the Greek, John A. Papalagos, as the
sign on his flourishing fruit and vegetable store had it. People smiled
at the time they knew that the Parson spent with the fruit seller. What
they did not realize was that this man with his queer name was probably
as well read as any man of the town, certainly far better read in
European affairs than any of the leading citizens of Sabinsport. His
ambition was a Greek republic, and every move on the European political
checker-board he watched with excited and intelligent interest,
calculating how it was going to deter or forward the one ardent passion
of his life.
As a matter of fact it was only with Papalagos and the Serbians on the
hill that Dick was able to carry on any really intelligent exchange of
views on European politics. Ralph, who ought to have been, he felt, his
comrade in these matters, had practically no interest in them. This
indifference always puzzled and dismayed Dick. European politics, in
Ralph's opinion, were as unrelated to the United States as the politics
of Mars. One feature only he treated with interest, and that was
Germany's social work. The forms of social insurance she had devised
interested him keenly. He had regularly written enthusiastic editorials
on the way she met the breaking down of men through age, illness,
accident. Her handling of employment was one of his stock subjects.
Germany was socially efficient in his mind, preserving men power, "as
well as machines and hogs," as he put it in the phrase of his school.
He pictured her as a land where every man and woman was well housed,
continuously employed, cared for in sickness or in health, and that was
all Ralph knew about Germany. When Dick, who had tramped the land from
end to end, put in a protest and mentioned the army as the end of all
this care of human beings, Ralph broke out in a violent defense of the
military system. It was merely a way of training men physically and
arousing in them social solidarity. A nation couldn't do what Germany
did for men and women unless she loved them. It was what the United
States needed.
Outside of these devices for meeting the breaking down of human beings,
Ralph took no interest in Europe. His attitude through the Balkan War
had baffled Dick by its perfunctoriness. He published the news as it
came to him daily. He kept the maps on his walls, and now and then he
wrote a few correct paragraphs, noting the change in situation. He was
pleased that the power of Turkey was limited at the end, for he did
have a hazy notion of the undesirableness of Turkey in Europe, but
beyond this there was neither feeling nor understanding.
How, Dick asked himself, could a man of Ralph's ability spend four
years in a first-class American college and two on a great newspaper
and still be so completely cut off from the affairs of the globe
outside of the United States? It was a fact, but Dick could not
understand how it could be a fact. It gave him his first real sense of
the newness of the country, its entire absorption in itself.
Ralph defended this indifference. "They're nothing to us," he declared.
"We're too busy taking care of their scrap heaps. A million a year
coming here to be reconstructed and Americanized, why should we bother
about what Europe thinks or does? We're too busy. They can't touch us."
As Dick walked out to the "Emma" that night after supper, he felt
keenly his isolation. His mind was full of dread. Europe and her
affairs had long been like a chess-board to him. For years with his
fellows at Oxford, with _Times_ correspondents in different continental
cities, with a host of scattered acquaintances of various points of
view, he had played the fascinating game of speculation and forecast
that traps every student of history and politics who in the last forty
years has spent any length of time in any great continental center.
Dick knew something of the ambitions of every nation in Europe,
something of their temper and their antipathies. He had in mind all
possible lineups. He knew as well as any European statesman that if
Austria declared war on Serbia, there would probably be Russian
interference, and if Russia went in--"My God," he groaned to himself,
"_Der Tag_ is here at last. It's the '_nächste Krieg_.'"
He tried hard, as he walked, to push away the depression which was
overwhelming him. "Of course, they'll stop it," he told himself; "they
have before. It is folly for me to let this thing get hold of me in
this way."
It was twilight when he crossed the fields to the mining settlement and
made for the house of his friend Nikola Petrovitch. In the dim light
the little house looked very pleasant. Stana Petrovitch loved her
garden, and the severe outlines of the company house were softened with
blossoming honeysuckle, which filled the air with a faint perfume. It
was very sweet to see, but before Dick was near enough to get more than
a pleasant outline, from the house there came a burst of strong, fierce
song--a dozen voices, eloquent with emotion. How well he knew it! The
Serbian National Anthem:
"God of Justice! Thou Who saved us
When in deepest bondage cast,
Hear Thy Serbian children's voices,
Be our help as in the past.
With Thy mighty hand sustain us,
Still our rugged pathway trace;
God, our Hope! protect and cherish
Serbian crown and Serbian race!
"On our sepulcher of ages
Breaks the resurrection morn,
From the slough of direst slavery
Serbia anew is born.
Through five hundred years of durance
We have knelt before Thy face,
All our kin, O God! deliver!
Thus entreats the Serbian race. Amen."
It was what he knew. Nikola, Yovan, Marta. They were _going_.
"God help the women," he said to himself. Turning, he went around and
to the street. It was the end of a shift, and the men who had come out
had washed, eaten and now were smoking their pipes in groups at one or
another door. The women were collected too. There was excitement in the
air.
"Mr. Dick," some one called to him. "Is it true, the war?"
"I am afraid so," he said.
"And what are they jumping on poor little Serbia for, a big one like
Austria? That's your kings for you."
It was one of his Irish friends speaking.
"But they'll fight, them Serbians; they're scrappers all right. Nikola
is going in the morning. Marta too. It is good to live in a country
where they don't have wars."
"Nikola's foolish to go," broke in some one. "I told his woman so, and
she flared up and said, 'He no go, I go! Serbian men fight--not
'fraid.' I guess she's right. I don't see what she is going to do, five
kids too."
Dick walked on. One of the foremen dropped out of the group that sat on
the porch.
"May I speak with you, Mr. Dick?" he said. "A man came to-night,
Serbian. He was here when Nikola and Marta came up, and went home with
them. Nikola was just here. He told me Serbia was going to war, and
that he and Marta and Yovan were leaving in the morning. What's the
row? Is there a war?"
Dick told him all he knew. The foreman's brief comment was, "Must be
some country that will take a man like Nikola out of a job like
his--family too."
"It is," said Dick.
Back at home he called up Ralph. "Better be sure that some one is at
the 10:30 to-morrow morning, Sam. Nikola is leaving. Marta and Yovan
too."
"Leaving," said Ralph. "Why, they're the best men in the 'Emma.' You
don't mean they're fools enough to rush out without knowing whether
there's going to be a war. It will be over before they get there. Stop
'em, Dick. It is nonsense."
"There'll be a war when they get there, all right, Ralph, and no man
could hold Nikola now. Make a note of their going, won't you?"
"Sure, if you want it."
If you will examine the personal column of the Sabinsport _Argus_ for
July 29, 1914, you will find among other items, this:
"Nikola Petrovitch, Yovan Markovitch, and Marta Popovitch, all of
the 'Emma' mine, left at 10:30 this morning for New York. They
expect to sail at once for Serbia, where they will join the army
which has been called into the field by Austria's declaration of
war. Hope to see you back soon, boys."
And thus it was that the Great War first came to Sabinsport.