Jim Hewin picked his satisfied way over the ramp's top and along the
road below, toward the gap and the gap offices. He eyed the midnight
stars with unseeing animal contentment, sluggishly at peace with the
world.
A voice from the watchman's hut blurred upon his hearing. "Hey, where
you going?" The man peered closer. "Where the hell have you been? The
old man's been looking for hours----"
"I been right over in Hewintown."
"He wants you, now."
"What's up?" Reawakened briskness bristled in his tones.
"Bringing in them carloads of miners."
"Oh!"
"He's in the guard auto by the machine house. Better hump yourself."
Jim idled off, then changed his gait to a run as he heard the
preliminary whirr of the engine. "Hai!" he shouted, as the lighted nose
turned up the hill. "Hai! Wait! It's Jim!"
Tom Hewin made room for him on the front seat. "Take this rifle. Got
your automatic?"
They joined the three other cars, ran on too far by the viaduct, and
doubled back. The thin pop of fire-arms reached them, then the distant
crackle of a volley. The men hunched together excitedly, blood tingling
at the prospective ambuscade of the man-hunt.
The wash of the headlight on the tall pines beyond the cut located the
engine.
"There!" came Tom's stabbing whisper.
The cars coursed to the curve, and turned parallel, facing the tracks.
The angry glare of four searchlights burned against the black figures
huddled above the stalled train.
The startled crowd eddied together, then scattered in headlong panic.
Gunfire thunder and pelting lead poured from the rows of rifles toward
the fleeing bodies.
Jim sprang out, crouched beside the searchlight, blazed away. He ran
forward, stumbling against a pungently resinous stump. He rested his
rifle on it to aim. Crack! The clumsy figure halted, raised wild arms
grotesquely, fell spinning toward him. He caught up with the foremost
guards, and stood with them for a volley across the narrow railroad
gulch.
"Come on," boomed Huggins, the deputy sheriff in charge, running to the
top of the cut.
Jim followed.
A wounded miner on the left trembled to his knees; his pistol aimed
uncertainly at the man ahead. Jim's automatic plupped; the man's face
butted against the rocky ground.
"Hey, there," Huggins bellowed, "Whatcher stop for?"
"We're goin' on," a gunman below shouted back. "We're goin' on, I say."
"Go on, then," he replied, disgustedly.
"Don'cher hear him, Ed?" to the engineer. "Go on, he says."
"Ain't I going?"
The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and
carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at
Hewintown.
"None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest.
"A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward
blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another
deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main
office. It's been a morgue afore."
The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson
kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the
pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make
us all swing?"
"We could manage a get-away----"
Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing,
fiercely resentful.
"God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter.
Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the
black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun----"
"No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the
silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last
thing.... They'd call out their soldiers--where'd we be then? Oh hell!
If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin'
to us----"
"Can you?" whispered Pelham.
"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."
Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others,
for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the
Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of
daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted
his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber
dreams.
The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked
the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It
was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose
frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of
uncertainty.
The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up
somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry
over the dewed body on an empty barrow.
Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me,"
said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A
second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery
meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the
head.
This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl
himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to
make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the
_Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ warned of a general strike, which
would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.
"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't
dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."
The young mining inspector, as yet unassigned to his duty by the State,
preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale,
and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal
for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at
your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get!
Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office,
out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone;
why not make it your government?"
In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little
impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.
"He don't do any harm," Dawson confided to John McGue who had attached
himself as the big man's private guard. "Let him spit fire if he wants
to. My God, man! A state mining inspector as organizer! We'll have Paul
Judson in the local yet!"
Sullenly the strikers held to their Hewintown homes, cowed by the armed
guards from interfering with the spasmodic attempts of the convicts,
negroes, and strike-breakers to keep the mine product up to normal.
Formal notices of eviction came to them; but Ben Spencer reassured the
disheartened committee. "They've got to follow the state law; that means
delay. Tell the boys to sit steady till hell freezes over. They're sewed
up."
Henry Tuttle rendered an exhaustive report upon the same matter to the
managing committee of the directors. "We can go ahead, if you say----"
Paul Judson, at Judge Florence's nod, shook his decisive head. "Wait.
We're not quite ready. When we are----"
After a thoughtful pause, the vice-president went on. "It's a good time
to appropriate enough to outfit the State National Guard. We can't pay
them directly, as the companies did in Colorado; the law's against that,
Henry?"
The counsel nodded corroboration.
"But they'll appreciate new uniforms and guns.... You can never tell,
you know.... I had a talk with Adjutant-General Rice last week; he
approves heartily."
The matter was left to the vice-president, for action.
During these weeks of comparative inactivity, in spite of the details of
strike work, Pelham found time to debate "Socialism the Remedy" with
Burke Horton, an energetic lawyer-politician of near-radical views. The
debate was the first of a newly opened community forum, under the
auspices of Dr. Gulley's Free Congregation, which met in Edlin's Hall.
The crowd was packed with Horton's followers, but the young Judson made
his points tell.
This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had
followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a
wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own
eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw
approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him.
Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike
audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm.
Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or
sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying
feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love.
They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a
home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung
dreams and precious intimacies.
In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in
her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused
above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet.
"You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating."
"I'd be sick of the whole bloody business," she smiled indulgently, "if
it wasn't for you."
"Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair
possessively.
"Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?"
"Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy."
"It was only taffy?"
"I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I
should think your father would have to be proud of you!"
"The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim
oxfords print."
"Not even wings?"
"We are forging them together."
Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they
were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be.
Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he
meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances
to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but
this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of
the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled
flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's
Avenue.
Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp
building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no
hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background.
Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further
part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was
caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.
But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him--hatred that turned
this silver heaven into an iron-red hell. No; he was pledged fighter in
the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware
that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that
watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to
welcome him at war's end.
The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his
usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed
frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about
to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.
"Your car woke us up at three last night."
"It was shortly after two when I got here."
"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys.
Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."
Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.
"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to
imagine you are keeping bad company--of both sexes----"
The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking--last
night was the debate--you know I've been busy----"
His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it.
They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll
have to leave the mountain."
Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad
to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of
leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling
again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad
companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on.
"I'll leave by Saturday."