SECTION 1.

KING COAL

_A NOVEL_

By Upton Sinclair

TO

MARY CRAIG KIMBROUGH

To whose persistence in the perilous task of tearing her husband’s

manuscript to pieces, the reader is indebted for the absence of most of

the faults from this book.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

THE DOMAIN OF KING COAL

BOOK TWO

THE SERFS OF KING COAL

BOOK THREE

THE HENCHMEN OF KING COAL

BOOK FOUR

THE WILL OF KING COAL

INTRODUCTION

Upton Sinclair is one of the not too many writers who have consecrated

their lives to the agitation for social justice, and who have also

enrolled their art in the service of a set purpose. A great and

non-temporizing enthusiast, he never flinched from making sacrifices.

Now and then he attained great material successes as a writer, but

invariably he invested and lost his earnings in enterprises by which he

had hoped to ward off injustice and to further human happiness. Though

disappointed time after time, he never lost faith nor courage to start

again.

As a convinced socialist and eager advocate of unpopular doctrines, as

an exposer of social conditions that would otherwise be screened away

from the public eye, the most influential journals of his country were

as a rule arraigned against him. Though always a poor man, though never

willing to grant to publishers the concessions essential for many

editions and general popularity, he was maliciously represented to be a

carpet knight of radicalism and a socialist millionaire. He has several

times been obliged to change his publisher, which goes to prove that he

is no seeker of material gain.

Upton Sinclair is one of the writers of the present time most deserving

of a sympathetic interest. He shows his patriotism as an American, not

by joining in hymns to the very conditional kind of liberty peculiar to

the United States, but by agitating for infusing it with the elixir of

real liberty, the liberty of humanity. He does not limit himself to a

dispassionate and entertaining description of things as they are. But in

his appeals to the honour and good-fellowship of his compatriots, he

opens their eyes to the appalling conditions under which wage-earning

slaves are living by the hundreds of thousands. His object is to better

these unnatural conditions, to obtain for the very poorest a glimpse of

light and happiness, to make even them realise the sensation of cosy

well-being and the comfort of knowing that justice is to be found also

for them.

This time Upton Sinclair has absorbed himself in the study of the

miner’s life in the lonesome pits of the Rocky Mountains, and his

sensitive and enthusiastic mind has brought to the world an American

parallel to GERMINAL, Emile Zola’s technical masterpiece.

The conditions described in the two books are, however, essentially

different. While Zola’s working-men are all natives of France, one meets

in Sinclair’s book a motley variety of European emigrants, speaking a

Babel of languages and therefore debarred from forming some sort of

association to protect themselves against being exploited by the

anonymous limited Company. Notwithstanding this natural bar against

united action on the part of the wage-earning slaves, the Company feels

far from at ease and jealously guards its interests against any attempt

of organising the men.

A young American of the upper class, with great sympathy for the

downtrodden and an honest desire to get a first-hand knowledge of their

conditions in order to help them, decides to take employment in a mine

under a fictitious name and dressed like a working-man. His unusual way

of trying to obtain work arouses suspicion. He is believed to be a

professional strike-leader sent out to organise the miners against their

exploiters, and he is not only refused work, but thrashed mercilessly.

When finally he succeeds in getting inside, he discovers with growing

indignation the shameless and inhuman way in which those who unearth the

black coal are being exploited.

These are the fundamental ideas of the book, but they give but a faint

notion of the author’s poetic attitude. Most beautifully is this shown

in Hal’s relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her

daily life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is

one of the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of

Mary is that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little

children. She develops into a Valküre of the working-class, always ready

to fight for the worker’s right.

The last chapters of the book give a description of the miners’ revolt

against the Company. They insist upon their right to choose a deputy to

control the weighing-in of the coal, and upon having the mines sprinkled

regularly to prevent explosion. They will also be free to buy their food

and utensils wherever they like, even in shops not belonging to the

Company.

In a postscript Sinclair explains the fundamental facts on which his

work of art has been built up. Even without the postscript one could not

help feeling convinced that the social conditions he describes are true

to life. The main point is that Sinclair has not allowed himself to

become inspired by hackneyed phrases that bondage and injustice and the

other evils and crimes of Kingdoms have been banished from Republics,

but that he is earnestly pointing to the honeycombed ground on which the

greatest modern money-power has been built. The fundament of this power

is not granite, but mines. It lives and breathes in the light, because

it has thousands of unfortunates toiling in the darkness. It lives and

has its being in proud liberty because thousands are slaving for it,

whose thraldom is the price of this liberty.

This is the impression given to the reader of this exciting novel.

GEORG BRANDES.

BOOK ONE

THE DOMAIN OF KING COAL

SECTION 1.

The town of Pedro stood on the edge of the mountain country; a

straggling assemblage of stores and saloons from which a number of

branch railroads ran up into the canyons, feeding the coal-camps.

Through the week it slept peacefully; but on Saturday nights, when the

miners came trooping down, and the ranchmen came in on horseback and in

automobiles, it wakened to a seething life.

At the railroad station, one day late in June, a young man alighted from

a train. He was about twenty-one years of age, with sensitive features,

and brown hair having a tendency to waviness. He wore a frayed and faded

suit of clothes, purchased in a quarter of his home city where the

Hebrew merchants stand on the sidewalks to offer their wares; also a

soiled blue shirt without a tie, and a pair of heavy boots which had

seen much service. Strapped on his back was a change of clothing and a

blanket, and in his pockets a comb, a toothbrush, and a small pocket

mirror.

Sitting in the smoking-car of the train, the young man had listened to

the talk of the coal-camps, seeking to correct his accent. When he got

off the train he proceeded down the track and washed his hands with

cinders, and lightly powdered some over his face. After studying the

effect of this in his mirror, he strolled down the main street of Pedro,

and, selecting a little tobacco-shop, went in. In as surly a voice as he

could muster, he inquired of the proprietress, “Can you tell me how to

get to the Pine Creek mine?”

The woman looked at him with no suspicion in her glance. She gave the

desired information, and he took a trolley and got off at the foot of

the Pine Creek canyon, up which he had a thirteen-mile trudge. It was

a sunshiny day, with the sky crystal clear, and the mountain air

invigourating. The young man seemed to be happy, and as he strode on

his way, he sang a song with many verses:

“Old King Coal was a merry old soul,

And a merry old soul was he;

He made him a college all full of knowledge--

Hurrah for you and me!

“Oh, Liza-Ann, come out with me,

The moon is a-shinin’ in the monkey-puzzle tree;

Oh, Liza-Ann, I have began

To sing you the song of Harrigan!

“He keeps them a-roll, this merry old soul--

The wheels of industree;

A-roll and a-roll, for his pipe and his bowl

And his college facultee!

“Oh, Mary-Jane, come out in the lane,

The moon is a-shinin’ in the old pecan;

Oh, Mary-Jane, don’t you hear me a-sayin’

I’ll sing you the song of Harrigan!

“So hurrah for King Coal, and his fat pay-roll,

And his wheels of industree!

Hurrah for his pipe, and hurrah for his bowl--

And hurrah for you and me!

“Oh, Liza-Ann, come out with me,

The moon is a-shinin’--”

And so on and on--as long as the moon was a-shinin’ on a college campus.

It was a mixture of happy nonsense and that questioning with which

modern youth has begun to trouble its elders. As a marching tune, the

song was a trifle swift for the grades of a mountain canyon; Warner

could stop and shout to the canyon-walls, and listen to their answer,

and then march on again. He had youth in his heart, and love and

curiosity; also he had some change in his trousers’ pocket, and a ten

dollar bill, for extreme emergencies, sewed up in his belt. If a

photographer for Peter Harrigan’s General Fuel Company could have got a

snap-shot of him that morning, it might have served as a “portrait of a

coal-miner” in any “prosperity” publication.

But the climb was a stiff one, and before the end the traveller became

aware of the weight of his boots, and sang no more. Just as the sun was

sinking up the canyon, he came upon his destination--a gate across the

road, with a sign upon it:

PINE CREEK COAL CO.

PRIVATE PROPERTY

TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN

Hal approached the gate, which was of iron bars, and padlocked. After

standing for a moment to get ready his surly voice, he kicked upon the

gate and a man came out of a shack inside.

“What do you want?” said he.

“I want to get in. I’m looking for a job.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From Pedro.”

“Where you been working?”

“I never worked in a mine before.”

“Where did you work?”

“In a grocery-store.”

“What grocery-store?”

“Peterson & Co., in Western City.”

The guard came closer to the gate and studied him through the bars.

“Hey, Bill!” he called, and another man came out from the cabin. “Here’s

a guy says he worked in a grocery, and he’s lookin’ for a job.”

“Where’s your papers?” demanded Bill.

Every one had told Hal that labour was scarce in the mines, and that the

companies were ravenous for men; he had supposed that a workingman would

only have to knock, and it would be opened unto him. “They didn’t give

me no papers,” he said, and added, hastily, “I got drunk and they fired

me.” He felt quite sure that getting drunk would not bar one from a coal

camp.

But the two made no move to open the gate. The second man studied him

deliberately from top to toe, and Hal was uneasily aware of possible

sources of suspicion. “I’m all right,” he declared. “Let me in, and I’ll

show you.”

Still the two made no move. They looked at each other, and then Bill

answered, “We don’t need no hands.”

“But,” exclaimed Hal, “I saw a sign down the canyon--”

“That’s an old sign,” said Bill.

“But I walked all the way up here!”

“You’ll find it easier walkin’ back.”

“But--it’s night!”

“Scared of the dark, kid?” inquired Bill, facetiously.

“Oh, say!” replied Hal. “Give a fellow a chance! Ain’t there some way I

can pay for my keep--or at least for a bunk to-night?”

“There’s nothin’ for you,” said Bill, and turned and went into the

cabin.

The other man waited and watched, with a decidedly hostile look. Hal

strove to plead with him, but thrice he repeated, “Down the canyon with

you.” So at last Hal gave up, and moved down the road a piece and sat

down to reflect.

It really seemed an absurdly illogical proceeding, to post a notice,

“Hands Wanted,” in conspicuous places on the roadside, causing a man to

climb thirteen miles up a mountain canyon, only to be turned off without

explanation. Hal was convinced that there must be jobs inside the

stockade, and that if only he could get at the bosses he could persuade

them. He got up and walked down the road a quarter of a mile, to where

the railroad-track crossed it, winding up the canyon. A train of

“empties” was passing, bound into the camp, the cars rattling and

bumping as the engine toiled up the grade. This suggested a solution of

the difficulty.

It was already growing dark. Crouching slightly, Hal approached the

cars, and when he was in the shadows, made a leap and swung onto one of

them. It took but a second to clamber in, and he lay flat and waited,

his heart thumping.

Before a minute had passed he heard a shout, and looking over, he saw

the Cerberus of the gate running down a path to the track, his

companion, Bill, just behind him. “Hey! come out of there!” they yelled;

and Bill leaped, and caught the car in which Hal was riding.

The latter saw that the game was up, and sprang to the ground on the

other side of the track and started out of the camp. Bill followed him,

and as the train passed, the other man ran down the track to join him.

Hal was walking rapidly, without a word; but the Cerberus of the gate

had many words, most of them unprintable, and he seized Hal by the

collar, and shoving him violently, planted a kick upon that portion of

his anatomy which nature has constructed for the reception of kicks. Hal

recovered his balance, and, as the man was still pursuing him, he turned

and aimed a blow, striking him on the chest and making him reel.

Hal’s big brother had seen to it that he knew how to use his fists; he

now squared off, prepared to receive the second of his assailants. But

in coal-camps matters are not settled in that primitive way, it

appeared. The man halted, and the muzzle of a revolver came suddenly

under Hal’s nose. “Stick ’em up!” said the man.

This was a slang which Hal had never heard, but the meaning was

inescapable; he “stuck ’em up.” At the same moment his first assailant

rushed at him, and dealt him a blow over the eye which sent him

sprawling backward upon the stones.

SECTION 2.

When Hal came to himself again he was in darkness, and was conscious of

agony from head to toe. He was lying on a stone floor, and he rolled

over, but soon rolled back again, because there was no part of his back

which was not sore. Later on, when he was able to study himself, he

counted over a score of marks of the heavy boots of his assailants.

He lay for an hour or two, making up his mind that he was in a lock-up,

because he could see the starlight through iron bars. He could hear

somebody snoring, and he called half a dozen times, in a louder and

louder voice, until at last, hearing a growl, he inquired, “Can you give

me a drink of water?”

“I’ll give you hell if you wake me up again,” said the voice; after

which Hal lay in silence until morning.

A couple of hours after daylight, a man entered his cell. “Get up,” said

he, and added a prod with his foot. Hal had thought he could not do it,

but he got up.

“No funny business now,” said his jailer, and grasping him by the sleeve

of his coat, marched him out of the cell and down a little corridor into

a sort of office, where sat a red-faced personage with a silver shield

upon the lapel of his coat. Hal’s two assailants of the night before

stood nearby.

“Well, kid?” said the personage in the chair. “Had a little time to

think it over?”

“Yes,” said Hal, briefly.

“What’s the charge?” inquired the personage, of the two watchmen.

“Trespassing and resisting arrest.”

“How much money you got, young fellow?” was, the next question.

Hal hesitated.

“Speak up there!” said the man.

“Two dollars and sixty-seven cents,” said Hal--“as well as I can

remember.”

“Go on!” said the other. “What you givin’ us?” And then, to the two

watchmen, “Search him.”

“Take off your coat and pants,” said Bill, promptly, “and your boots.”

“Oh, I say!” protested Hal.

“Take ’em off!” said the man, and clenched his fists. Hal took ’em off,

and they proceeded to go through the pockets, producing a purse with the

amount stated, also a cheap watch, a strong pocket knife, the

tooth-brush, comb and mirror, and two white handkerchiefs, which they

looked at contemptuously and tossed to the spittle-drenched floor.

They unrolled the pack, and threw the clean clothing about. Then,

opening the pocket-knife, they proceeded to pry about the soles and

heels of the boots, and to cut open the lining of the clothing. So they

found the ten dollars in the belt, which they tossed onto the table with

the other belongings. Then the personage with the shield announced, “I

fine you twelve dollars and sixty-seven cents, and your watch and

knife.” He added, with a grin, “You can keep your snot-rags.”

“Now see here!” said Hal, angrily. “This is pretty raw!”

“You get your duds on, young fellow, and get out of here as quick as you

can, or you’ll go in your shirt-tail.”

But Hal was angry enough to have been willing to go in his skin. “You

tell me who you are, and your authority for this procedure?”

“I’m marshal of the camp,” said the man.

“You mean you’re an employé of the General Fuel Company? And you propose

to rob me--”

“Put him out, Bill,” said the marshal. And Hal saw Bill’s fists clench.

“All right,” he said, swallowing his indignation. “Wait till I get my

clothes on.” And he proceeded to dress as quickly as possible; he rolled

up his blanket and spare clothing, and started for the door.

“Remember,” said the marshal, “straight down the canyon with you, and if

you show your face round here again, you’ll get a bullet through you.”

So Hal went out into the sunshine, with a guard on each side of him as

an escort. He was on the same mountain road, but in the midst of the

company-village. In the distance he saw the great building of the

breaker, and heard the incessant roar of machinery and falling coal. He

marched past a double lane of company houses and shanties, where

slattern women in doorways and dirty children digging in the dust of the

roadside paused and grinned at him--for he limped as he walked, and it

was evident enough what had happened to him.

Hal had come with love and curiosity. The love was greatly

diminished--evidently this was not the force which kept the wheels of

industry a-roll. But the curiosity was greater than ever. What was there

so carefully hidden inside this coal-camp stockade?

Hal turned and looked at Bill, who had showed signs of humour the day

before. “See here,” said he, “you fellows have got my money, and you’ve

blacked my eye and kicked me blue, so you ought to be satisfied. Before

I go, tell me about it, won’t you?”

“Tell you what?” growled Bill.

“Why did I get this?”

“Because you’re too gay, kid. Didn’t you know you had no business trying

to sneak in here?”

“Yes,” said Hal; “but that’s not what I mean. Why didn’t you let me in

at first?”

“If you wanted a job in a mine,” demanded the man, “why didn’t you go at

it in the regular way?”

“I didn’t know the regular way.”

“That’s just it. And we wasn’t takin’ chances with you. You didn’t look

straight.”

“But what did you think I was? What are you afraid of?”

“Go on!” said the man. “You can’t work me!”

Hal walked a few steps in silence, pondering how to break through. “I

see you’re suspicious of me,” he said. “I’ll tell you the truth, if

you’ll let me.” Then, as the other did not forbid him, “I’m a college

boy, and I wanted to see life and shift for myself a while. I thought it

would be a lark to come here.”

“Well,” said Bill, “this ain’t no foot-ball field. It’s a coal-mine.”

Hal saw that his story had been accepted. “Tell me straight,” he said,

“what did you think I was?”

“Well, I don’t mind telling,” growled Bill. “There’s union agitators

trying to organise these here camps, and we ain’t taking no chances with

’em. This company gets its men through agencies, and if you’d went and

satisfied them, you’d ’a been passed in the regular way. Or if you’d

went to the office down in Pedro and got a pass, you’d ’a been all

right. But when a guy turns up at the gate, and looks like a dude and

talks like a college perfessor, he don’t get by, see?”

“I see,” said Hal. And then, “If you’ll give me the price of a breakfast

out of my money, I’ll be obliged.”

“Breakfast is over,” said Bill. “You sit round till the pinyons gets

ripe.” He laughed; but then, mellowed by his own joke, he took a quarter

from his pocket and passed it to Hal. He opened the padlock on the gate

and saw him out with a grin; and so ended Hal’s first turn on the wheels

of industry.

SECTION 3.

Hal Warner started to drag himself down the road, but was unable to make

it. He got as far as a brooklet that came down the mountain-side, from

which he might drink without fear of typhoid; there he lay the whole

day, fasting. Towards evening a thunder-storm came up, and he crawled

under the shelter of a rock, which was no shelter at all. His single

blanket was soon soaked through, and he passed a night almost as

miserable as the previous one. He could not sleep, but he could think,

and he thought about what had happened to him. “Bill” had said that a

coal mine was not a foot-ball field, but it seemed to Hal that the net

impress of the two was very much the same. He congratulated himself that

his profession was not that of a union organiser.

At dawn he dragged himself up, and continued his journey, weak from cold

and unaccustomed lack of food. In the course of the day he reached a

power-station near the foot of the canyon. He did not have the price of

a meal, and was afraid to beg; but in one of the group of buildings by

the roadside was a store, and he entered and inquired concerning prunes,

which were twenty-five cents a pound. The price was high, but so was the

altitude, and as Hal found in the course of time, they explained the one

by the other--not explaining, however, why the altitude of the price was

always greater than the altitude of the store. Over the counter he saw a

sign: “We buy scrip at ten per cent discount.” He had heard rumours of a

state law forbidding payment of wages in “scrip”; but he asked no

questions, and carried off his very light pound of prunes, and sat down

by the roadside and munched them.

Just beyond the power-house, down on the railroad track, stood a little

cabin with a garden behind it. He made his way there, and found a

one-legged old watchman. He asked permission to spend the night on the

floor of the cabin; and seeing the old fellow look at his black eye, he

explained, “I tried to get a job at the mine, and they thought I was a

union organiser.”

“Well,” said the man, “I don’t want no union organisers round here.”

“But I’m not one,” pleaded Hal.

“How do I know what you are? Maybe you’re a company spy.”

“All I want is a dry place to sleep,” said Hal. “Surely it won’t be any

harm for you to give me that.”

“I’m not so sure,” the other answered. “However, you can spread your

blanket in the corner. But don’t you talk no union business to me.”

Hal had no desire to talk. He rolled himself in his blanket and slept

like a man untroubled by either love or curiosity. In the morning the

old fellow gave him a slice of corn bread and some young onions out of

his garden, which had a more delicious taste than any breakfast that had

ever been served him. When Hal thanked his host in parting, the latter

remarked: “All right, young fellow, there’s one thing you can do to pay

me, and that is, say nothing about it. When a man has grey hair on his

head and only one leg, he might as well be drowned in the creek as lose

his job.”

Hal promised, and went his way. His bruises pained him less, and he was

able to walk. There were ranch-houses in sight--it was like coming back

suddenly to America!

SECTION 4.

Hal had now before him a week’s adventures as a hobo: a genuine hobo,

with no ten dollar bill inside his belt to take the reality out of his

experiences. He took stock of his worldly goods and wondered if he still

looked like a dude. He recalled that he had a smile which had fascinated

the ladies; would it work in combination with a black eye? Having no

other means of support, he tried it on susceptible looking housewives,

and found it so successful that he was tempted to doubt the wisdom of

honest labour. He sang the Harrigan song no more, but instead the words

of a hobo-song he had once heard:

“Oh, what’s the use of workin’ when there’s women in the land?”

The second day he made the acquaintance of two other gentlemen of the

road, who sat by the railroad-track toasting some bacon over a fire.

They welcomed him, and after they had heard his story, adopted him into

the fraternity and instructed him in its ways of life. Pretty soon he

made the acquaintance of one who had been a miner, and was able to give

him the information he needed before climbing another canyon.

“Dutch Mike” was the name this person bore, for reasons he did not

explain. He was a black-eyed and dangerous-looking rascal, and when the

subject of mines and mining was broached, he opened up the flood-gates

of an amazing reservoir of profanity. He was through with that game--Hal

or any other God-damned fool might have his job for the asking. It was

only because there were so many natural-born God-damned fools in the

world that the game could be kept going. “Dutch Mike” went on to relate

dreadful tales of mine-life, and to summon before him the ghosts of one

pit-boss after another, consigning them to the fires of eternal

perdition.

“I wanted to work while I was young,” said he, “but now I’m cured, an’

fer good.” The world had come to seem to him a place especially

constructed for the purpose of making him work, and every faculty he

possessed was devoted to foiling this plot. Sitting by a camp-fire near

the stream which ran down the valley, Hal had a merry time pointing out

to “Dutch Mike” how he worked harder at dodging work than other men

worked at working. The hobo did not seem to mind that, however--it was a

matter of principle with him, and he was willing to make sacrifices for

his convictions. Even when they had sent him to the work-house, he had

refused to work; he had been shut in a dungeon, and had nearly died on a

diet of bread and water, rather than work. If everybody would do the

same, he said, they would soon “bust things.”

Hal took a fancy to this spontaneous revolutionist, and travelled with

him for a couple of days, in the course of which he pumped him as to

details of the life of a miner. Most of the companies used regular

employment agencies, as the guard had mentioned; but the trouble was,

these agencies got something from your pay for a long time--the bosses

were “in cahoots” with them. When Hal wondered if this were not against

the law, “Cut it out, Bo!” said his companion. “When you’ve had a job

for a while, you’ll know that the law in a coal-camp is what your boss

tells you.” The hobo went on to register his conviction that when one

man has the giving of jobs, and other men have to scramble for them, the

law would never have much to say in the deal. Hal judged this a profound

observation, and wished that it might be communicated to the professor

of political economy at Harrigan.

On the second night of his acquaintance with “Dutch Mike,” their

“jungle” was raided by a constable with half a dozen deputies; for a

determined effort was being made just then to drive vagrants from the

neighbourhood--or to get them to work in the mines. Hal’s friend, who

slept with one eye open, made a break in the darkness, and Hal followed

him, getting under the guard of the raiders by a foot-ball trick. They

left their food and blankets behind them, but “Dutch Mike” made light of

this, and lifted a chicken from a roost to keep them cheerful through

the night hours, and stole a change of underclothing off a clothes-line

the next day. Hal ate the chicken, and wore the underclothing, thus

beginning his career in crime.

Parting from “Dutch Mike,” he went back to Pedro. The hobo had told him

that saloon-keepers nearly always had friends in the coal-camps, and

could help a fellow to a job. So Hal began enquiring, and the second one

replied, Yes, he would give him a letter to a man at North Valley, and

if he got the job, the friend would deduct a dollar a month from his

pay. Hal agreed, and set out upon another tramp up another canyon, upon

the strength of a sandwich “bummed” from a ranch-house at the entrance

to the valley. At another stockaded gate of the General Fuel Company he

presented his letter, addressed to a person named O’Callahan, who turned

out also to be a saloon-keeper.

The guard did not even open the letter, but passed Hal in at sight of

it, and he sought out his man and applied for work. The man said he

would help him, but would have to deduct a dollar a month for himself,

as well as a dollar for his friend in Pedro. Hal kicked at this, and

they bartered back and forth; finally, when Hal turned away and

threatened to appeal directly to the “super,” the saloon-keeper

compromised on a dollar and a half.

“You know mine-work?” he asked.

“Brought up at it,” said Hal, made wise, now, in the ways of the world.

“Where did you work?”

Hal named several mines, concerning which he had learned something from

the hoboes. He was going by the name of “Joe Smith,” which he judged

likely to be found on the payroll of any mine. He had more than a week’s

growth of beard to disguise him, and had picked up some profanity as

well.

The saloon-keeper took him to interview Mr. Alec Stone, pit-boss in

Number Two mine, who inquired promptly: “You know anything about mules?”

“I worked in a stable,” said Hal, “I know about horses.”

“Well, mules is different,” said the man. “One of my stable-men got the

colic the other day, and I don’t know if he’ll ever be any good again.”

“Give me a chance,” said Hal. “I’ll manage them.”

The boss looked him over. “You look like a bright chap,” said he. “I’ll

pay you forty-five a month, and if you make good I’ll make it fifty.”

“All right, sir. When do I start in?”

“You can’t start too quick to suit me. Where’s your duds?”

“This is all I’ve got,” said Hal, pointing to the bundle of stolen

underwear in his hand.

“Well, chuck it there in the corner,” said the man; then suddenly he

stopped, and looked at Hal, frowning. “You belong to any union?”

“Lord, no!”

“Did you _ever_ belong to any union?”

“No, sir. Never.”

The man’s gaze seemed to imply that Hal was lying, and that his secret

soul was about to be read. “You have to swear to that, you know, before

you can work here.”

“All right,” said Hal, “I’m willing.”

“I’ll see you about it to-morrow,” said the other. “I ain’t got the

paper with me. By the way, what’s your religion?”

“Seventh Day Adventist.”

“Holy Christ! What’s that?”

“It don’t hurt,” said Hal. “I ain’t supposed to work on Saturdays, but I

do.”

“Well, don’t you go preachin’ it round here. We got our own

preacher--you chip in fifty cents a month for him out of your wages.

Come ahead now, and I’ll take you down.” And so it was that Hal got his

start in life.

SECTION 5.

The mule is notoriously a profane and godless creature; a blind alley

of Nature, so to speak, a mistake of which she is ashamed, and which

she does not permit to reproduce itself. The thirty mules under Hal’s

charge had been brought up in an environment calculated to foster the

worst tendencies of their natures. He soon made the discovery that the

“colic” of his predecessor had been caused by a mule’s hind foot in the

stomach; and he realised that he must not let his mind wander for an

instant, if he were to avoid this dangerous disease.

These mules lived their lives in the darkness of the earth’s interior;

only when they fell sick were they taken up to see the sunlight and to

roll about in green pastures. There was one of them called “Dago

Charlie,” who had learned to chew tobacco, and to rummage in the

pockets of the miners and their “buddies.” Not knowing how to spit out

the juice, he would make himself ill, and then he would swear off from

indulgence. But the drivers and the pit-boys knew his failing, and

would tempt “Dago Charlie” until he fell from grace. Hal soon

discovered this moral tragedy, and carried the pain of it in his soul

as he went about his all-day drudgery.

He went down the shaft with the first cage, which was very early in the

morning. He fed and watered his charges, and helped to harness them.

Then, when the last four hoofs had clattered away, he cleaned out the

stalls, and mended harness, and obeyed the orders of any person older

than himself who happened to be about.

Next to the mules, his torment was the “trapper-boys,” and other

youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so

they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job--there seemed to their

minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending

mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and

Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed

little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of

English curse words and obscenities; the filthiness which their minds

had spawned was incredible to one born and raised in the sunlight. They

alleged obscenities of their mothers and their grandmothers; also of the

Virgin Mary, the one mythological character they had heard of. Poor

little creatures of the dark, their souls grimed and smutted even more

quickly and irrevocably than their faces!

Hal had been advised by his boss to inquire for board at “Reminitsky’s.”

He came up in the last car, at twilight, and was directed to a dimly

lighted building of corrugated iron, where upon inquiry he was met by a

stout Russian, who told him he could be taken care of for twenty-seven

dollars a month, this including a cot in a room with eight other single

men. After deducting a dollar and a half a month for his saloon-keepers,

fifty cents for the company clergyman and a dollar for the company

doctor, fifty cents a month for wash-house privileges and fifty cents

for a sick and accident benefit fund, he had fourteen dollars a month

with which to clothe himself, to found a family, to provide himself with

beer and tobacco, and to patronise the libraries and colleges endowed by

the philanthropic owners of coal mines.

Supper was nearly over at Reminitsky’s when he arrived; the floor looked

like the scene of a cannibal picnic, and what food was left was cold. It

was always to be this way with him, he found, and he had to make the

best of it. The dining-room of this boarding-house, owned and managed by

the G. F. C., brought to his mind the state prison, which he had once

visited--with its rows of men sitting in silence, eating starch and

grease out of tin-plates. The plates here were of crockery half an inch

thick, but the starch and grease never failed; the formula of

Reminitsky’s cook seemed to be, When in doubt add grease, and boil it

in. Even ravenous as Hal was after his long tramp and his labour below

ground, he could hardly swallow this food. On Sundays, the only time he

ate by daylight, the flies swarmed over everything, and he remembered

having heard a physician say that an enlightened man should be more

afraid of a fly than of a Bengal tiger. The boarding-house provided him

with a cot and a supply of vermin, but with no blanket, which was a

necessity in the mountain regions. So after supper he had to seek out

his boss, and arrange to get credit at the company-store. They were

willing to give a certain amount of credit, he found, as this would

enable the camp-marshal to keep him from straying. There was no law to

hold a man for debt--but Hal knew by this time how much a camp-marshal

cared for law.

SECTION 6.

For three days Hal toiled in the bowels of the mine, and ate and pursued

vermin at Reminitsky’s. Then came a blessed Sunday, and he had a couple

of free hours to see the sunlight and to get a look at the North Valley

camp. It was a village straggling along more than a mile of the mountain

canyon. In the centre were the great breaker-buildings, the shaft-house,

and the power-house with its tall chimneys; nearby were the

company-store and a couple of saloons. There were several

boarding-houses like Reminitsky’s, and long rows of board cabins

containing from two to four rooms each, some of them occupied by several

families. A little way up a slope stood a school-house, and another

small one-room building which served as a church; the clergyman

belonging to the General Fuel Company denomination. He was given the use

of the building, by way of start over the saloons, which had to pay a

heavy rental to the company; it seemed a proof of the innate perversity

of human nature that even in spite of this advantage, heaven was losing

out in the struggle against hell in the coal-camp.

As one walked through this village, the first impression was of

desolation. The mountains towered, barren and lonely, scarred with the

wounds of geologic ages. In these canyons the sun set early in the

afternoon, the snow came early in the fall; everywhere Nature’s hand

seemed against man, and man had succumbed to her power. Inside the camps

one felt a still more cruel desolation--that of sordidness and

animalism. There were a few pitiful attempts at vegetable-gardens, but

the cinders and smoke killed everything, and the prevailing colour was

of grime. The landscape was strewn with ash-heaps, old wire and

tomato-cans, and smudged and smutty children playing.

There was a part of the camp called “shanty-town,” where, amid miniature

mountains of slag, some of the lowest of the newly-arrived foreigners

had been permitted to build themselves shacks out of old boards, tin,

and sheets of tar-paper. These homes were beneath the dignity of

chicken-houses, yet in some of them a dozen people were crowded, men and

women sleeping on old rags and blankets on a cinder floor. Here the

babies swarmed like maggots. They wore for the most part a single ragged

smock, and their bare buttocks were shamelessly upturned to the heavens.

It was so the children of the cave-men must have played, thought Hal;

and waves of repulsion swept over him. He had come with love and

curiosity, but both motives failed here. How could a man of sensitive

nerves, aware of the refinements and graces of life, learn to love these

people, who were an affront to his every sense--a stench to his

nostrils, a jabbering to his ear, a procession of deformities to his

eye? What had civilisation done for them? What could it do? After all,

what were they fit for, but the dirty work they were penned up to do? So

spoke the haughty race-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, contemplating

these Mediterranean hordes, the very shape of whose heads was

objectionable.

But Hal stuck it out; and little by little new vision came to him.

First of all, it was the fascination of the mines. They were old

mines--veritable cities tunnelled out beneath the mountains, the main

passages running for miles. One day Hal stole off from his job, and

took a trip with a “rope-rider,” and got through his physical senses a

realisation of the vastness and strangeness and loneliness of this

labyrinth of night. In Number Two mine the vein ran up at a slope of

perhaps five degrees; in part of it the empty cars were hauled in long

trains by an endless rope, but coming back loaded, they came of their

own gravity. This involved much work for the “spraggers,” or boys who

did the braking; it sometimes meant run-away cars, and fresh perils

added to the everyday perils of coal-mining.

The vein varied from four to five feet in thickness; a cruelty of nature

which made it necessary that the men at the “working face”--the place

where new coal was being cut--should learn to shorten their stature.

After Hal had squatted for a while and watched them at their tasks, he

understood why they walked with head and shoulders bent over and arms

hanging down, so that, seeing them coming out of the shaft in the

gloaming, one thought of a file of baboons. The method of getting out

the coal was to “undercut” it with a pick, and then blow it loose with a

charge of powder. This meant that the miner had to lie on his side while

working, and accounted for other physical peculiarities.

Thus, as always, when one understood the lives of men, one came to pity

instead of despising. Here was a separate race of creatures,

subterranean, gnomes, pent up by society for purposes of its own.

Outside in the sunshine-flooded canyon, long lines of cars rolled down

with their freight of soft-coal; coal which would go to the ends of the

earth, to places the miner never heard of, turning the wheels of

industry whose products the miner would never see. It would make

precious silks for fine ladies, it would cut precious jewels for their

adornment; it would carry long trains of softly upholstered cars across

deserts and over mountains; it would drive palatial steamships out of

wintry tempests into gleaming tropic seas. And the fine ladies in their

precious silks and jewels would eat and sleep and laugh and lie at

ease--and would know no more of the stunted creatures of the dark than

the stunted creatures knew of them. Hal reflected upon this, and subdued

his Anglo-Saxon pride, finding forgiveness for what was repulsive in

these people--their barbarous, jabbering speech, their vermin-ridden

homes, their bare-bottomed babies.

SECTION 7.

It chanced before many days that Hal got a holiday, relieving the

monotony of his labours as stableman: an accidental holiday, not

provided for in his bargain with the pit-boss. Something went wrong with

the ventilating-course in Number Two, and he began to notice a headache,

and heard the men grumbling that their lamps were burning low. Then, as

matters began to get serious, orders came to get the mules to the

surface.

Which meant an amusing adventure. The delight of Hal’s pets at seeing

the sunlight was irresistibly comic. They could not be kept from lying

down and rolling on their backs in the cinder-strewn street; and when

they were corralled in a distant part of the camp where actual grass

grew, they abandoned themselves to rapture like a horde of school

children at a picnic.

So Hal had a few free hours; and being still young and not cured of idle

curiosities, he climbed the canyon wall to see the mountains. As he was

sliding down again, toward evening, a vivid spot of colour was painted

into his picture of mine-life; he found himself in somebody’s back yard,

and being observed by somebody’s daughter, who was taking in the family

wash. It was a splendid figure of a lass, tall and vigorous, with the

sort of hair that in polite circles is called auburn, and that flaming

colour in the cheeks which is Nature’s recompense to people who live

where it rains all the time. She was the first beautiful sight Hal had

seen since he had come up the canyon, and it was only natural that he

should be interested. It seemed to him that, so long as the girl stared,

he had a right to stare back. It did not occur to him that he too was a

pleasing sight--that the mountain air had given colour to his cheeks and

a shine to his gay brown eyes, while the mountain winds had blown his

wavy brown hair.

“Hello,” said she, at last, in a warm voice, unmistakably Irish.

“Hello yourself,” said Hal, in the accepted dialect; then he added, with

more elegance, “Pardon me for trespassing on your wash.”

Her grey eyes opened wider. “Go on!” she said.

“I’d rather stay,” said Hal. “It’s a beautiful sunset.”

“I’ll move, so ye can see it better.” She carried her armful of clothes

over and dropped them into the basket.

“No,” said Hal, “it’s not so fine now. The colours have faded.”

She turned and gazed at him again. “Go on wid ye! I been teased about my

hair since before I could talk.”

“’Tis envy,” said Hal, dropping into her way of speech; and he came a

few steps nearer, so that he could inspect the hair more closely. It lay

above her brow in undulations which were agreeable to the decorative

instinct, and a tight heavy braid of it fell over her shoulders and

swung to her waist-line. He observed the shoulders, which were sturdy,

obviously accustomed to hard labour; not conforming to accepted romantic

standards of femininity, yet having an athletic grace of their own. They

were covered with a faded blue calico dress, unfortunately not entirely

clean; also, the young man noticed, there was a rent in one shoulder

through which a patch of skin was visible. The girl’s eyes, which had

been following his, became defiant; she tossed a piece of her washing

over the shoulder, where it stayed through the balance of the interview.

“Who are ye?” she demanded, suddenly.

“My name’s Joe Smith. I’m a stableman in Number Two.”

“And what were ye doin’ up there, if a body might ask?” She lifted her

grey eyes to the bare mountainside, down which he had come sliding in a

shower of loose stones and dirt.

“I’ve been surveying my empire,” said he.

“Your what?”

“My empire. The land belongs to the company, but the landscape belongs

to him who cares for it.”

She tossed her head a little. “Where did ye learn to talk like ye do?”

“In another life,” said he--“before I became a stableman. Not in entire

forgetfulness, but trailing clouds of glory did I come.”

For a moment she wrestled with this. Then a smile broke upon her face.

“Sure, ’tis like a poetry-book! Say some more!”

“_O, singe fort, so suess und fein_!” quoted Hal--and saw her look

puzzled.

“Aren’t you American?” she inquired; and he laughed. To speak a foreign

language in North Valley was not a mark of culture!

“I’ve been listening to the crowd at Reminitsky’s,” he said,

apologetically.

“Oh! You eat there?”

“I go there three times a day. I can’t say I eat very much. Could you

live on greasy beans?”

“Sure,” laughed the girl, “the good old pertaties is good enough for

me.”

“I should have said you lived on rose leaves!” he observed.

“Go on wid ye! ’Tis the blarney-stone ye been kissin’!”

“’Tis no stone I’d be wastin’ my kisses on.”

“Ye’re gettin’ bold, Mister Smith. I’ll not listen to ye.” And she

turned away, and began industriously taking her clothes from the line.

But Hal did not want to be dismissed. He came a step closer.

“Coming down the mountain-side,” he said, “I found something wonderful.

It’s bare and grim up there, but I came on a sheltered corner where the

sun shone, and there was a wild rose. Only one! I thought to myself, ‘So

roses grow, even in the loneliest parts of the world!’”

“Sure, ’tis a poetry-book again!” she cried. “Why didn’t ye bring the

rose?”

“There is a poetry-book that tells us to ‘leave the wild-rose on its

stalk.’ It will go on blooming there; but if one were to pluck it, it

would wither in a few hours.”

He had meant nothing more by this than to keep the conversation going.

But her answer turned the tide of their acquaintance.

“Ye can never be sure, lad. Perhaps to-night a storm may come and blow

it to pieces. Perhaps if ye’d pulled it and been happy, ’twould ’a been

what the rose was for.”

Whatever of unconscious patronage there had been in the poet’s attitude

was lost now in the eternal mystery. Whether the girl knew it--or

cared--she had won the woman’s first victory. She had caught the man’s

mind and pinned it with curiosity. What did this wild rose of the mining

camps mean?

The wild rose, apparently unconscious that she had said anything

epoch-making, was busy with the wash; and meantime Hal Warner studied

her features and pondered her words. From a lady of sophistication they

would have meant only one thing, an invitation; but in this girl’s clear

grey eyes was nothing of wantonness, only pain. But what was this pain

in the face and words of one so young, so eager and alive? Was it the

melancholy of her race, the thing one got in old folk-songs? Or was it a

new and special kind of melancholy, engendered in mining-camps in the

far West of America?

The girl’s countenance was as intriguing as her words. Her grey eyes

were set under sharply defined dark brows, which did not match her hair.

Her lips also were sharply defined, and straight, almost without curves,

so that it seemed as if her mouth had been painted in carmine upon her

face. These features gave her, when she stared at you, an aspect vivid

and startling, bold, with a touch of defiance. But when she smiled, the

red lips would curve into gentler lines, and the grey eyes would become

wistful, and seemingly darker in colour. Winsome indeed, but not simple,

was this Irish lass!

SECTION 8.

Hal asked the name of his new acquaintance, and she told him it was Mary

Burke. “Ye’ve not been here long, I take it,” she said, “or ye’d have

heard of ‘Red Mary.’ ’Tis along of this hair.”

“I’ve not been here long,” he answered, “but I shall hope to stay

now--along of this hair! May I come to see you some time, Miss Burke?”

She did not reply, but glanced at the house where she lived. It was an

unpainted, three room cabin, more dilapidated than the average, with

bare dirt and cinders about it, and what had once been a picket-fence,

now falling apart and being used for stove-wood. The windows were

cracked and broken, and upon the roof were signs of leaks that had been

crudely patched.

“May I come?” he made haste to ask again--so that he would not seem to

look too critically at her home.

“Perhaps ye may,” said the girl, as she picked up the clothes basket. He

stepped forward, offering to carry it, but she did not give it up.

Holding it tight, and looking him defiantly in the face, she said, “Ye

may come, but ye’ll not find it a happy place to visit, Mr. Smith. Ye’ll

hear soon enough from the neighbours.”

“I don’t think I know any of your neighbours,” said he.

There was sympathy in his voice; but her look was no less defiant.

“Ye’ll hear about it, Mr. Smith; but ye’ll hear also that I hold me head

up. And ’tis not so easy to do that in North Valley.”

“You don’t like the place?” he asked; and he was amazed by the effect of

this question, which was merely polite. It was as if a storm cloud had

swept over the girl’s face. “I hate it! ’Tis a place of fear and

devils!”

He hesitated a moment; then, “Will you tell me what you mean by that

when I come?”

But “Red Mary” was winsome again. “When ye come, Mr. Smith, I’ll not be

entertaining ye with troubles. I’ll put on me company manner, and we’ll

go out for a nice walk, if ye please.”

All the way as he walked back to Reminitsky’s to supper, Hal thought

about this girl; not merely her pleasantness to the eye, so unexpected

in this place of desolation, but her personality, which baffled him--the

pain that seemed always just beneath the surface of her thoughts, the

fierce pride which flashed out at the slightest suggestion of sympathy,

the way she had of brightening when he spoke the language of metaphor,

however trite. How had she come to know about poetry-books? He wanted to

know more about this miracle of Nature--this wild rose blooming on a

bare mountain-side!

SECTION 9.

There was one of Mary Burke’s remarks upon which Hal soon got light--her

statement that North Valley was a place of fear. He listened to the

tales of these underworld men, until it came so that he shuddered with

dread each time that he went down in the cage.

There was a wire-haired and almond eyed Korean, named Cho, a

“rope-rider” in Hal’s part of the mine. He was one of those who had

charge of the long trains of cars, called “trips,” which were hauled

through the main passage-ways; the name “rope-rider” came from the fact

that he sat on the heavy iron ring to which the rope was attached. He

invited Hal to a seat with him, and Hal accepted, at peril of his job as

well as of his limbs. Cho had picked up what he fondly thought was

English, and now and then one could understand a word. He pointed upon

the ground, and shouted above the rattle of the cars: “Big dust!” Hal

saw that the ground was covered with six inches of coal-dust, while on

the old disused walls one could write his name in it. “Much blow-up!”

said the rope-rider; and when the last empty cars had been shunted off

into the working-rooms, and he was waiting to make up a return “trip,”

he laboured with gestures to explain what he meant. “Load cars. Bang!

Bust like hell!”

Hal knew that the mountain air in this region was famous for its

dryness; he learned now that the quality which meant life to invalids

from every part of the world meant death to those who toiled to keep the

invalids warm. Driven through the mines by great fans, this air took out

every particle of moisture, and left coal dust so thick and dry that

there were fatal explosions from the mere friction of loading-shovels.

So it happened that these mines were killing several times as many men

as other mines throughout the country.

Was there no remedy for this, Hal asked, talking with one of his

mule-drivers, Tim Rafferty, the evening after his ride with Cho. There

was a remedy, said Tim--the law required sprinkling the mines with

“adobe-dust”; and once in Tim’s life, he remembered this law’s being

obeyed. There had come some “big fellows” inspecting things, and

previous to their visit there had been an elaborate campaign of

sprinkling. But that had been several years ago, and now the apparatus

was stored away, nobody knew where, and one heard nothing about

sprinkling.

It was the same with precautions against gas. The North Valley mines

were especially “gassy,” it appeared. In these old rambling passages one

smelt a stink as of all the rotten eggs in all the barn-yards of the

world; and this sulphuretted hydrogen was the least dangerous of the

gases against which a miner had to contend. There was the dreaded

“choke-damp,” which was odourless, and heavier than air. Striking into

soft, greasy coal, one would open a pocket of this gas, a deposit laid

up for countless ages, awaiting its predestined victim. A man might sink

to sleep as he lay at work, and if his “buddy,” or helper, happened to

be out of sight, and to delay a minute too long, it would be all over

with the man. And there was the still more dreaded “fire-damp,” which

might wreck a whole mine, and kill scores and even hundreds of men.

Against these dangers there was a “fire-boss,” whose duty was to go

through the mine, testing for gas, and making sure that the

ventilating-course was in order, and the fans working properly. The

“fire-boss” was supposed to make his rounds in the early morning, and

the law specified that no one should go to work till he had certified

that all was safe. But what if the “fire-boss” overslept himself, or

happened to be drunk? It was too much to expect thousands of dollars to

be lost for such a reason. So sometimes one saw men ordered to their

work, and sent down grumbling and cursing. Before many hours some of

them would be prostrated with headache, and begging to be taken out; and

perhaps the superintendent would not let them out, because if a few

came, the rest would get scared and want to come also.

Once, only last year, there had been an accident of that sort. A young

mule-driver, a Croatian, told Hal about it while they sat munching the

contents of their dinner-pails. The first cage-load of men had gone down

into the mine, sullenly protesting; and soon afterwards some one had

taken down a naked light, and there had been an explosion which had

sounded like the blowing up of the inside of the world. Eight men had

been killed, the force of the explosion being so great that some of the

bodies had been wedged between the shaft wall and the cage, and it had

been necessary to cut them to pieces to get them out. It was them Japs

that were to blame, vowed Hal’s informant. They hadn’t ought to turn

them loose in coal mines, for the devil himself couldn’t keep a Jap from

sneaking off to get a smoke.

So Hal understood how North Valley was a place of fear. What tales the

old chambers of these mines could have told, if they had had voices! Hal

watched the throngs pouring in to their labours, and reflected that

according to the statisticians of the government eight or nine of every

thousand of them were destined to die violent deaths before a year was

out, and some thirty more would be badly injured. And they knew this,

they knew it better than all the statisticians of the government; yet

they went to their tasks! Reflecting upon this, Hal was full of wonder.

What was the force that kept men at such a task? Was it a sense of duty?

Did they understand that society had to have coal and that some one had

to do the “dirty work” of providing it? Did they have a vision of a

future, great and wonderful, which was to grow out of their ill-requited

toil? Or were they simply fools or cowards, submitting blindly, because

they had not the wit nor the will to do otherwise? Curiosity held him,

he wanted to understand the inner souls of these silent and patient

armies which through the ages have surrendered their lives to other

men’s control.

SECTION 10.

Hal was coming to know these people; to see them no longer as a mass,

to be despised or pitied in bulk, but as individuals, with individual

temperaments and problems, exactly like people in the world of the

sunlight. Mary Burke and Tim Rafferty, Cho the Korean and Madvik the

Croatian--one by one these individualities etched themselves into the

foreground of Hal’s picture, making it a thing of life, moving him to

sympathy and fellowship. Some of these people, to be sure, were stunted

and dulled to a sordid ugliness of soul and body--but on the other hand,

some of them were young, and had the light of hope in their hearts, and

the spark of rebellion.

There was “Andy,” a boy of Greek parentage; Androkulos was his right

name--but it was too much to expect any one to get that straight in a

coal-camp. Hal noticed him at the store, and was struck by his beautiful

features, and the mournful look in his big black eyes. They got to

talking, and Andy made the discovery that Hal had not spent all his time

in coal-camps, but had seen the great world. It was pitiful, the

excitement that came into his voice; he was yearning for life, with its

joys and adventures--and it was his destiny to sit ten hours a day by

the side of a chute, with the rattle of coal in his ears and the dust of

coal in his nostrils, picking out slate with his fingers. He was one of

many scores of “breaker-boys.”

“Why don’t you go away?” asked Hal.

“Christ! How I get away? Got mother, two sisters.”

“And your father?” So Hal made the discovery that Andy’s father had been

one of those men whose bodies had had to be cut to pieces to get them

out of the shaft. Now the son was chained to the father’s place, until

his time too should come!

“Don’t want to be miner!” cried the boy. “Don’t want to get _kil-lid_!”

He began to ask, timidly, what Hal thought he could do if he were to run

away from his family and try his luck in the world outside. Hal,

striving to remember where he had seen olive-skinned Greeks with big

black eyes in this beautiful land of the free, could hold out no better

prospect than a shoe-shining parlour, or the wiping out of wash-bowls in

a hotel-lavatory, handing over the tips to a fat padrone.

Andy had been to school, and had learned to read English, and the

teacher had loaned him books and magazines with wonderful pictures in

them; now he wanted more than pictures, he wanted the things which they

portrayed. So Hal came face to face with one of the difficulties of

mine-operators. They gathered a population of humble serfs, selected

from twenty or thirty races of hereditary bondsmen; but owing to the

absurd American custom of having public-schools, the children of this

population learned to speak English, and even to read it. So they became

too good for their lot in life; and then a wandering agitator would get

in, and all of a sudden there would be hell. Therefore in every

coal-camp had to be another kind of “fire-boss,” whose duty it was to

guard against another kind of explosions--not of carbon monoxide, but of

the human soul.

The immediate duties of this office in North Valley devolved upon Jeff

Cotton, the camp-marshal. He was not at all what one would have expected

from a person of his trade--lean and rather distinguished-looking, a man

who in evening clothes might have passed for a diplomat. But his mouth

would become ugly when he was displeased, and he carried a gun with six

notches upon it; also he wore a deputy-sheriff’s badge, to give him

immunity for other notches he might wish to add. When Jeff Cotton came

near, any man who was explosive went off to be explosive by himself. So

there was “order” in North Valley, and it was only on Saturday and

Sunday nights, when the drunks had to be suppressed, or on Monday

mornings when they had to be haled forth and kicked to their work, that

one realised upon what basis this “order” rested.

Besides Jeff Cotton, and his assistant, “Bud” Adams, who wore badges,

and were known, there were other assistants who wore no badges, and were

not supposed to be known. Coming up in the cage one evening, Hal made

some remark to the Croatian mule-driver, Madvik, about the high price of

company-store merchandise, and was surprised to get a sharp kick on the

ankle. Afterwards, as they were on their way to supper, Madvik gave him

the reason. “Red-faced feller, Gus. Look out for him--company spotter.”

“Is that so?” said Hal, with interest. “How do you know?”

“I know. Everybody know.”

“He don’t look like he had much sense,” said Hal--who had got his idea

of detectives from Sherlock Holmes.

“No take much sense. Go pit-boss, say, ‘Joe feller talk too much. Say

store rob him.’ Any damn fool do that. Hey?”

“To be sure,” admitted Hal. “And the company pays him for it?”

“Pit-boss pay him. Maybe give him drink, maybe two bits. Then pit-boss

come to you: ‘You shoot your mouth off too much, feller. Git the hell

out of here!’ See?”

Hal saw.

“So you go down canyon. Then maybe you go ’nother mine. Boss say, ‘Where

you work?’ You say ‘North Valley.’ He say, ‘What your name?’ You say,

‘Joe Smith.’ He say, ‘Wait.’ He go in, look at paper; he come out, say,

‘No job!’ You say, ‘Why not?’ He say, ‘Shoot off your mouth too much,

feller. Git the hell out of here!’ See?”

“You mean a black-list,” said Hal.

“Sure, black-list. Maybe telephone, find out all about you. You do

anything bad, like talk union”--Madvik had dropped his voice and

whispered the word “union”--“they send your picture--don’t get job

nowhere in state. How you like that?”

SECTION 11.

Before long Hal had a chance to see this system of espionage at work,

and he began to understand something of the force which kept these

silent and patient armies at their tasks. On a Sunday morning he was

strolling with his mule-driver friend Tim Rafferty, a kindly lad with a

pair of dreamy blue eyes in his coal-smutted face. They came to Tim’s

home, and he invited Hal to come in and meet his family. The father was

a bowed and toil-worn man, but with tremendous strength in his solid

frame, the product of many generations of labour in coal-mines. He was

known as “Old Rafferty,” despite the fact that he was well under fifty.

He had been a pit-boy at the age of nine, and he showed Hal a faded

leather album with pictures of his ancestors in the “oul’ country”--men

with sad, deeply lined faces, sitting very stiff and solemn to have

their presentments made permanent for posterity.

The mother of the family was a gaunt, grey-haired woman, with no teeth,

but with a warm heart. Hal took to her, because her home was clean; he

sat on the family door-step, amid a crowd of little Rafferties with

newly-washed Sunday faces, and fascinated them with tales of adventures

cribbed from Clark Russell and Captain Mayne Reid. As a reward he was

invited to stay for dinner, and had a clean knife and fork, and a clean

plate of steaming hot potatoes, with two slices of salt pork on the

side. It was so wonderful that he forthwith inquired if he might forsake

his company boarding-house and come and board with them.

Mrs. Rafferty opened wide her eyes. “Sure,” exclaimed she, “do you think

you’d be let?”

“Why not?” asked Hal.

“Sure, ’t would be a bad example for the others.”

“Do you mean I _have_ to board at Reminitsky’s?”

“There be six company boardin’-houses,” said the woman.

“And what would they do if I came to you?”

“First you’d get a hint, and then you’d go down the canyon, and maybe us

after ye.”

“But there’s lots of people have boarders in shanty-town,” objected Hal.

“Oh! Them wops! Nobody counts them--they live any way they happen to

fall. But you started at Reminitsky’s, and ’t would not be healthy for

them that took ye away.”

“I see,” laughed Hal. “There seem to be a lot of unhealthy things

hereabouts.”

“Sure there be! They sent down Nick Ammons because his wife bought milk

down the canyon. They had a sick baby, and it’s not much you get in this

thin stuff at the store. They put chalk in it, I think; any way, you can

see somethin’ white in the bottom.”

“So you have to trade at the store, too!”

“I thought ye said ye’d worked in coal-mines,” put in Old Rafferty, who

had been a silent listener.

“So I have,” said Hal. “But it wasn’t quite that bad.”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Rafferty, “I’d like to know where ’twas then--in this

country. Me and me old man spent weary years a-huntin’.”

Thus far the conversation had proceeded naturally; but suddenly it was

as if a shadow passed over it--a shadow of fear. Hal saw Old Rafferty

look at his wife, and frown and make signs to her. After all, what did

they know about this handsome young stranger, who talked so glibly, and

had been in so many parts of the world?

“’Tis not complainin’ we’d be,” said the old man.

And his wife made haste to add, “If they let peddlers and the like of

them come in, ’twould be no end to it, I suppose. We find they treat us

here as well as anywhere.”

“’Tis no joke, the life of workin’ men, wherever ye try it,” added the

other; and when young Tim started to express an opinion, they shut him

up with such evident anxiety that Hal’s heart ached for them, and he

made haste to change the subject.

SECTION 12.

On the evening of the same Sunday Hal went to pay his promised call upon

Mary Burke. She opened the front door of the cabin to let him in, and

even by the dim rays of the little kerosene lamp, there came to him an

impression of cheerfulness. “Hello,” she said--just as she had said it

when he had slid down the mountain into the family wash. He followed her

into the room, and saw that the impression he had got of cheerfulness

came from Mary herself. How bright and fresh she looked! The old blue

calico, which had not been entirely clean, was newly laundered now, and

on the shoulder where the rent had been was a neat patch of unfaded

blue.

There being only three rooms in Mary’s home, two of these necessarily

bed-rooms, she entertained her company in the kitchen. The room was

bare, Hal saw--there was not even so much as a clock by way of ornament.

The only charm the girl had been able to give to it, in preparation for

company, was that of cleanness. The board floor had been newly sanded

and scrubbed; the kitchen table also had been scrubbed, and the kettle

on the stove, and the cracked tea-pot and bowls on the shelf. Mary’s

little brother and sister were in the room: Jennie, a dark-eyed,

dark-haired little girl, frail, with a sad, rather frightened face; and

Tommie, a round headed youngster, like a thousand other round headed and

freckle-faced boys. Both of them were now sitting very straight in their

chairs, staring at the visitor with a certain resentment, he thought. He

suspected that they had been included in the general scrubbing. Inasmuch

as it had been uncertain just when the visitor would come, they must

have been required to do this every night, and he could imagine family

disturbances, with arguments possibly not altogether complimentary to

Mary’s new “feller.”

There seemed to be a certain uneasiness in the place.

Mary did not invite her company to a seat, but stood irresolute; and

after Hal had ventured a couple of friendly remarks to the children, she

said, abruptly, “Shall we be takin’ that walk that we spoke of, Mr.

Smith?”

“Delighted!” said Hal; and while she pinned on her hat before the broken

mirror on the shelf, he smiled at the children and quoted two lines from

his Harrigan song--

“Oh, Mary-Jane, come out in the lane,

The moon is a-shinin’ in the old pecan!”

Tommie and Jennie were too shy to answer, but Mary exclaimed, “’Tis in a

tin-can ye see it shinin’ here!”

They went out. In the soft summer night it was pleasant to stroll under

the moon--especially when they had come to the remoter parts of the

village, where there were not so many weary people on door-steps and

children playing noisily. There were other young couples walking here,

under the same moon; the hardest day’s toil could not so sap their

energies that they did not feel the spell of this soft summer night.

Hal, being tired, was content to stroll and enjoy the stillness; but

Mary Burke sought information about the mysterious young man she was

with. “Ye’ve not worked long in coal-mines, Mr. Smith?” she remarked.

Hal was a trifle disconcerted. “How did you find that out?”

“Ye don’t look it--ye don’t talk it. Ye’re not like anybody or anything

around here. I don’t know how to say it, but ye make me think more of

the poetry-books.”

Flattered as Hal was by this naïve confession, he did not want to talk

of the mystery of himself. He took refuge in a question about the

“poetry-books.” “I’ve read some,” said the girl; “more than ye’d have

thought, perhaps.” This with a flash of her defiance.

He asked more questions, and learned that she, like the Greek boy,

“Andy,” had come under the influence of that disturbing American

institution, the public-school; she had learned to read, and the pretty

young teacher had helped her, lending her books and magazines. Thus she

had been given a key to a treasure-house, a magic carpet on which to

travel over the world. These similes Mary herself used--for the Arabian

Nights had been one of the books that were loaned to her. On rainy days

she would hide behind the sofa, reading at a spot where the light crept

in--so that she might be safe from small brothers and sisters!

Joe Smith had read these same books, it appeared; and this seemed

remarkable to Mary, for books cost money and were hard to get. She

explained how she had searched the camp for new magic carpets, finding a

“poetry-book” by Longfellow, and a book of American history, and a story

called “David Copperfield,” and last and strangest of all, another story

called “Pride and Prejudice.” A curious freak of fortune--the prim and

sentimentally quivering Jane Austen in a coal-camp in a far Western

wilderness! An adventure for Jane, as well as for Mary!

What had Mary made of it, Hal wondered. Had she revelled, shop-girl

fashion, in scenes of pallid ease? He learned that what she had made of

it was despair. This world outside, with its freedom and cleanness, its

people living gracious and worth-while lives, was not for her; she was

chained to a scrub-pail in a coal-camp. Things had got so much worse

since the death of her mother, she said. Her voice had become dull and

hard--Hal thought that he had never heard a young voice express such

hopelessness.

“You’ve never been anywhere but here?” he asked.

“I been in two other camps,” she said--“first the Gordon, and then East

Run. But they’re all alike.”

“But you’ve been down to the towns?”

“Only for a day, once or twice a year. Once I was in Sheridan, and in a

church I heard a lady sing.”

She stopped for a moment, lost in this memory. Then suddenly her voice

changed--and he could imagine in the darkness that she had tossed her

head defiantly. “I’ll not be entertainin’ company with my troubles! Ye

know how tiresome that is when ye hear it from somebody else--like my

next-door neighbour, Mrs. Zamboni. D’ ye know her?”

“No,” said Hal.

“The poor old lady has troubles enough, God knows. Her man’s not much

good--he’s troubled with the drink; and she’s got eleven childer, and

that’s too many for one woman. Don’t ye think so?”

She asked this with a naïveté which made Hal laugh. “Yes,” he said, “I

do.”

“Well, I think people’d help her more if she’d not complain so! And half

of it in the Slavish language, that a body can’t understand!” So Mary

began to tell funny things about Mrs. Zamboni and her other polyglot

neighbours, imitating their murdering of the Irish dialect. Hal thought

her humour was naïve and delightful, and he led her on to more cheerful

gossip during the remainder of their walk.

SECTION 13.

But then, as they were on their way home, tragedy fell upon them.

Hearing a step behind them, Mary turned and looked; then catching Hal by

the arm, she drew him into the shadows at the side, whispering to him to

be silent. The bent figure of a man went past them, lurching from side

to side.

When he had turned and gone into the house, Mary said, “It’s my father.

He’s ugly when he’s like that.” And Hal could hear her quick breathing

in the darkness.

So that was Mary’s trouble--the difficulty in her home life to which she

had referred at their first meeting! Hal understood many things in a

flash--why her home was bare of ornament, and why she did not invite her

company to sit down. He stood silent, not knowing what to say. Before he

could find the word, Mary burst out, “Oh, how I hate O’Callahan, that

sells the stuff to my father! His home with plenty to eat in it, and his

wife dressin’ in silk and goin’ down to mass every Sunday, and thinkin’

herself too good for a common miner’s daughter! Sometimes I think I’d

like to kill them both.”

“That wouldn’t help much,” Hal ventured.

“No, I know--there’d only be some other one in his place. Ye got to do

more than that, to change things here. Ye got to get after them that

make money out of O’Callahan.”

So Mary’s mind was groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement

was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she

reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this

terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in

Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common

miner’s daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was turned

to intellectual interest.

“They’ll stop the drink business altogether some day,” he said. He had

not known that he was a Prohibitionist; he had become one suddenly!

“Well,” she answered, “they’d best stop it soon, if they don’t want to

be too late. ’Tis a sight to make your heart sick to see the young lads

comin’ home staggerin’, too drunk even to fight.”

Hal had not had time to see much of this aspect of North Valley. “They

sell to boys?” he asked.

“Sure, who’s to care? A boy’s money’s as good as a man’s.”

“But I should think the company--”

“The company lets the saloon-buildin’--that’s all the company cares.”

“But they must care something about the efficiency of their hands!”

“Sure, there’s plenty more where they come from. When ye can’t work,

they fire ye, and that’s all there is to it.”

“And is it so easy to get skilled men?”

“It don’t take much skill to get out coal. The skill is in keepin’ your

bones whole--and if you can stand breakin’ ’em, the company can stand

it.”

They had come to the little cabin. Mary stood for a moment in silence.

“I’m talkin’ bitter again!” she exclaimed suddenly. “And I promised ye

me company manner! But things keep happening to set me off.” And she

turned abruptly and ran into the house. Hal stood for a moment wondering

if she would return; then, deciding that she had meant that as good

night, he went slowly up the street.

He fought against a mood of real depression, the first he had known

since his coming to North Valley. He had managed so far to keep a

certain degree of aloofness, that he might see this industrial world

without prejudice. But to-night his pity for Mary had involved him more

deeply. To be sure, he might be able to help her, to find her work in

some less crushing environment; but his mind went on to the

question--how many girls might there be in mining-camps, young and

eager, hungering for life, but crushed by poverty, and by the burden of

the drink problem?

A man walked past Hal, greeting him in the semi-darkness with a nod and

a motion of the hand. It was the Reverend Spragg, the gentleman who was

officially commissioned to combat the demon rum in North Valley.

Hal had been to the little white church the Sunday before, and heard the

Reverend Spragg preach a doctrinal sermon, in which the blood of the

lamb was liberally sprinkled, and the congregation heard where and how

they were to receive compensation for the distresses they endured in

this vale of tears.

What a mockery it seemed! Once, indubitably, people had believed such

doctrines; they had been willing to go to the stake for them. But now

nobody went to the stake for them--on the contrary, the company

compelled every worker to contribute out of his scanty earnings towards

the preaching of them. How could the most ignorant of zealots confront

such an arrangement without suspicion of his own piety? Somewhere at the

head of the great dividend-paying machine that was called the General

Fuel Company must be some devilish intelligence that had worked it all

out, that had given the orders to its ecclesiastical staff: “We want the

present--we leave you the future! We want the bodies--we leave you the

souls! Teach them what you will about heaven--so long as you let us

plunder them on earth!”

In accordance with this devil’s program, the Reverend Spragg might

denounce the demon rum, but he said nothing about dividends based on the

renting of rum-shops, nor about local politicians maintained by company

contributions, plus the profits of wholesale liquor. He said nothing

about the conclusions of modern hygiene, concerning over-work as a cause

of the craving for alcohol; the phrase “industrial drinking,” it seemed,

was not known in General Fuel Company theology! In fact, when you

listened to such a sermon, you would never have guessed that the hearers

of it had physical bodies at all; certainly you would never have guessed

that the preacher had a body, which was nourished by food produced by

the overworked and under-nourished wage-slaves whom he taught!

SECTION 14.

For the most part the victims of this system were cowed and spoke of

their wrongs only in whispers; but there was one place in the camp, Hal

found, where they could not keep silence, where their sense of outrage

battled with their fear. This place was the solar plexus of the

mine-organism, the centre of its nervous energies; to change the simile,

it was the judgment-seat, where the miner had sentence passed upon

him--sentence either to plenty, or to starvation and despair.

This place was the “tipple,” where the coal that came out of the mine

was weighed and recorded. Every digger, as he came from the cage, made

for this spot. There was a bulletin-board, and on it his number, and the

record of the weights of the cars he had sent out that day. And every

man, no matter how ignorant, had learned enough English to read those

figures.

Hal had gradually come to realise that here was the place of drama. Most

of the men would look, and then, without a sound or glance about, would

slouch off with drooping shoulders. Others would mumble to

themselves--or, what amounted to the same thing, would mumble to one

another in barbarous dialects. But about one in five could speak

English; and scarcely an evening passed that some man did not break

loose, shaking his fist at the sky, or at the weigh-boss--behind the

latter’s back. He might gather a knot of fellow-grumblers about him; it

was to be noted that the camp-marshal had the habit of being on hand at

this hour.

It was on one of these occasions that Hal first noticed Mike Sikoria, a

grizzle-haired old Slovak, who had spent twenty years in the mines of

these regions. All the bitterness of all the wrongs of all these years

welled up in Old Mike, as he shouted his score aloud: “Nineteen,

twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty! Is that my weight, Mister? You want me

to believe that’s my weight?”

“That’s your weight,” said the weigh-boss, coldly.

“Well, by Judas, your scale is off, Mister! Look at them cars--them cars

is big! You measure them cars, Mister--seven feet long, three and a half

feet high, four feet wide. And you tell me them don’t go but twenty?”

“You don’t load them right,” said the boss.

“Don’t load them right?” echoed the old miner; he became suddenly

plaintive, as if more hurt than angered by such an insinuation. “You

know all the years I work, and you tell me I don’t know a load? When I

load a car, I load him like a miner, I don’t load him like a Jap, that

don’t know about a mine! I put it up--I chunk it up like a stack of hay.

I load him square--like that.” With gestures the old fellow was

illustrating what he meant. “See there! There’s a ton on the top, and a

ton and a half on the bottom--and you tell me I get only nineteen,

twenty!”

“That’s your weight,” said the boss, implacably.

“But, Mister, your scale is wrong! I tell you I used to get my weight. I

used to get forty-five, forty-six on them cars. Here’s my buddy--ask him

if it ain’t so. What is it, Bo?”

“Um m m-mum,” said Bo, who was a negro--though one could hardly be sure

of this for the coal-dust on him.

“I can’t make a living no more!” exclaimed the old Slovak, his voice

trembling and his wizened dark eyes full of pleading. “What you think I

make? For fifteen days, fifty cents! I pay board, and so help me God,

Mister--and I stand right here--I swear for God I make fifty cents. I

dig the coal and I ain’t got no weight, I ain’t got nothing! Your scale

is wrong!”

“Get out!” said the weigh-boss, turning away.

“But, Mister!” cried Old Mike, following behind him, and pouring his

whole soul into his words. “What is this life, Mister? You work like a

burro, and you don’t get nothing for it! You burn your own powder--half

a dollar a day powder--what you think of that? Crosscut--and you get

nothing! Take the skip and a pillar, and you get nothing! Brush--and you

get nothing! Here, by Judas, a poor man, going and working his body to

the last point, and blood is run out! You starve me to death, I say! I

have got to have something to eat, haven’t I?”

And suddenly the boss whirled upon him. “Get the hell out of here!” he

shouted. “If you don’t like it, get your time and quit. Shut your face,

or I’ll shut it for you.”

The old man quailed and fell silent. He stood for a moment more, biting

his whiskered lips nervously; then his shoulders sank together, and he

turned and slunk off, followed by his negro helper.

SECTION 15.

Old Mike boarded at Reminitsky’s, and after supper was over, Hal sought

him out. He was easy to know, and proved an interesting acquaintance.

With the help of his eloquence Hal wandered through a score of camps in

the district. The old fellow had a temper that he could not manage, and

so he was always on the move; but all places were alike, he said--there

was always some trick by which a miner was cheated of his earnings. A

miner was a little business man, a contractor who took a certain job,

with its expenses and its chance of profit or loss. A “place” was

assigned to him by the boss--and he undertook to get out the coal from

it, being paid at the rate of fifty-five cents a ton for each ton of

clean coal. In some “places” a man could earn good money, and in others

he would work for weeks, and not be able to keep up with his

store-account.

It all depended upon the amount of rock and slate that was found with

the coal. If the vein was low, the man had one or two feet of rock to

take off the ceiling, and this had to be loaded on separate cars and

taken away. This work was called “brushing,” and for it the miner

received no pay. Or perhaps it was necessary to cut through a new

passage, and clean out the rock; or perhaps to “grade the bottom,” and

lay the ties and rails over which the cars were brought in to be loaded;

or perhaps the vein ran into a “fault,” a broken place where there was

rock instead of coal--and this rock must be hewed away before the miner

could get at the coal. All such work was called “dead-work,” and it was

the cause of unceasing war. In the old days the company had paid extra

for it; now, since they had got the upper hand of the men, they were

refusing to pay. And so it was important to the miner to have a “place”

assigned him where there was not so much of this dead work. And the

“place” a man got depended upon the boss; so here, at the very outset,

was endless opportunity for favouritism and graft, for quarrelling, or

“keeping in” with the boss. What chance did a man stand who was poor and

old and ugly, and could not speak English good? inquired old Mike, with

bitterness. The boss stole his cars and gave them to other people; he

took the weight off the cars, and gave them to fellows who boarded with

him, or treated him to drinks, or otherwise curried favour with him.

“I work five days in the Southeastern,” said Mike, “and when I work them

five days, so help me God, brother, if I don’t get up out of this chair,

fifteen cents I was still in the hole yet. Fourteen inches of rock! And

the Mr. Bishop--that is the superintendent--I says, ‘Do you pay

something for that rock?’ ‘Huh?’ says he. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if you don’t

pay nothing for the rock, I don’t go ahead with it. I ain’t got no place

to put that rock.’ ‘Get the hell out of here,’ says he, and when I

started to fight he pull gun on me. And then I go to Cedar Mountain, and

the super give me work there, and he says, ‘You go Number Four,’ and he

says, ‘Rail is in Number Three, and the ties.’ And he says, ‘I pay you

for it when you put it in.’ So I take it away and I put it in, and I

work till twelve o’clock. Carried the three pair of rails and the ties,

and I pulled all the spikes--”

“Pulled the spikes?” asked Hal.

“Got no good spikes. Got to use old spikes, what you pull out of them

old ties. So then I says, ‘What is my half day, what you promise me?’

Says he, ‘You ain’t dug no coal yet!’ ‘But, mister,’ says I, ‘you

promise me pay to pull them spikes and put in them ties!’ Says he,

‘Company pay nothin’ for dead work--you know that,’ says he, and that is

all the satisfaction I get.”

“And you didn’t get your half day’s pay?”

“Sure I get nothin’. Boss do just as he please in coal mine.”

SECTION 16.

There was another way, Old Mike explained, in which the miner was at the

mercy of others; this was the matter of stealing cars. Each miner had

brass checks with his number on them, and when he sent up a loaded car,

he hung one of these checks on a hook inside. In the course of the long

journey to the tipple, some one would change the check, and the car was

gone. In some mines, the number was put on the car with chalk; and how

easy it was for some one to rub it out and change it! It appeared to Hal

that it would have been a simple matter to put a number padlock on the

car, instead of a check; but such an equipment would have cost the

company one or two hundred dollars, he was told, and so the stealing

went on year after year.

“You think it’s the bosses steal these cars?” asked Hal.

“Sometimes bosses, sometimes bosses’ friend--sometimes company himself

steal them from miners.” In North Valley it was the company, the old

Slovak insisted. It was no use sending up more than six cars in one day,

he declared; you could never get credit for more than six. Nor was it

worth while loading more than a ton on a car; they did not really weigh

the cars, the boss just ran them quickly over the scales, and had orders

not to go above a certain average. Mike told of an Italian who had

loaded a car for a test, so high that he could barely pass it under the

roof of the entry, and went up on the tipple and saw it weighed himself,

and it was sixty-five hundred pounds. They gave him thirty-five hundred,

and when he started to fight, they arrested him. Mike had not seen him

arrested, but when he had come out of the mine, the man was gone, and

nobody ever saw him again. After that they put a door onto the

weigh-room, so that no one could see the scales.

The more Hal listened to the men and reflected upon these things, the

more he came to see that the miner was a contractor who had no

opportunity to determine the size of the contract before he took it on,

nor afterwards to determine how much work he had done. More than that,

he was obliged to use supplies, over the price and measurements of which

he had no control. He used powder, and would find himself docked at the

end of the month for a certain quantity, and if the quantity was wrong,

he would have no redress. He was charged a certain sum for

“black-smithing”--the keeping of his tools in order; and he would find a

dollar or two deducted from his account each month, even though he had

not been near the blacksmith shop.

Let any business-man in the world consider the proposition, thought Hal,

and say if he would take a contract upon such terms! Would a man

undertake to build a dam, for example, with no chance to measure the

ground in advance, nor any way of determining how many cubic yards of

concrete he had to put in? Would a grocer sell to a customer who

proposed to come into the store and do his own weighing--and meantime

locking the grocer outside? Merely to put such questions was to show the

preposterousness of the thing; yet in this district were fifteen

thousand men working on precisely such terms.

Under the state law, the miner had a right to demand a check-weighman to

protect his interest at the scales, paying this check-weighman’s wages

out of his own earnings. Whenever there was any public criticism about

conditions in the coal-mines, this law would be triumphantly cited by

the operators; and one had to have actual experience in order to realise

what a bitter mockery this was to the miner.

In the dining-room Hal sat next to a fair-haired Swedish giant named

Johannson, who loaded timbers ten hours a day. This fellow was one who

indulged in the luxury of speaking his mind, because he had youth and

huge muscles, and no family to tie him down. He was what is called a

“blanket-stiff,” wandering from mine to harvest-field and from

harvest-field to lumber-camp. Some one broached the subject of

check-weighmen to him, and the whole table heard his scornful laugh. Let

any man ask for a check-weighman!

“You mean they would fire him?” asked Hal.

“Maybe!” was the answer. “Maybe they make him fire himself.”

“How do you mean?”

“They make his life one damn misery till he go.”

So it was with check-weighman--as with scrip, and with company stores,

and with all the provisions of the law to protect the miner against

accidents. You might demand your legal rights, but if you did, it was a

matter of the boss’s temper. He might make your life one damn misery

till you went of your own accord. Or you might get a string of curses

and an order, “Down the canyon!”--and likely as not the toe of a boot in

your trouser-seat, or the muzzle of a revolver under your nose.

SECTION 17.

Such conditions made the coal-district a place of despair. Yet there

were men who managed to get along somehow, and to raise families and

keep decent homes. If one had the luck to escape accident, if he did not

marry too young, or did not have too many children; if he could manage

to escape the temptations of liquor, to which overwork and monotony

drove so many; if, above all, he could keep on the right side of his

boss--why then he might have a home, and even a little money on deposit

with the company.

Such a one was Jerry Minetti, who became one of Hal’s best friends. He

was a Milanese, and his name was Gerolamo, which had become Jerry in the

“melting-pot.” He was about twenty-five years of age, and what is

unusual with the Italians, was of good stature. Their meeting took

place--as did most of Hal’s social experiences--on a Sunday. Jerry had

just had a sleep and a wash, and had put on a pair of new blue overalls,

so that he presented a cheering aspect in the sunlight. He walked with

his head up and his shoulders square, and one could see that he had few

cares in the world.

But what caught Hal’s attention was not so much Jerry as what followed

at Jerry’s heels; a perfect reproduction of him, quarter-size, also with

a newly-washed face and a pair of new blue overalls. He too had his head

up, and his shoulders square, and he was an irresistible object,

throwing out his heels and trying his best to keep step. Since the

longest strides he could take left him behind, he would break into a

run, and getting close under his father’s heels, would begin keeping

step once more.

Hal was going in the same direction, and it affected him like the music

of a military band; he too wanted to throw his head up and square his

shoulders and keep step. And then other people, seeing the grin on his

face, would turn and watch, and grin also. But Jerry walked on gravely,

unaware of this circus in the rear.

They went into a house; and Hal, having nothing to do but enjoy life,

stood waiting for them to come out. They returned in the same

procession, only now the man had a sack of something on his shoulder,

while the little chap had a smaller load poised in imitation. So Hal

grinned again, and when they were opposite him, he said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Jerry, and stopped. Then, seeing Hal’s grin, he grinned

back; and Hal looked at the little chap and grinned, and the little chap

grinned back. Jerry, seeing what Hal was grinning at, grinned more than

ever; so there stood all three in the middle of the road, grinning at

one another for no apparent reason.

“Gee, but that’s a great kid!” said Hal.

“Gee, you bet!” said Jerry; and he set down his sack. If some one

desired to admire the kid, he was willing to stop any length of time.

“Yours?” asked Hal.

“You bet!” said Jerry, again.

“Hello, Buster!” said Hal.

“Hello yourself!” said the kid. One could see in a moment that he had

been in the “melting-pot.”

“What’s your name?” asked Hal.

“Jerry,” was the reply.

“And what’s his name?” Hal nodded towards the man--

“Big Jerry.”

“Got any more like you at home?”

“One more,” said Big Jerry. “Baby.”

“He ain’t like me,” said Little Jerry. “He’s little.”

“And you’re big?” said Hal.

“He can’t walk!”

“Neither can you walk!” laughed Hal, and caught him up and slung him

onto his shoulder. “Come on, we’ll ride!”

So Big Jerry took up his sack again, and they started off; only this

time it was Hal who fell behind and kept step, squaring his shoulders

and flinging out his heels. Little Jerry caught onto the joke, and

giggled and kicked his sturdy legs with delight. Big Jerry would look

round, not knowing what the joke was, but enjoying it just the same.

They came to the three-room cabin which was Both Jerrys’ home; and Mrs.

Jerry came to the door, a black-eyed Sicilian girl, who did not look old

enough to have even one baby. They had another bout of grinning, at the

end of which Big Jerry said, “You come in?”

“Sure,” said Hal.

“You stay supper,” added the other. “Got spaghetti.”

“Gee!” said Hal. “All right, let me stay, and pay for it.”

“Hell, no!” said Jerry. “You no pay!”

“No! No pay!” cried Mrs. Jerry, shaking her pretty head energetically.

“All right,” said Hal, quickly, seeing that he might hurt their

feelings. “I’ll stay if you’re sure you have enough.”

“Sure, plenty!” said Jerry. “Hey, Rosa?”

“Sure, plenty!” said Mrs. Jerry.

“Then I’ll stay,” said Hal. “You like spaghetti, Kid?”

“Jesus!” cried Little Jerry.

Hal looked about him at this Dago home. It was a tome in keeping with

its pretty occupant. There were lace curtains in the windows, even

shinier and whiter than at the Rafferties; there was an incredibly

bright-coloured rug on the floor, and bright coloured pictures of Mount

Vesuvius and of Garibaldi on the walls. Also there was a cabinet with

many interesting treasures to look at--a bit of coral and a conch-shell,

a shark’s tooth and an Indian arrow-head, and a stuffed linnet with a

glass cover over him. A while back Hal would not have thought of such

things as especially stimulating to the imagination; but that was before

he had begun to spend five-sixths of his waking hours in the bowels of

the earth.

He ate supper, a real Dago supper; the spaghetti proved to be real Dago

spaghetti, smoking hot, with tomato sauce and a rich flavour of

meat-juice. And all through the meal Hal smacked his lips and grinned at

Little Jerry, who smacked his lips and grinned back. It was all so

different from feeding at Reminitsky’s pig-trough, that Hal thought he

had never had such a good supper in his life before. As for Mr. and Mrs.

Jerry, they were so proud of their wonderful kid, who could swear in

English as good as a real American, that they were in the seventh

heaven.

When the meal was over, Hal leaned back and exclaimed, just as he had at

the Rafferties’, “Lord, how I wish I could board here!”

He saw his host look at his wife. “All right,” said he. “You come here.

I board you. Hey, Rosa?”

“Sure,” said Rosa.

Hal looked at them, astonished. “You’re sure they’ll let you?” he asked.

“Let me? Who stop me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Reminitsky. You might get into trouble.”

Jerry grinned. “I no fraid,” said he. “Got friends here. Carmino my

cousin. You know Carmino?”

“No,” said Hal.

“Pit-boss in Number One. He stand by me. Old Reminitsky go hang! You

come here, I give you bunk in that room, give you good grub. What you

pay Reminitsky?”

“Twenty-seven a month.”

“All right, you pay me twenty-seven, you get everything good. Can’t get

much stuff here, but Rosa good cook, she fix it.”

Hal’s new friend--besides being a favourite of the boss--was a

“shot-firer”; it was his duty to go about the mine at night, setting off

the charges of powder which the miners had got ready by day. This was

dangerous work, calling for a skilled man, and it paid pretty well; so

Jerry got on in the world and was not afraid to speak his mind, within

certain limits. He ignored the possibility that Hal might be a company

spy, and astonished him by rebellious talk of the different kinds of

graft in North Valley, and at other places he had worked since coming to

America as a boy. Minetti was a Socialist, Hal learned; he took an

Italian Socialist paper, and the clerk at the post-office knew what sort

of paper it was, and would “josh” him about it. What was more

remarkable, Mrs. Minetti was a Socialist also; that meant a great deal

to a man, as Jerry explained, because she was not under the domination

of a priest.

SECTION 18.

Hal made the move at once, sacrificing part of a month’s board, which

Reminitsky would charge against his account with the company. But he was

willing to pay for the privilege of a clean home and clean food. To his

amusement he found that in the eyes of his Irish friends he was losing

caste by going to live with the Minettis. There were most rigid social

lines in North Valley, it appeared. The Americans and English and Scotch

looked down upon the Welsh and Irish; the Welsh and Irish looked down

upon the Dagoes and Frenchies; the Dagoes and Frenchies looked down upon

Polacks and Hunkies, these in turn upon Greeks, Bulgarians and

“Montynegroes,” and so on through a score of races of Eastern Europe,

Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Croatians, Armenians, Roumanians, Rumelians,

Ruthenians--ending up with Greasers, niggers, and last and lowest, Japs.

It was when Hal went to pay another call upon the Rafferties that he

made this discovery. Mary Burke happened to be there, and when she

caught sight of him, her grey eyes beamed with mischief. “How do ye do,

Mr. Minetti?” she cried.

“How do ye do, Miss Rosetti?” he countered.

“You lika da spagett?”

“You no lika da spagett?”

“I told ye once,” laughed the girl--“the good old pertaties is good

enough for me!”

“And you remember,” said he, “what I answered?”

Yes, she remembered! Her cheeks took on the colour of the rose-leaves he

had specified as her probable diet.

And then the Rafferty children, who had got to know Hal well, joined in

the teasing. “Mister Minetti! Lika da spagetti!” Hal, when he had

grasped the situation, was tempted to retaliate by reminding them that

he had offered to board with the Irish, and been turned down; but he

feared that the elder Rafferty might not appreciate this joke, so

instead he pretended to have supposed all along that the Rafferties were

Italians. He addressed the elder Rafferty gravely, pronouncing the name

with the accent on the second syllable--“Signer Rafferti”; and this so

amused the old man that he chuckled over it at intervals for an hour.

His heart warmed to this lively young fellow; he forgot some of his

suspicions, and after the youngsters had been sent away to bed, he

talked more or less frankly about his life as a coal-miner.

“Old Rafferty” had once been on the way to high station. He had been

made tipple-boss at the San José mine, but had given up his job because

he had thought that his religion did not permit him to do what he was

ordered to do. It had been a crude proposition of keeping the men’s

score at a certain level, no matter how much coal they might send up;

and when Rafferty had quit rather than obey such orders, he had had to

leave the mine altogether; for of course everybody knew why he had quit,

and his mere presence had the effect of keeping discontent alive.

“You think there are no honest companies at all?” Hal asked.

The old man answered, “There be some, but ’tis not so easy as ye might

think to be honest. They have to meet each other’s prices, and when one

short-weights, the others have to. ’Tis a way of cuttin’ wages without

the men findin’ it out; and there be people that do not like to fall

behind with their profits.” Hal found himself thinking of old Peter

Harrigan, who controlled the General Fuel Company, and had made the

remark: “I am a great clamourer for dividends!”

“The trouble with the miner,” continued Old Rafferty, “is that he has no

one to speak for him. He stands alone--”

During this discourse, Hal had glanced at “Red Mary,” and noticed that

she sat with her arms on the table, her sturdy shoulders bowed in a

fashion which told of a hard day’s toil. But here she broke into the

conversation; her voice came suddenly, alive with scorn: “The trouble

with the miner is that he’s a _slave!_”

“Ah, now--” put in the old man, protestingly.

“He has the whole world against him, and he hasn’t got the sense to get

together--to form a union, and stand by it!”

There fell a sudden silence in the Rafferty home. Even Hal was

startled--for this was the first time during his stay in the camp that

he had heard the dread word “union” spoken above a whisper.

“I know!” said Mary, her grey eyes full of defiance. “Ye’ll not have the

word spoken! But some will speak it in spite of ye!”

“’Tis all very well,” said the old man. “When ye’re young, and a woman

too--”

“A woman! Is it only the women that can have courage?”

“Sure,” said he, with a wry smile, “’tis the women that have the

tongues, and that can’t he stopped from usin’ them. Even the boss must

know that.”

“Maybe so,” replied Mary. “And maybe ’tis the women have the most to

suffer in a coal-camp; and maybe the boss knows that.” The girl’s cheeks

were red.

“Mebbe so,” said Rafferty; and after that there was silence, while he

sat puffing his pipe. It was evident that he did not care to go on, that

he did not want union speeches made in his home. After a while Mrs.

Rafferty made a timid effort to change the course of the talk, by asking

after Mary’s sister, who had not been well; and after they had discussed

remedies for the ailments of children, Mary rose, saying, “I’ll be goin’

along.”

Hal rose also. “I’ll walk with you, if I may,” he said.

“Sure,” said she; and it seemed that the cheerfulness of the Rafferty

family was restored by the sight of a bit of gallantry.

SECTION 19.

They strolled down the street, and Hal remarked, “That’s the first word

I’ve heard here about a union.”

Mary looked about her nervously. “Hush!” she whispered.

“But I thought you said you were talking about it!”

She answered, “’Tis one thing, talkin’ in a friend’s house, and another

outside. What’s the good of throwin’ away your job?”

He lowered his voice. “Would you seriously like to have a union here?”

“Seriously?” said she. “Didn’t ye see Mr. Rafferty--what a coward he is?

That’s the way they are! No, ’twas just a burst of my temper. I’m a bit

crazy to-night--something happened to set me off.”

He thought she was going on, but apparently she changed her mind.

Finally he asked, “What happened?”

“Oh, ’twould do no good to talk,” she answered; and they walked a bit

farther in silence.

“Tell me about it, won’t you?” he said; and the kindness in his tone

made its impression.

“’Tis not much ye know of a coal-camp, Joe Smith,” she said. “Can’t ye

imagine what it’s like--bein’ a woman in a place like this? And a woman

they think good-lookin’!”

“Oh, so it’s that!” said he, and was silent again. “Some one’s been

troubling you?” he ventured after a while.

“Sure! Some one’s always troublin’ us women! Always! Never a day but we

hear it. Winks and nudges--everywhere ye turn.”

“Who is it?”

“The bosses, the clerks--anybody that has a chance to wear a stiff

collar, and thinks he can offer money to a girl. It begins before she’s

out of short skirts, and there’s never any peace afterwards.”

“And you can’t make them understand?”

“I’ve made them understand me a bit; now they go after my old man.”

“What?”

“Sure! D’ye suppose they’d not try that? Him that’s so crazy for liquor,

and can never get enough of it!”

“And your father?--” But Hal stopped. She would not want that question

asked!

She had seen his hesitation, however. “He was a decent man once,” she

declared. “’Tis the life here, that turns a man into a coward. ’Tis

everything ye need, everywhere ye turn--ye have to ask favours from some

boss. The room ye work in, the dead work they pile on ye; or maybe ’tis

more credit ye need at the store, or maybe the doctor to come when ye’re

sick. Just now ’tis our roof that leaks--so bad we can’t find a dry

place to sleep when it rains.”

“I see,” said Hal. “Who owns the house?”

“Sure, there’s none but company houses here.”

“Who’s supposed to fix it?”

“Mr. Kosegi, the house-agent. But we gave him up long ago--if he does

anything, he raises the rent. Today my father went to Mr. Cotton. He’s

supposed to look out for the health of the place, and it seems hardly

healthy to keep people wet in their beds.”

“And what did Cotton say?” asked Hal, when she stopped again.

“Well, don’t ye know Jeff Cotton--can’t ye guess what he’d say? ‘That’s

a fine girl ye got, Burke! Why don’t ye make her listen to reason?’ And

then he laughed, and told me old father he’d better learn to take a

hint. ’Twas bad for an old man to sleep in the rain--he might get

carried off by pneumonia.”

Hal could no longer keep back the question, “What did your father do?”

“I’d not have ye think hard of my old father,” she said, quickly. “He

used to be a fightin’ man, in the days before O’Callahan had his way

with him. But now he knows what a camp-marshal can do to a miner!”

SECTION 20.

Mary Burke had said that the company could stand breaking the bones of

its men; and not long after Number Two started up again, Hal had a

chance to note the truth of this assertion.

A miner’s life depended upon the proper timbering of the room where he

worked. The company undertook to furnish the timbers, but when the miner

needed them, he would find none at hand, and would have to make the

mile-long trip to the surface. He would select timbers of the proper

length, and would mark them--the understanding being that they were to

be delivered to his room by some of the labourers. But then some one

else would carry them off--here was more graft and favouritism, and the

miner might lose a day or two of work, while meantime his account was

piling up at the store, and his children might have no shoes to go to

school. Sometimes he would give up waiting for timbers, and go on taking

out coal; so there would be a fall of rock--and the coroner’s jury would

bring in a verdict of “negligence,” and the coal-operators would talk

solemnly about the impossibility of teaching caution to miners. Not so

very long ago Hal had read an interview which the president of the

General Fuel Company had given to a newspaper, in which he set forth the

idea that the more experience a miner had the more dangerous it was to

employ him, because he thought he knew it all, and would not heed the

wise regulations which the company laid down for his safety!

In Number Two mine there were some places being operated by the “room

and pillar” method; the coal being taken out as from a series of rooms,

the portion corresponding to the walls of the rooms being left to uphold

the roof. These walls are the “pillars”; and when the end of the vein is

reached, the miner begins to work backwards, “pulling the pillars,” and

letting the roof collapse behind him. This is a dangerous task; as he

works, the man has to listen to the drumming sounds of the rock above

his head, and has to judge just when to make his escape. Sometimes he is

too anxious to save a tool; or sometimes the collapse comes without

warning. In that case the victim is seldom dug out; for it must be

admitted that a man buried under a mountain is as well buried as a

company could be expected to arrange it.

In Number Two mine a man was caught in this way. He stumbled as he ran,

and the lower half of his body was pinned fast; the doctor had to come

and pump opiates into him, while the rescue crew was digging him loose.

The first Hal knew of the accident was when he saw the body stretched

out on a plank, with a couple of old sacks to cover it. He noticed that

nobody stopped for a second glance. Going up from work, he asked his

friend Madvik, the mule driver, who answered, “Lit’uanian feller--got

mash.” And that was all. Nobody knew him, and nobody cared about him.

It happened that Mike Sikoria had been working nearby, and was one of

those who helped to get the victim out. Mike’s negro “buddy” had been in

too great haste to get some of the rock out of the way, and had got his

hand crushed, and would not be able to work for a month or so. Mike told

Hal about it, in his broken English. It was a terrible thing to see a

man trapped like that, gasping, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

Fortunately he was a young fellow, and had no family.

Hal asked what they would do with the body; the answer was they would

bury him in the morning. The company had a piece of ground up the

canyon.

“But won’t they have an inquest?” he inquired.

“Inques’?” repeated the other. “What’s he?”

“Doesn’t the coroner see the body?”

The old Slovak shrugged his bowed shoulders; if there was a coroner in

this part of the world, he had never heard of it; and he had worked in a

good many mines, and seen a good many men put under the ground. “Put him

in a box and dig a hole,” was the way he described the procedure.

“And doesn’t the priest come?”

“Priest too far away.”

Afterwards Hal made inquiry among the English-speaking men, and learned

that the coroner did sometimes come to the camp. He would empanel a jury

consisting of Jeff Cotton, the marshal, and Predovich, the Galician Jew

who worked in the company store, and a clerk or two from the company’s

office, and a couple of Mexican labourers who had no idea what it was

all about. This jury would view the corpse, and ask a couple of men what

had happened, and then bring in a verdict: “We find that the deceased

met his death from a fall of rock caused by his own fault.” (In one case

they had added the picturesque detail: “No relatives, and damned few

friends!”)

For this service the coroner got a fee, and the company got an official

verdict, which would be final in case some foreign consul should

threaten a damage suit. So well did they have matters in hand that

nobody in North Valley had ever got anything for death or injury; in

fact, as Hal found later, there had not been a damage suit filed against

any coal-operator in that county for twenty-three years!

This particular, accident was of consequence to Hal, because it got him

a chance to see the real work of mining. Old Mike was without a helper,

and made the proposition that Hal should take the job. It was better

than a stableman’s, for it paid two dollars a day.

“But will the boss let me change?” asked Hal.

“You give him ten dollar, he change you,” said Mike.

“Sorry,” said Hal, “I haven’t got ten dollars.”

“You give him ten dollar credit,” said the other.

And Hal laughed. “They take scrip for graft, do they?”

“Sure they take him,” said Mike.

“Suppose I treat my mules bad?” continued the other. “So I can make him

change me for nothing!”

“He change you to hell!” replied Mike. “You get him cross, he put us in

bad room, cost us ten dollar a week. No, sir--you give him drink, say

fine feller, make him feel good. You talk American--give him jolly!”

SECTION 21.

Hal was glad of this opportunity to get better acquainted with his

pit-boss. Alec Stone was six feet high, and built in proportion, with

arms like hams--soft with fat, yet possessed of enormous strength. He

had learned his manner of handling men on a sugar-plantation in

Louisiana--a fact which, when Hal heard it, explained much. Like a

stage-manager who does not heed the real names of his actors, but calls

them by their character-names, Stone had the habit of addressing his men

by their nationalities: “You, Polack, get that rock into the car! Hey,

Jap, bring them tools over here! Shut your mouth, now, Dago, and get to

work, or I’ll kick the breeches off you, sure as you’re alive!”

Hal had witnessed one occasion when there was a dispute as to whose duty

it was to move timbers. There was a great two-handled cross-cut saw

lying on the ground, and Stone seized it and began to wave it, like a

mighty broadsword, in the face of a little Bohemian miner. “Load them

timbers, Hunkie, or I’ll carve you into bits!” And as the terrified man

shrunk back, he followed, until his victim was flat against a wall, the

weapon swinging to and fro under his nose after the fashion of “The Pit

and the Pendulum.” “Carve you into pieces, Hunkie! Carve you into

stew-meat!” When at last the boss stepped back, the little Bohemian

leaped to load the timbers.

The curious part about it to Hal was that Stone seemed to be reasonably

good-natured about such proceedings. Hardly one time in a thousand did

he carry out his bloodthirsty threats, and like as not he would laugh

when he had finished his tirade, and the object of it would grin in

turn--but without slackening his frightened efforts. After the

broad-sword waving episode, seeing that Hal had been watching, the boss

remarked, “That’s the way you have to manage them wops.” Hal took this

remark as a tribute to his American blood, and was duly flattered.

He sought out the boss that evening, and found him with his feet upon

the railing of his home. “Mr. Stone,” said he, “I’ve something I’d like

to ask you.”

“Fire away, kid,” said the other.

“Won’t you come up to the saloon and have a drink?”

“Want to get something out of me, hey? You can’t work me, kid!” But

nevertheless he slung down his feet from the railing, and knocked the

ashes out of his pipe and strolled up the street with Hal.

“Mr. Stone,” said Hal, “I want to make a change.”

“What’s that? Got a grouch on them mules?”

“No, sir, but I got a better job in sight. Mike Sikoria’s buddy is laid

up, and I’d like to take his place, if you’re willing.”

“Why, that’s a nigger’s place, kid. Ain’t you scared to take a nigger’s

place?”

“Why, sir?”

“Don’t you know about hoodoos?”

“What I want,” said Hal, “is the nigger’s pay.”

“No,” said the boss, abruptly, “you stick by them mules. I got a good

stableman, and I don’t want to spoil him. You stick, and by and by I’ll

give you a raise. You go into them pits, the first thing you know you’ll

get a fall of rock on your head, and the nigger’s pay won’t be no good

to you.”

They came to the saloon and entered. Hal noted that a silence fell

within, and every one nodded and watched. It was pleasant to be seen

going out with one’s boss.

O’Callahan, the proprietor, came forward with his best society smile and

joined them, and at Hal’s invitation they ordered whiskies. “No, you

stick to your job,” continued the pit-boss. “You stay by it, and when

you’ve learned to manage mules, I’ll make a boss out of you, and let you

manage men.”

Some of the bystanders tittered. The pit-boss poured down his whiskey,

and set the glass on the bar. “That’s no joke,” said he, in a tone that

every one could hear. “I learned that long ago about niggers. They’d say

to me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t talk to our niggers like that. Some night

you’ll have your house set afire.’ But I said, ‘Pet a nigger, and you’ve

got a spoiled nigger.’ I’d say, ‘Nigger, don’t you give me any of your

imp, or I’ll kick the breeches off you.’ And they knew I was a

gentleman, and they stepped lively.”

“Have another drink,” said Hal.

The pit-boss drank, and becoming more sociable, told nigger stories. On

the sugar-plantations there was a rush season, when the rule was twenty

hours’ work a day; when some of the niggers tried to shirk it, they

would arrest them for swearing or crap-shooting, and work them as

convicts, without pay. The pit-boss told how one “buck” had been brought

before the justice of the peace, and the charge read, “being

cross-eyed”; for which offence he had been sentenced to sixty days’ hard

labour. This anecdote was enjoyed by the men in the saloon--whose

race-feelings seemed to be stronger than their class-feelings.

When the pair went out again, it was late, and the boss was cordial.

“Mr. Stone,” began Hal, “I don’t want to bother you, but I’d like first

rate to get more pay. If you could see your way to let me have that

buddy’s job, I’d be more than glad to divide with you.”

“Divide with me?” said Stone. “How d’ye mean?” Hal waited with some

apprehension--for if Mike had not assured him so positively, he would

have expected a swing from the pit-boss’s mighty arm.

“It’s worth about fifteen a month more to me. I haven’t any cash, but if

you’d be willing to charge off ten dollars from my store-account, it

would be well worth my while.”

They walked for a short way in silence. “Well, I’ll tell you,” said the

boss, at last; “that old Slovak is a kicker--one of these fellows that

thinks he could run the mine if he had a chance. And if you get to

listenin’ to him, and think you can come to me and grumble, by God--”

“That’s all right, sir,” put in Hal, quickly. “I’ll manage that for

you--I’ll shut him up. If you’d like me to, I’ll see what fellows he

talks with, and if any of them are trying to make trouble, I’ll tip you

off.”

“Now that’s the talk,” said the boss, promptly. “You do that, and I’ll

keep my eye on you and give you a chance. Not that I’m afraid of the old

fellow--I told him last time that if I heard from him again, I’d kick

the breeches off him. But when you got half a thousand of this foreign

scum, some of them Anarchists, and some of them Bulgars and Montynegroes

that’s been fightin’ each other at home--”

“I understand,” said Hal. “You have to watch ’em.”

“That’s it,” said the pit-boss. “And by the way, when you tell the

store-clerk about that fifteen dollars, just say you lost it at poker.”

“I said ten dollars,” put in Hal, quickly.

“Yes, I know,” responded the other. “But _I_ said fifteen!”

SECTION 22.

Hal told himself with satisfaction that he was now to do the real work

of coal-mining. His imagination had been occupied with it for a long

time; but as so often happens in the life of man, the first contact with

reality killed the results of many years’ imagining. It killed all

imagining, in fact; Hal found that his entire stock of energy, both

mental and physical, was consumed in enduring torment. If any one had

told him the horror of attempting to work in a room five feet high, he

would not have believed it. It was like some of the dreadful devices of

torture which one saw in European castles, the “iron maiden” and the

“spiked collar.” Hal’s back burned as if hot irons were being run up and

down it; every separate joint and muscle cried aloud. It seemed as if he

could never learn the lesson of the jagged ceiling above his head--he

bumped it and continued to bump it, until his scalp was a mass of cuts

and bruises, and his head ached till he was nearly blind, and he would

have to throw himself flat on the ground.

Then old Mike Sikoria would grin. “I know. Like green mule! Some day get

tough!”

Hal recalled the great thick callouses on the flanks of his former

charges, where the harness rubbed against them. “Yes, I’m a ‘green

mule,’ all right!”

It was amazing how many ways there were to bruise and tear one’s

fingers, loading lumps of coal into a car. He put on a pair of gloves,

but these wore through in a day. And then the gas, and the smoke of

powder, stifling one; and the terrible burning of the eyes, from the

dust and the feeble light. There was no way to rub these burning eyes,

because everything about one was equally dusty. Could anybody have

imagined the torment of that--any of those ladies who rode in softly

upholstered parlour-cars, or reclined upon the decks of steam-ships in

gleaming tropic seas?

Old Mike was good to his new “buddy.” Mike’s spine was bent and his

hands were hardened by forty years of this sort of toil, so he could do

the work of two men, and entertain his friend with comments into the

bargain. The old fellow had the habit of talking all the time, like a

child; he would talk to his helper, to himself, to his tools. He would

call these tools by obscene and terrifying names--but with entire

friendliness and good humour. “Get in there, you son-of-a-gun!” he would

say to his pick. “Come along here, you wop!” he would say to his car.

“In with you, now, you old buster!” he would say to a lump of coal. And

he would lecture Hal on the details of mining. He would tell stories of

successful days, or of terrible mishaps. Above all he would tell about

rascality--cursing the “G. F. C.,” its foremen and superintendents, its

officials, directors and stock-holders, and the world which permitted

such a criminal institution to exist.

Noon-time would come, and Hal would lie upon his back, too worn to eat.

Old Mike would sit munching; his abundant whiskers came to a point on

his chin, and as his jaws moved, he looked for all the world like an

aged billy-goat. He was a kind-hearted and anxious old billy-goat, and

sought to tempt his buddy with a bit of cheese or a swig of cold coffee.

He believed in eating--no man could keep up steam if he did not stoke

the furnace. Failing in this, he would try to divert Hal’s mind, telling

stories of mining-life in America and Russia. He was most proud to have

an “American feller” for a buddy, and tried to make the work as easy as

possible, for fear lest Hal might quit.

Hal did not quit; but he would drag himself out towards night, so

exhausted that he would fall asleep in the cage. He would fall asleep at

supper, and go in and sink down on his cot and sleep like a log. And oh,

the torture of being routed out before daybreak! Having to shake the

sleep out of his head, and move his creaking joints, and become aware of

the burning in his eyes, and the blisters and sores on his hands!

It was a week before he had a moment that was not pain; and he never got

fully used to the labour. It was impossible for any one to work so hard

and keep his mental alertness, his eagerness and sensitiveness; it was

impossible to work so hard and be an adventurer--to be anything, in

fact, but a machine. Hal had heard that phrase of contempt, “the inertia

of the masses,” and had wondered about it. He no longer wondered, he

knew. Could a man be brave enough to protest to a pit-boss when his body

was numb with weariness? Could he think out a definite conclusion as to

his rights and wrongs, and back his conclusion with effective action,

when his mental faculties were paralysed by such weariness of body?

Hal had come here, as one goes upon the deck of a ship in mid-ocean, to

see the storm. In this ocean of social misery, of ignorance and despair,

one saw upturned, tortured faces, writhing limbs and clutching hands; in

one’s ears was a storm of lamentation, upon one’s cheek a spray of blood

and tears. Hal found himself so deep in this ocean that he could no

longer find consolation in the thought that he could escape whenever he

wanted to: that he could say to himself, It is sad, it is terrible--but

thank God, I can get out of it when I choose! I can go back into the

warm and well-lighted saloon and tell the other passengers how

picturesque it is, what an interesting experience they are missing!

SECTION 23.

During these days of torment, Hal did not go to see “Red Mary”; but

then, one evening, the Minettis’ baby having been sick, she came in to

ask about it, bringing what she called “a bit of a custard” in a bowl.

Hal was suspicious enough of the ways of men, especially of

business-men; but when it came to women he was without insight--it did

not occur to him as singular that an Irish girl with many troubles at

home should come out to nurse a Dago woman’s baby. He did not reflect

that there were plenty of sick Irish babies in the camp, to whom Mary

might have taken her “bit of a custard.” And when he saw the surprise of

Rosa, who had never met Mary before, he took it to be the touching

gratitude of the poor!

There are, in truth, many kinds of women, with many arts, and no man has

time to learn them all. Hal had observed the shop-girl type, who dress

themselves with many frills, and cast side-long glances, and indulge in

fits of giggles to attract the attention of the male; he was familiar

with the society-girl type, who achieve the same end with more subtle

and alluring means. But could there be a type who hold little Dago

babies in their laps, and call them pretty Irish names, and feed them

custard out of a spoon? Hal had never heard of that kind, and he thought

that “Red Mary” made a charming picture--a Celtic madonna with a

Sicilian infant in her arms.

He noticed that she was wearing the same faded blue calico-dress with a

patch on the shoulder. Man though he was, he realised that dress is an

important consideration in the lives of women. He was tempted to suspect

that this blue calico might be the only dress that Mary owned; but

seeing it newly laundered every time, he concluded that she must have at

least one other. At any rate, here she was, crisp and fresh-looking; and

with the new shining costume, she had put on the long promised “company

manner”: high spirits and badinage, precisely like any belle of the

world of luxury, who powders and bedecks herself for a ball. She had

been grim and complaining in former meetings with this interesting young

man; she had frightened him away, apparently; perhaps she could win him

back by womanliness and good humour.

She rallied him upon his battered scalp and his creaking back, telling

him he looked ten years older--which he was fully prepared to believe.

Also she had fun with him for working under a Slovak--another loss of

caste, it appeared! This was a joke the Minettis could share

in--especially Little Jerry, who liked jokes. He told Mary how Joe Smith

had had to pay fifteen dollars for his new job, besides several drinks

at O’Callahan’s. Also he told how Mike Sikoria had called Joe his “green

mule.” Little Jerry complained about the turn of events, for in the old

days Joe had taught him a lot of fine new games--and now he was sore,

and would not play them. Also, in the old days he had sung a lot of

jolly songs, full of the most fascinating rhymes. There was a song about

a “monkey puzzle tree”! Had Mary ever seen that kind of tree? Little

Jerry never got tired of trying to imagine what it might look like.

The Dago urchin stood and watched gravely while Mary fed the custard to

the baby; and when two or three spoonfuls were held out to him, he

opened his mouth wide, and afterwards licked his lips. Gee, that was

good stuff!

When the last taste was gone, he stood gazing at Mary’s shining coronet.

“Say,” said he, “was your hair always like that?”

Hal and Mary burst into laughter, while Rosa cried “Hush!” She was never

sure what this youngster would say next.

“Sure, did ye think I painted it?” asked Mary.

“I didn’t know,” said Little Jerry. “It looks so nice and new.” And he

turned to Hal. “Ain’t it?”

“You bet,” said Hal, and added, “Go on and tell her about it. Girls like

compliments.”

“Compliments?” echoed Little Jerry. “What’s that?”

“Why,” said Hal, “that’s when you say that her hair is like the sunrise,

and her eyes are like twilight, or that she’s a wild rose on a

mountain-side.”

“Oh,” said the Dago urchin, somewhat doubtfully. “Anyhow,” he added,

“she make nice custard!”

SECTION 24.

The time came for Mary to take her departure, and Hal got up, wincing

with pain, to escort her home. She regarded him gravely, having not

realised before how seriously he was suffering. As they walked along she

asked, “Why do ye do such work, when ye don’t have to?”

“But I _do_ have to! I have to earn a living!”

“Ye don’t have to earn it that way! A bright young fellow like you--an

American!”

“Well,” said Hal, “I thought it would be interesting to see coal

mining.”

“Now ye’ve seen it,” said the girl--“now quit!”

“But it won’t do me any harm to go on for a while!”

“Won’t it? How can ye know? When any day they may carry you out on a

plank!”

Her “company manner” was gone; her voice was full of bitterness, as it

always was when she spoke of North Valley. “I know what I’m tellin’ ye,

Joe Smith. Didn’t I lose two brothers in it--as fine lads as ye’d find

anywhere in the world! And many another lad I’ve seen go in laughin’,

and come out a corpse--or what is worse, for workin’ people, a cripple.

Sometimes I’d like to go and stand at the pit-mouth in the mornin’ and

cry to them, ‘Go back, go back! Go down the canyon this day! Starve, if

ye have to, beg if ye have to, only find some other work but

coal-minin’!’”

Her voice had risen to a passion of protest; when she went on a new note

came into it--a note of personal terror. “It’s worse now--since you

came, Joe! To see ye settin’ out on the life of a miner--you, that are

young and strong and different. Oh, go away, Joe, go away while ye can!”

He was astonished at her intensity. “Don’t worry about me, Mary,” he

said. “Nothing will happen to me. I’ll go away after a while.”

The path was irregular, and he had been holding her arm as they walked.

He felt her trembling, and went on again, quickly, “It’s not I that

should go away, Mary. It’s yourself. You hate the place--it’s terrible

for you to have to live here. Have you never thought of going away?”

She did not answer at once, and when she did the excitement was gone

from her voice; it was flat and dull with despair. “’Tis no use to think

of me. There’s nothin’ I can do--there’s nothin’ any girl can do when

she’s poor. I’ve tried--but ’tis like bein’ up against a stone wall. I

can’t even save the money to get on a train with! I’ve tried it--I been

savin’ for two years--and how much d’ye think I got, Joe? Seven dollars!

Seven dollars in two years! No--ye can’t save money in a place where

there’s so many things that wring the heart. Ye may hate them for being

cowards--but ye must help when ye see a man killed, and his family

turned out without a roof to cover them in the winter-time!”

“You’re too tender-hearted, Mary.”

“No, ’tis not that! Should I go off and leave me own brother and sister,

that need me?”

“But you could earn money and send it to them.”

“I earn a little here--I do cleanin’ and nursin’ for some that need me.”

“But outside--couldn’t you earn more?”

“I could get a job in a restaurant for seven or eight a week, but I’d

have to spend more, and what I sent home would not go so far, with me

away. Or I could get a job in some other woman’s home, and work fourteen

hours a day for it. But, Joe, ’tis not more drudgery I want, ’tis

somethin’ fair to look upon--somethin’ of my own!” She flung out her

arms suddenly like one being stifled. “Oh, I want somethin’ that’s fair

and clean!”

Again he felt her trembling. Again the path was rough, and having an

impulse of sympathy, he put his arm about her. In the world of leisure,

one might indulge in such considerateness, and he assumed it would not

be different with a miner’s daughter. But then, when she was close to

him, he felt, rather than heard, a sob.

“Mary!” he whispered; and they stopped. Almost without realising it, he

put his other arm about her, and in a moment more he felt her warm

breath on his cheek, and she was trembling and shaking in his embrace.

“Joe! Joe!” she whispered. “_You_ take me away!”

She was a rose in a mining-camp, and Hal was deeply moved. The primrose

path of dalliance stretched fair before him, here in the soft summer

night, with a moon overhead which bore the same message as it bore in

the Italian gardens of the leisure-class. But not many minutes passed

before a cold fear began to steal over Hal. There was a girl at home,

waiting for him; and also there was the resolve which had been growing

in him since his coming to this place--a resolve to find some way of

compensation to the poor, to repay them for the freedom and culture he

had taken; not to prey upon them, upon any individual among them. There

were the Jeff Cottons for that!

“Mary,” he pleaded, “we mustn’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because--I’m not free. There is some one else.”

He felt her start, but she did not draw away.

“Where?” she asked, in a low voice.

“At home, waiting for me.”

“And why didn’t ye tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

Hal realised in a moment that the girl had ground of complaint against

him. According to the simple code of her world, he had gone some

distance with her; he had been seen to walk out with her, he had been

accounted her “fellow.” He had led her to talk to him of herself--he had

insisted upon having her confidences. And these people who were poor did

not have subtleties, there was no room in their lives for intellectual

curiosities, for Platonic friendships or philanderings. “Forgive me,

Mary!” he said.

She made no answer; but a sob escaped her, and she drew back from his

arms--slowly. He struggled with an impulse to clasp her again. She was

beautiful, warm with life--and so much in need of happiness!

But he held himself in check, and for a minute or two they stood apart.

Then he asked, humbly, “We can still be friends, Mary, can’t we? You

must know--I’m so _sorry_!”

But she could not endure being pitied. “’Tis nothin’,” she said. “Only I

thought I was going to get away! That’s what ye mean to me.”

SECTION 25.

Hal had promised Alec Stone to keep a look-out for trouble-makers; and

one evening the boss stopped him on the street, and asked him if he had

anything to report. Hal took the occasion to indulge his sense of

humour.

“There’s no harm in Mike Sikoria,” said he. “He likes to shoot off his

head, but if he’s got somebody to listen, that’s all he wants. He’s just

old and grouchy. But there’s another fellow that I think would bear

watching.”

“Who’s that?” asked the boss.

“I don’t know his last name. They call him Gus and he’s a ’cager.’

Fellow with a red face.”

“I know,” said Stone--“Gus Durking.”

“Well, he tried his best to get me to talk about unions. He keeps

bringing it up, and I think he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

“I see,” said the boss. “I’ll get after him.”

“You won’t say I told you,” said Hal, anxiously.

“Oh, no--sure not.” And Hal caught the trace of a smile on the

pit-boss’s face.

He went away, smiling in his turn. The “red-faced feller. Gus,” was the

person Madvik had named as being a “spotter” for the company!

There were ins and outs to this matter of “spotting,” and sometimes it

was not easy to know what to think. One Sunday morning Hal went for a

walk up the canyon, and on the way he met a young chap who got to

talking with him, and after a while brought up the question of

working-conditions in North Valley. He had only been there a week, he

said, but everybody he had met seemed to be grumbling about short

weight. He himself had a job as an “outside man,” so it made no

difference to him, but he was interested, and wondered what Hal had

found.

Straightway came the question, was this really a workingman, or had Alec

Stone set some one to spying upon his spy. This was an intelligent

fellow, an American--which in itself was suspicious, for most of the new

men the company got in were from “somewhere East of Suez.”

Hal decided to spar for a while. He did not know, he said, that

conditions were any worse here than elsewhere. You heard complaints, no

matter what sort of job you took.

Yes, said the stranger, but matters seemed to be especially bad in the

coal-camps. Probably it was because they were so remote, and the

companies owned everything in sight.

“Where have you been?” asked Hal, thinking that this might trap him.

But the other answered straight; he had evidently worked in half a dozen

of the camps. In Mateo he had paid a dollar a month for wash-house

privileges, and there had never been any water after the first three men

had washed. There had been a common wash-tub for all the men, an

unthinkably filthy arrangement. At Pine Creek--Hal found the very naming

of the place made his heart stand still--at Pine Creek he had boarded

with his boss, but the roof of the building leaked, and everything he

owned was ruined; the boss would do nothing--yet when the boarder moved,

he lost his job. At East Ridge, this man and a couple of other fellows

had rented a two room cabin and started to board themselves, in spite of

the fact that they had to pay a dollar-fifty a sack for potatoes and

eleven cents a pound for sugar at the company store. They had continued

until they made the discovery that the water supply had run short, and

that the water for which they were paying the company a dollar a month

was being pumped from the bottom of the mine, where the filth of mules

and men was plentiful!

Hal forced himself to remain non-committal; he shook his head and said

it was too bad, but the workers always got it in the neck, and he didn’t

see what they could do about it. So they strolled back to the camp, the

stranger evidently baffled, and Hal, for his part, feeling like the

reader of a detective story at the end of the first chapter. Was this

young man the murderer, or was he the hero? One would have to read on in

the book to find out!

SECTION 26.

Hal kept his eye upon his new acquaintance, and perceived that he was

talking with others. Before long the man tackled Old Mike; and Mike of

course could not refuse an invitation to grumble, though it came from

the devil himself. Hal decided that something must be done about it.

He consulted his friend Jerry, who, being a radical, might have some

touch-stone by which to test the stranger. Jerry sought him out at

noon-time, and came back and reported that he was as much in the dark as

Hal. Either the man was an agitator, seeking to “start something,” or

else he was a detective sent in by the company. There was only one way

to find out--which was for some one to talk freely with him, and see

what happened to that person!

After some hesitation, Hal decided that he would be the victim. It

rewakened his love of adventure, which digging in a coal-mine had

subdued in him. The mysterious stranger was a new sort of miner, digging

into the souls of men; Hal would countermine him, and perhaps blow him

up. He could afford the experiment better than some others--better, for

example, than little Mrs. David, who had already taken the stranger into

her home, and revealed to him the fact that her husband had been a

member of the most revolutionary of all miners’ organisations, the South

Wales Federation.

So next Sunday Hal invited the stranger for another walk. The man showed

reluctance--until Hal said that he wanted to talk to him. As they walked

up the canyon, Hal began, “I’ve been thinking about what you said of

conditions in these camps, and I’ve concluded it would be a good thing

if we had a little shaking up here in North Valley.”

“Is that so?” said the other.

“When I first came here, I used to think the men were grouchy. But now

I’ve had a chance to see for myself, and I don’t believe anybody gets a

square deal. For one thing, nobody gets full weight in these mines--at

least not unless he’s some favourite of the boss. I’m sure of it, for

I’ve tried all sorts of experiments with my partner. We’ve loaded a car

extra light, and got eighteen hundredweight, and then we’ve loaded one

high and solid, so that we’d know it had twice as much in it--but all we

ever got was twenty-two and twenty-three. There’s just no way you can

get over that--though everybody knows those big cars can be made to hold

two or three tons.”

“Yes, I suppose they might,” said the other.

“And if you get the smallest piece of rock in, you get a ‘double-O,’

sure as fate; and sometimes they say you got rock in when you didn’t.

There’s no law to make them prove it.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“What it comes to is simply this--they make you think they are paying

fifty-five a ton, but they’ve secretly cut you down to thirty-five. And

yesterday at the company-store I paid a dollar and a half for a pair of

blue overalls that I’d priced in Pedro for sixty cents.”

“Well,” said the other, “the company has to haul them up here, you

know!”

So, gradually, Hal made the discovery that the tables were turned--the

mysterious personage was now occupied in holding _him_ at arm’s length!

For some reason, Hal’s sudden interest in industrial justice had failed

to make an impression.

So his career as a detective came to an inglorious end. “Say, man!” he

exclaimed “What’s your game, anyhow?”

“Game?” said the other, quietly. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you here for?”

“I’m here for two dollars a day--the same as you, I guess.”

Hal began to laugh. “You and I are like a couple of submarines, trying

to find each other under water. I think we’d better come to the surface

to do our fighting.”

The other considered the simile, and seemed to like it. “You come

first,” said he. But he did not smile. His quiet blue eyes were fixed on

Hal with deadly seriousness.

“All right,” said Hal; “my story isn’t very thrilling. I’m not an

escaped convict, I’m not a company spy, as you may be thinking. Nor am I

a ‘natural born’ coal-miner. I happen to have a brother and some friends

at home who think they know about the coal-industry, and it got on my

nerves, and I came to see for myself. That’s all, except that I’ve found

things interesting, and want to stay on a while, so I hope you aren’t a

‘dick’!”

The other walked in silence, weighing Hal’s words. “That’s not exactly

what you’d call a usual story,” he remarked, at last.

“I know,” replied Hal. “The best I can say for it is that it’s true.”

“Well,” said the stranger, “I’ll take a chance on it. I have to trust

somebody, if I’m ever to get anywhere. I picked you out because I liked

your face.” He gave Hal another searching look as he walked. “Your smile

isn’t that of a cheat. But you’re young--so let me remind you of the

importance of secrecy in this place.”

“I’ll keep mum,” said Hal; and the stranger opened a flap inside his

shirt, and drew out a letter which certified him to be Thomas Olson, an

organiser for the United Mine-Workers, the great national union of the

coal-miners!

SECTION 27.

Hal was so startled by this discovery that he stopped in his tracks and

gazed at the man. He had heard a lot about “trouble-makers” in the

camps, but so far the only kind he had seen were those hired by the

company to make trouble for the men. But now, here was a union

organiser! Jerry had suggested the possibility, but Hal had not thought

of it seriously; an organiser was a mythological creature, whispered

about by the miners, cursed by the company and its servants, and by

Hal’s friends at home. An incendiary, a fire-brand, a loudmouthed,

irresponsible person, stirring up blind and dangerous passions! Having

heard such things all his life, Hal’s first impulse was of distrust. He

felt like the one-legged old switchman who had given him a place to

sleep, after his beating at Pine Creek, and who had said, “Don’t you

talk no union business to me!”

Seeing Hal’s emotion, the organiser gave an uneasy laugh. “While you’re

hoping I’m not a ‘dick,’ I trust you understand I’m hoping _you’re_ not

one.”

Hal’s answer was to the point. “I was taken for an organiser once,” he

said, and his hands sought the seat of his ancient bruises.

The other laughed. “You got off with a beating? You were lucky. Down in

Alabama, not so long ago, they tarred and feathered one of us.”

Dismay came upon Hal’s face; but after a moment he too began to laugh.

“I was just thinking about my brother and his friends--what they’d have

said if I’d come home from Pine Creek in a coat of tar and feathers!”

“Possibly,” ventured the other, “they’d have said you got what you

deserved.”

“Yes, that seems to be their attitude. That’s the rule they apply to all

the world--if anything goes wrong with you, it must be your own fault.

It’s a land of equal opportunity.”

“And you’ll notice,” said the organiser, “that the more privileges

people have had, the more boldly they talk that way.”

Hal began to feel a sense of comradeship with this stranger, who was

able to understand one’s family troubles! It had been a long time since

Hal had talked with any one from the outside world, and he found it a

relief to his mind. He remembered how, after he had got his beating, he

had lain out in the rain and congratulated himself that he was not what

the guards had taken him for. Now he was curious about the psychology of

an organiser. A man must have strong convictions to follow that

occupation!

He made the remark, and the other answered, “You can have my pay any

time you’ll do my work. But let me tell you, too, it isn’t being beaten

and kicked out of camp that bothers one most; it isn’t the camp-marshal

and the spy and the blacklist. Your worst troubles are inside the heads

of the fellows you’re trying to help! Have you ever thought what it

would mean to try to explain things to men who speak twenty different

languages?”

“Yes, of course,” said Hal. “I wonder how you ever get a start.”

“Well, you look for an interpreter--and maybe he’s a company spy. Or

maybe the first man you try to convert reports you to the boss. For, of

course, some of the men are cowards, and some of them are crooks;

they’ll sell out the next fellow for a better ‘place’--maybe for a glass

of beer.”

“That must have a tendency to weaken your convictions,” said Hal.

“No,” said the other, in a matter of fact tone. “It’s hard, but one

can’t blame the poor devils. They’re ignorant--kept so deliberately. The

bosses bring them here, and have a regular system to keep them from

getting together. And of course these European peoples have their old

prejudices--national prejudices, religious prejudices, that keep them

apart. You see two fellows, one you think is exactly as miserable as the

other--but you find him despising the other, because back home he was

the other’s superior. So they play into the bosses’ hands.”

SECTION 28.

They had come to a remote place in the canyon, and found themselves

seats on a flat rock, where they could talk in comfort.

“Put yourself in their place,” said the organiser. “They’re in a strange

country, and one person tells them one thing, and another tells them

something else. The masters and their agents say: ‘Don’t trust the union

agitators. They’re a lot of grafters, they live easy and don’t have to

work. They take your money and call you out on strike, and you lose your

jobs and your home; they sell you out, maybe, and go on to some other

place to repeat the same trick.’ And the workers think maybe that’s

true; they haven’t the wit to see that if the union leaders are corrupt,

it must be because the bosses are buying them. So you see, they’re

completely bedevilled; they don’t know which way to turn.”

The man was speaking quietly, but there was a little glow of excitement

in his face. “The company is forever repeating that these people are

satisfied--that it’s we who are stirring them up. But are they

satisfied? You’ve been here long enough to know!”

“There’s no need to discuss that,” Hal answered. “Of course they’re not

satisfied! They’ve seemed to me like a lot of children crying in the

dark--not knowing what’s the matter with them, or who’s to blame, or

where to turn for help.”

Hal found himself losing his distrust of this man. He did not correspond

in any way to Hal’s imaginary picture of a union organiser; he was a

blue-eyed, clean-looking young American, and instead of being wild and

loud-mouthed, he seemed rather wistful. He had indignation, of course,

but it did not take the form of ranting or florid eloquence; and this

repression was making its appeal to Hal, who, in spite of his democratic

impulses, had the habits of thought of a class which shrinks from

noisiness and over-emphasis.

Also Hal was interested in his attitude towards the weaknesses of

working-people. The “inertia” of the poor, which caused so many people

to despair for them--their cowardice and instability--these were things

about which Hal had heard all his life. “You can’t help them,” people

would say. “They’re dirty and lazy, they drink and shirk, they betray

each other. They’ve always been like that.” The idea would be summed up

in a formula: “You can’t change human nature!” Even Mary Burke, herself

one of the working-class, spoke of the workers in this angry and

scornful way. But Olson had faith in their manhood, and went ahead to

awaken and teach them.

To his mind the path was clear and straight. “They must be taught the

lesson of solidarity. As individuals, they’re helpless in the power of

the great corporations; but if they stand together, if they sell their

labour as a unit--then they really count for something.” He paused, and

looked at the other inquiringly. “How do you feel about unions?”

Hal answered, “They’re one of the things I want to find out about. You

hear this and that--there’s so much prejudice on each side. I want to

help the under dog, but I want to be sure of the right way.”

“What other way is there?” And Olson paused. “To appeal to the tender

hearts of the owners?”

“Not exactly; but mightn’t one appeal to the world in general--to public

opinion? I was brought up an American, and learned to believe in my

country. I can’t think but there’s some way to get justice. Maybe if the

men were to go into politics--”

“Politics?” cried Olson. “My God! How long have you been in this place?”

“Only a couple of months.”

“Well, stay till November, and see what they do with the ballot-boxes in

these camps!”

“I can imagine, of course--”

“No, you can’t. Any more than you could imagine the graft and the

misery!”

“But if the men should take to voting together--”

“How _can_ they take to voting together--when any one who mentions the

idea goes down the canyon? Why, you can’t even get naturalisation

papers, unless you’re a company man; they won’t register you, unless the

boss gives you an O. K. How are you going to make a start, unless you

have a union?”

It sounded reasonable, Hal had to admit; but he thought of the stories

he had heard about “walking delegates,” all the dreadful consequences of

“union domination.” He had not meant to go in for unionism!

Olson was continuing. “We’ve had laws passed, a whole raft of laws about

coal-mining--the eight-hour law, the anti-scrip law, the company-store

law, the mine-sprinkling law, the check-weighman law. What difference

has it made in North Valley that there are such laws on the

statute-books? Would you ever even know about them?”

“Ah, now!” said Hal. “If you put it that way--if your movement is to

have the law enforced--I’m with you!”

“But how will you get the law enforced, except by a union? No individual

man can do it--it’s ‘down the canyon’ with him if he mentions the law.

In Western City our union people go to the state officials, but they

never do anything--and why? They know we haven’t got the men behind us!

It’s the same with the politicians as it is with the bosses--the union

is the thing that counts!”

Hal found this an entirely new argument. “People don’t realise that

idea--that men have to be organised to get their _legal_ rights.”

And the other threw up his hands with a comical gesture. “My God! If you

want to make a list of the things that people don’t realise about us

miners!”

SECTION 29.

Olson was eager to win Hal, and went on to tell all the secrets of his

work. He sought men who believed in unions, and were willing to take the

risk of trying to convert others. In each place he visited he would get

a group together, and would arrange some way to communicate with them

after he left, smuggling in propaganda literature for distribution. So

there would be the nucleus of an organisation. In a year or two they

would have such a nucleus in every camp, and then they would be ready to

come into the open, calling meetings in the towns, and in places in the

canyons to which the miners would flock. So the flame of revolt would

leap up; men would join the movement faster than the companies could get

rid of them, and they would make a demand for their rights, backed with

the threat of a strike throughout the entire district.

“You understand,” added Olson, “we have a legal right to organise--even

though the bosses disapprove. You need not stand back on that score.”

“Yes,” said Hal; “but it occurs to me that as a matter of tactics, it

would be better here in North Valley if you chose some issue there’s

less controversy about; if, for instance, you’d concentrate on getting a

check-weighman.”

The other smiled. “We’d have to have a union to back the demand; so

what’s the difference?”

“Well,” argued Hal, “there are prejudices to be reckoned with. Some

people don’t like the idea of a union--they think it means tyranny and

violence--”

The organiser laughed. “You aren’t convinced but that it does yourself,

are you! Well, all I can tell you is, if you want to tackle the job of

getting a check-weighman in North Valley, I’ll not stand in your way!”

Here was an idea--a real idea! Life had grown dull for Hal since he had

become a buddy, working in a place five feet high. This would promise

livelier times!

But was it a thing he wanted to do? So far he had been an observer of

conditions in this coal-camp. He had convinced himself that conditions

were cruel, and he had pretty well convinced himself that the cruelty

was needless and deliberate. But when it came to a question of an action

to be taken--then he hesitated, and old prejudices and fears made

themselves heard. He had been told that labour was “turbulent” and

“lazy,” that it had to be “ruled with a strong hand”; now, was he

willing to weaken the strong hand, to ally himself with those who

“fomented labour troubles”?

But this would not be the same thing, he told himself. This suggestion

of Olson’s was different from trade unionism, which might be a

demoralising force, leading the workers from one demand to another,

until they were seeking to “dominate industry.” This would be merely an

appeal to the law, a test of that honesty and fair dealing to which the

company everywhere laid claim. If, as the bosses proclaimed, the workers

were fully protected by the check-weighman law; if, as all the world was

made to believe, the reason there was no check-weighman was simply

because the men did not ask for one--why, then there would be no harm

done. If on the other hand a demand for a right that was not merely a

legal right, but a moral right as well--if that were taken by the bosses

as an act of rebellion against the company--well, Hal would understand a

little more about the “turbulence” of labour! If, as Old Mike and

Johannson and the rest maintained, the bosses would “make your life one

damn misery” till you left--then he would be ready to make a few damn

miseries for the bosses in return!

“It would be an adventure,” said Hal, suddenly.

And the other laughed. “It would that!”

“You’re thinking I’ll have another Pine Creek experience,” Hal added.

“Well, maybe so--but I have to try things out for myself. You see, I’ve

got a brother at home, and when I think about going in for revolution, I

have imaginary arguments with him. I want to be able to say ‘I didn’t

swallow anybody’s theories; I tried it for myself, and this is what

happened.’”

“Well,” replied the organiser, “that’s all right. But while you’re

seeking education for yourself and your brother, don’t forget that I’ve

already got my education. I _know_ what happens to men who ask for a

check-weighman, and I can’t afford to sacrifice myself proving it

again.”

“I never asked you to,” laughed Hal. “If I won’t join your movement, I

can’t expect you to join mine! But if I can find a few men who are

willing to take the risk of making a demand for a check-weighman--that

won’t hurt your work, will it?”

“Sure not!” said the other. “Just the opposite--it’ll give me an object

lesson to point to. There are men here who don’t even know they’ve a

legal right to a check-weighman. There are others who know they don’t

get their weights, but aren’t sure its the company that’s cheating them.

If the bosses should refuse to let any one inspect the weights, if they

should go further and fire the men who ask it--well, there’ll be plenty

of recruits for my union local!”

“All right,” said Hal. “I’m not setting out to recruit your union local,

but if the company wants to recruit it, that’s the company’s affair!”

And on this bargain the two shook hands.

BOOK TWO

THE SERFS OF KING COAL

SECTION 1.

Hal was now started upon a new career, more full of excitements than

that of stableman or buddy, with perils greater than those of falling

rock or the hind feet of mules in the stomach. The inertia which

overwork produces had not had time to become a disease with him; youth

was on his side, with its zest for more and yet more experience. He

found it thrilling to be a conspirator, to carry about with him secrets

as dark and mysterious as the passages of the mine in which he worked.

But Jerry Minetti, the first person he told of Tom Olson’s purpose in

North Valley, was older in such thrills. The care-free look which Jerry

was accustomed to wear vanished abruptly, and fear came into his eyes.

“I know it come some day,” he exclaimed--“trouble for me and Rosa!”

“How do you mean?”

“We get into it--get in sure. I say Rosa, ‘Call yourself Socialist--what

good that do? No help any. No use to vote here--they don’t count no

Socialist vote, only for joke!’ I say, ‘Got to have union. Got to

strike!’ But Rosa say, ‘Wait little bit. Save little bit money, let

children grow up. Then we help, no care if we no got any home.’”

“But we’re not going to start a union now!” objected Hal. “I have

another plan for the present.”

Jerry, however, was not to be put at ease. “No can wait!” he declared.

“Men no stand it! I say, ‘It come some day quick--like blow-up in mine!

Somebody start fight, everybody fight.’” And Jerry looked at Rosa, who

sat with her black eyes fixed anxiously upon her husband. “We get into

it,” he said; and Hal saw their eyes turn to the room where Little Jerry

and the baby were sleeping.

Hal said nothing--he was beginning to understand the meaning of

rebellion to such people. He watched with curiosity and pity the

struggle that went on; a struggle as old as the soul of man--between the

voice of self-interest, of comfort and prudence, and the call of duty,

of the ideal. No trumpet sounded for this conflict, only the still small

voice within.

After a while Jerry asked what it was Hal and Olson had planned; and Hal

explained that he wanted to make a test of the company’s attitude toward

the check-weighman law. Hal thought it a fine scheme; what did Jerry

think?

Jerry smiled sadly. “Yes, fine scheme for young feller--no got family!”

“That’s all right,” said Hal, “I’ll take the job--I’ll be the

check-weighman.”

“Got to have committee,” said Jerry--“committee go see boss.”

“All right, but we’ll get young fellows for that too--men who have no

families. Some of the fellows who live in the chicken-coops in

shanty-town. They won’t care what happens to them.”

But Jerry would not share Hal’s smile. “No got sense ’nough, them

fellers. Take sense to stick together.” He explained that they would

need a group of men to stand back of the committee; such a group would

have to be organised, to hold meetings in secret--it would be

practically the same thing as a union, would be so regarded by the

bosses and their spotters. And no organisation of any sort was permitted

in the camps. There had been some Serbians who had wanted to belong to a

fraternal order back in their home country, but even that had been

forbidden. If you wanted to insure your life or your health, the company

would attend to it--and get the profit from it. For that matter, you

could not even buy a post-office money-order, to send funds back to the

old country; the post-office clerk, who was at the same time a clerk in

the company-store, would sell you some sort of a store-draft.

So Hal was facing the very difficulties about which Olson had warned

him. The first of them was Jerry’s fear. Yet Hal knew that Jerry was no

“coward”; if any man had a contempt for Jerry’s attitude, it was because

he had never been in Jerry’s place!

“All I’ll ask of you now is advice,” said Hal. “Give me the names of

some young fellows who are trustworthy, and I’ll get their help without

anybody suspecting you.”

“You my boarder!” was Jerry’s reply to this.

So again Hal was “up against it.” “You mean that would get you into

trouble?”

“Sure! They know we talk. They know I talk Socialism, anyhow. They fire

me sure!”

“But how about your cousin, the pit-boss in Number One?”

“He no help. May be get fired himself. Say damn fool--board

check-weighman!”

“All right,” said Hal. “Then I’ll move away now, before it’s too late.

You can say I was a trouble-maker, and you turned me off.”

The Minettis sat gazing at each other--a mournful pair. They hated to

lose their boarder, who was such good company, and paid them such good

money. As for Hal, he felt nearly as bad, for he liked Jerry and his

girl-wife, and Little Jerry--even the black-eyed baby, who made so much

noise and interrupted conversation!

“No!” said Jerry. “I no run, away! I do my share!”

“That’s all right,” replied Hal. “You do your share--but not just yet.

You stay on in the camp and help Olson after I’m fired. We don’t want

the best men put out at once.”

So, after further argument, it was decided, and Hal saw little Rosa sink

back in her chair and draw a deep breath of relief. The time for

martyrdom was put off; her little three-roomed cabin, her furniture and

her shining pans and her pretty white lace curtains, might be hers for a

few weeks longer!