"Will the speaker answer a question?"
Paul, suave and collected, smilingly consented.
"Isn't it a fact that"—Jensen's voice choked in his throat, in his mad eagerness to make his point—"that the mine safeguards here are behind every state in the union? That the men are paid less, and suffer more accidents? How can there be harmony between capital and labor? Don't we both want the same thing?" His words crowded over each other; his growing incoherence was unintelligible to most of the audience. He waved a pamphlet at the speaker. "I have in my hand the latest federal mining report——"
"Aw, hire a hall, Swedey!" an ugly-faced satellite of Pooley's cut in.
The audience laughed, releasing tense feelings.
"I will do my best to answer the questions," Paul began. He picked up a paper from the desk before him. "I have here the report referred to. It is a fact that the monetary wage here is slightly lower than in most states. But the purchasing price of money is almost twice that in some Western states."
There was some applause at this.
Paul went on. "As to safeguards, that bill takes away your chief safeguard—your job."
He sat down. The jubilant audience calloused their hands noisily.
The district delegate of the miners, Jack Bowden, rose gracefully. "Isn't it also a fact, Mr. Judson, that the Birrell-Florence mines have recently installed safety devices not required by the law?"
Paul did not know it, but he bowed agreeably. "So I have understood."
Pelham writhed. Even after his father's manifestly unfair speech, he had expected intellectual honesty from him. He had dodged both parts of Jensen's question. Surface brilliancy—but the questions were still unanswered. The intense disappointment in his father wracked him with physical pain.
As she felt Pelham's body commence to rise, Jane's hand clenched his arm. "Don't do it; it will only make a scene. Let's leave."
Ignoring the pleading grasp, he rose unsteadily. Against the walls of his chest his heart pounded irregularly; he feared for a flashed instant that it would burst its way out, and he would fall dead. Gripping the seat ahead more tightly, he found his voice. "Mr. Speaker——"
Paul looked at him, for the moment surprised and displeased. The cautious smile reappeared faintly.
"About this question of wages. Isn't it a fact that, the smaller the dividends, the larger the wages? Both come from the same fund, the wealth produced; doesn't the prosperity of one cut against the prosperity of the other? So that, for labor to get its full product, profit must be abolished, and coöperation introduced?"
There was a gasp of surprise from the few in the audience who recognized the pale figure as the speaker's son. A scattering rattle of applause shook parts of the crowd.
Paul moistened his lips, and explained: "The questioner asks, will not labor's prosperity come when profit has been abolished, and coöperation substituted. There is something to be said for that as an air-spun theory. It has never worked in practice. We—all of us—must feed on our daily bread, not on economic theories," he finished with crisp decisiveness.
There was a generous hand at this.
Pelham's quiet words to Jane whistled between clenched teeth. "All untrue, all unfair. A thing cannot be good in theory and bad in practice. Something is wrong with a theory, if it does not take into account all facts, all reality. He can't even think honestly!"
She squeezed his hand in the darkness.
In dazed agony he sat—his father had left unperceived by the stage exit—while the delegates, their discussion carefully guided by the administration machine, voted, three to one, against the mining law on which he and Jane had built such hopeful fancies.
The summer stars hung muddily above the western horizon when he ran his car into the garage, and slipped quietly up to his room.
The rest of the Cottage was dark.
Pelham avoided his father the next week. The son came late to breakfasts, his father did not return for luncheon, and in the evenings Pelham dropped by one of the clubs for dinner.
He simply could not face the parent. They had passed, several times, on the place; they had spoken politely. But Pelham felt that this was only a courteous truce. Their ways of thinking were irreconcilable; what he regarded as his father's intellectual dishonesty, plus his own open opposition at the federation meeting, brought the conflict to a head at last.
His father was pledged, soul and brain, to things as they were. He was deaf to the call of progress, blind to what was imminent in the world around him, Pelham's emotionalized thinking told him. Paul was a Democrat, as grandfather Judson had been; he would remain one, even though he must see that the tariff issue was an outworn ruse, and that the states' rights question had been wiped out bloodily fifty years before. He was a capitalist; he would remain one, as long as a sleepily tolerant public opinion permitted this criminality in its midst.
Yes, criminality! Property was theft; Pelham was glad to find, in his new favorite, "Erewhon," an insistent echo of Proudhon's declaration. The lands, the waters, and their products shaped by labor's hands, must belong to labor, to the people; no whitewashing by legal titles could make the robbery justifiable. Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. And his father was irretrievably part and parcel of it.
Pelham took it up with his mother, in one forlorn attempt to win her backing. She checked sharply his criticism of Paul. "He is your father, Pelham. He is older, knows more, than you. I cannot listen to you."
A sense of shame prevented the son's turning to Jane. He saw her once or twice; but she had been so right, he so wrong, about his father, that he could not feel at ease with her, until the sting of the disappointment wore off. Pelham was ashamed to go to her; he went, instead, to the clubs.
Dorothy was away; but he made out. On the night of Sue's dance, he delayed until almost midnight, in order to avoid his parents. He had worked late that afternoon, and had walked afterwards through the new portion of Hewintown that lay on both sides of the railroad track. The drabness, the noisome poverty, even in new shacks, depressed him immeasurably; his disgust at the utter inartistry had long been dulled.
As he paused at the bottom of the steps to the dancing floor, the shocking contrast unsteadied him. There, where the workers lived, all was bleak want; here, where the drones celebrated, all was plenteous riot.
The curving lines of dazzling gowns, where Lane Cullom led an elaborate figure—the shimmer of jewels, the gross powdered bosoms of the chaperones, the smug smartness of the men—what a pitiable travesty of pleasure! Festooned flowers, deferential service, barbaric, subtly lascivious music—this waste would have fed those workers for years! These were not brilliant nor creative people—merely average humanity, whom the spin of the unfair wheel had swung to the top, to fling broadcast the stolen blood-toll of underpaid, underfed, underwise grubbers.
An overdressed, overperfumed matron brushed down the steps, and gushingly pushed her simpering daughter at him. An indecent exposure, as of a woman whose charms were on sale—his mind leapt to a miner's widow, holding by the hand her anemic, sunken-eyed daughter, who had stopped him and begged for work that afternoon—any work, to keep life in her daughter's body. And this waste!
Shaking off the depressed mood, he submerged his moralizing nature, and lashed himself into a hearty share in the pleasure-making. The unhealthy intoxication caught and held him; he danced and philandered with an abandon foreign to his nature. He felt that his part in the revel dirtied him. Once started, he hurled himself almost hysterically into the soiling gayety.
He had told Tom Hewin he might be late the next morning, despite the rush caused by wartime orders; it was after four when he went to bed. A troubled dream bridged his passage from sleep to waking.
He dreamt that he was flying—a common beginning of his dreams. He had powerful, sullen red wings, that beat against the gusty waves of wind, and swirled him up and forward out of the misty valley shadows toward the lean black peak of a solitary hill. Here a figure cowered—for a moment he fancied it was Jane. It turned frightened eyes up to his—no, it was his mother. He crept into her embrace.
All at once he was aware of an approaching darkness flying between him and the twinkling valley lights at an unbelievable depth below. The darkness took form as a vast black flyer mounting toward him. He unwound his mother's arms from his neck. Dimly he knew that it was a time of war, and those twinkling lights were the eyes of vast munition factories, packed with explosives.
In a slanting drop he shot toward the black figure. He did not see the face; but he knew it for his father. Lower and lower he and the black figure circled, until the night activity below could almost be made out. He avoided two beating rushes of the black wings. He grappled with the enemy.
He felt his arms pressing outward the fierce talons that sought to grasp him, his hands straining against the pulsing throat. Back, back, back he pressed—then with a mighty effort released, and flung the other, wheeling like a thrown stick, straight into the factory of death below.
Desperately his wings beat upward. A wide-tongued flash of fire bit into the night, there was a crash as if the earth burst apart.
Still half asleep, he sat up in bed. The roar rang in his ears. The house shook; fragments of window pane tinkled on the floor.
Out of bed he jumped, avoiding the broken glass, still uncertain what was dream, what reality.
Somewhere outside he heard a negro's frightened scream, and the sound of running steps.
He pulled on a shirt and a pair of working trousers, and knotted his shoe-strings. As he ran down the hall, Hollis, his tones shaking, was speaking to the doctor on the wire.
On reaching the back porch, a peculiar smell struck his nostrils—just a suggestion of a heavy odor that he knew at once. The dead fumes of dynamite—could they be blasting that close to the house? An overcharge, perhaps?
Over the sink his mother bent, washing the blood from the arm of the cook, Diana. "What's the matter, mother?"
She turned an alarmed face to his. "The glass cut her arm—nothing serious. Hollis is phoning the doctor." As he came closer, she whispered, "Artery."
"Can I help?"
She looked white and worried. "You'd better go to the mine, Pelham. It's an explosion, I think."
"Which way?"
"Sounded very close—that first ramp, perhaps——"
He went for the car; it would be quicker, and it might be needed.
As he cut through the gap, on the road just under the summit in front, parallel to the old dummy line, he noticed that the gap workings, and the second ramp, were deserted. The road turned sharply to the north, circling the long squat storehouse. He slowed mechanically, as a quick side squint caught the group on the steps: McArdle, the clerk, his anemic face, under the sparse scrub of beard, flushed from his emotional exertion, hectoring the dozen frightened negroes in front of him.
"What's wrong, Mac?"
The white man cursed the panicky negroes, the explosion, his job which kept him tied to the building.... "I can't get 'em to go back, Mr. Judson, the——" He was off again.
"Leave the store, come on with me——" He snapped open the door of the car.
"Got to watch the phone. The hospitals are sending doctors——"
"It's that bad?"
Pelham turned on the power again, and turned up the front of the hill. The air was clear here of the sickly odor that had reached the house—the wind swept this slope clear of the reminder of what lay beyond. Just before the ramp buildings showed beyond the trees, it came to him again—the stabbing, strangling odor of exploded dynamite. The tendency to nausea twisted his face into grotesque inhumanity; he held his breath as well as he could, and shoved on.
Now he had a view of the head of the ramp, and the shacks on both sides. His first impression was that it looked strangely usual: same houses, same isolated scrags of trees, all the familiar slopes and rises. A cloudy, half-hysterical belief fought within him that nothing had happened; surely exploding death and stifling horrors had not torn this kindly hill, these humble workers!
His vision cleared. The shacks were not the same; there was only a torn dilapidation on the farther side of the opening, only the vacuous shells of buildings stood on the nearer side. Horror visible, a wavering fog of dust and gray-smoky vapor, hovered over the top of the ramp. The huddling activity of the figures grouping and scattering above the opening, this was all unusual.
Running the car against a mound of red earth, he climbed clumsily out. His legs trod an unreal soil; it was as if he had forgotten how to articulate their use. The hurrying men descending the artificial slope did not notice him; they were intent on what was below.
On the third level he passed four figures lying parallel, motionless, dreadfully relaxed. He pressed his hands madly against his face, to clear the dust from his eyes, the punishing ache from his nostrils. He stopped, unable to proceed; dead men even this high up! One of the men shuddered, raised himself sideways. He saw that they were merely resting, recovering. The rescue work must be going on, then! He hurried lower.
Here was Tom Hewin, eyes bloodshot, a blackened bandage bulging out from his forehead. "You too?"
Hewin came closer, peering emptily into Pelham's face. He muttered something.
"What's 'at?"
"Hell." The manager held to his arm, as a rock to cling to, and, walking painfully, led him down the cluttered ramp, deeper into the dizzying mist. Every few feet he stopped to shout disjointed explanations or profanity into Pelham's ear. Grotesque shapes appeared suddenly, flowed both sides of them, were gone. Flickering lanterns bobbed horribly around the entrances; they stumbled over two prone figures, their wavering lantern lights sputtering out, like star-headed deities fallen and expiring. Wild bursts of imaginative activity rocked Pelham's perceptions; there was nothing real in the whole thing. The only living creatures were himself and this shrunken, dirtied being who shouted in his ear, descending ever into a darkening pit.
"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. Niggers, maybe."
"They're digging in?"
"They got into six. Working on eight—the whole mountain's caved down."
"What did it?"
"Overcharge—damn' carelessness—God knows. At this time of all others—the damn' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked—an' then they overcharge! The damn'——"
"Shall I take eight?"
"I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope. Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside.
The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without. Pelham went at the job quickly—Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight."
The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown.
He saw Jane Lauderdale at the other end of the long drab room, busily directing the emergency workers the United Charities had sent. Deaf to the questions of the company doctor at his side, he stood for a long moment. Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress—mother or wife—clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern sunshine drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death.
Jane did not see him. He returned to the grim task of providing for what new bodies were borne into the temporary morgue.
He could not find time to think; here was all that he could do.
The morning's mail included one letter of importance for Pelham. It was a form announcement of a directors' meeting of the mining company, at ten.
Judge Florence was calling the group to order, when Pelham arrived. The young mining engineer took one comprehensive look around the massive directors' table, a plate-glass-covered stretch centering the sumptuous gray office. Slowly he let himself into the one vacant chair. Paul Judson sat next to the head; Henry Tuttle, of Tuttle and Mabry, general counsel for the corporation, was talking earnestly to him. Kane, one of Judson's directors, was grouped with two of the younger men from the other interest. Sam Ross, John and Stephen Birrell, Randolph, Pelham nodded to each in turn: their faces seemed to him carved into a new heartless savagery,—a huddled group of soul-squeezing masters of men.
As general manager, Paul reported briefly the facts of the accident, with evidence, gathered by company detectives, that the blow-up originated in a miner's criminal carelessness in seriously overcharging in number six entry. This was due to wilful misunderstanding of the company's haste to get out iron, to take advantage of war prices; haste, but not carelessness, was demanded.
Two of the fourteen in the entry most affected were still alive; one had given his deposition at the hospital, telling of the conversation between the miner and his foreman immediately preceding the explosion, in which the dead miner had boasted of the overheavy charge.
"There are, according to the latest reports," Paul concluded, "twenty-two dead, and about thirty injured in greater or less degree. Spence and Jacks have filed already the first damage suits. If we pay these claims, it will cost the company from a quarter of a million to a million dollars. Since the company is not at all responsible, I recommend that we make no settlement whatever." His thin lips lifted together, and contracted. He sat down.
"Can you give us the legal side, Henry?" Jeremiah Florence had lifted Henry Tuttle from Choctaw Falls to Adamsville, and started him on the driving career that made him the worst-feared corporation lawyer in this part of the South. He regarded him now with fatherly admiration.
Tuttle rose lankly, his thin watery eyes staring with fixed impassivity. His voice was soft and malleable; he was never hurried, never vehement; he possessed a tact that caught the idea of the more creative type, then carried it to unerring completion. "Paul's suggestion would hold, if we decided to follow it. There is no liability in this state for such an accident; it would be a different matter if the legislature had passed that additional liability act last fall. That is the legal side."
He took his feet more slowly in answer to the chairman's second question. "Public policy? That is perhaps different. It might be well to make some sort of settlement. It's never hard to buy off Spence and Jacks; three or four hundred apiece—a thousand at the most—they'd keep half, or more——"
John Birrell, the older of the two boys, who retained much of the implacable push that had carried old Stephen Birrell to the headship of the local mining industry, spoke sharply from his seat. "I agree with Mr. Judson. This is no time to yield; ore's high enough to pay for any unpleasantness. Give them an inch, they'll demand the whole plant. They were restless before, in our mines as well as the Judson; even the furnaces report union talk. This is the chance to step on the whole matter."
Three or four expressions of similar vigor were too much for Pelham. He took the floor unsteadily; the glances bent on him were curious, almost pitying. The table's circle had read of the pass with his father at the labor convention; there was an uneasy titillating expectancy as to how much of a fool he would make of himself, how long he could hang on to the fringes of business, while he nourished a sprouting radicalism.
"I represent only two shares as a stockholder," he began painstakingly. "I am only one director. But I wonder if you gentlemen know what you are doing. Thirty of your workers lie seriously injured; twenty-two families are deprived of their bread-winners through an accident not their fault, but yours; yours, and other mining employers' who have fought all safety legislation, even as late as last week——" His eye caught a side glimpse of his father's unperturbed profile, as he rolled an unlighted cigar around the rim of his teeth. "It is not enough to say that these were convicts, or negroes; many were hired white workers. I don't know how well you have the law sewed up; but every idea of justice entitles them to full settlement. Any other decision would be an outrage."
The aged chairman, while disavowing any sympathy with the spirit of the young man's remarks, wondered if a proper regard for public opinion would not dictate some middle course. The younger Birrell sided with him, as did Sam Ross, Tuttle, and several others. At length Paul Judson was asked again for his opinion.
"Gentlemen, you understood what I said before. I have told you what you must do—refuse to pay one cent to any claimant, no matter how strongly the claim is pressed. Any other course, in the long run, will be suicide. Unless you want ultimate bankruptcy, you will treat this as a business matter." He gathered into a portfolio the papers before him. "I have some matters to attend to. I have shown you how to handle the matter. You can call me in for a vote."
The discussion veered and twisted after his abrupt departure; but Pelham could not fail to see, even through his disgust, how his father's insistent advice, no matter how unpleasantly phrased, dominated the group. The driver of men is never popular; and Paul Judson's keen, aggressive mind drove them against their wills. Within an hour a resolution embodying his idea was put and carried with only the son's dissenting vote.
TheTimes-Dispatchcontained a report of the meeting, and an interview with Paul Judson stressing the legal side of the situation. An editorial referred to the disaster as one of the necessary casualties of industrial growth, paid tribute to the company's promise of further safety devices, and hung on an attack on the "forces of unrest that sought to make capital of the accident, to aid their insidious unAmerican propaganda."
Pelham was puzzled by this wording, until he came across Jane, who had charge of the relief work among the victims' families. Her large eyes sparkled with a light of warfare, as she fell into step beside him, among the poor-ridden shanties of Hewintown. "You hadn't heard? Why, it's all over town now, Pell. There's a big meeting at Arlington Hall at seven-thirty to-night, to discuss the accident—and a strike!"
"Fine! It had to come—the radical unionists were just waiting the chance."
"Will you take me?"
"You couldn't keep us away."
They arrived early, but the crowd had come earlier. Only by taking stage seats were they able to get in at all. When the son of the owner of the mine was recognized, there was slight hissing, and scattered handclapping from a few Socialists. Jensen came over quietly to Pelham, his eyes dancing. "Your application's gone through, my boy; Hernandez has your red card in his pocket."
They shook hands silently. Now, Pelham realized, he was a recognized member of the red-bannered army, who were leading man into his promised earthly heritage.
Michael Serrano, who presided, plunged into the thing that had brought them there. "I'm a bricklayer by trade, as you all know. The bricklayers have made me president of their local four times. I'm called the 'reddest of the red.' If this murderous mine accident doesn't make all of you reds too, then you aren't fit for anything but to be murdered!"
The crowd stamped approval. They had come in fighting spirit; the proper key had been hit from the start.
"Now, if ever, is your chance to win your rights. The papers have been slobbering of wartime profits on ore; the reckless haste to line their pockets was the real cause of this explosion for which the worthy directors of your mines are responsible. They can't afford a shutdown now; this is your hour to win!"
Turning from the applause, he introduced Ben Spence as "a labor lawyer, with a union card in place of a heart." Spence and Jacks were the regular federation attorneys, and Spence was quite close to Pooley and Bivens; but he always professed a near-socialism that captivated his hearers in Labor Day addresses. He passed from a humorous opening into an indictment of the mining corporations that brought the hot crowd clamoring to their feet, with wild shouts of "Go to it, Ben! Eat 'em up!"
The next few speeches scattered. Pelham wondered if the mass desire would evaporate without action. Serrano saw the drift, and walked over to where the son of Paul Judson sat drinking in the wild-mouthed denunciation of his father's rapacity and cold-heartedness. "I'm going to call on you, comrade."
"You have to?"
The chairman nodded. "You give 'em hell. I'll sound 'em out first. These regular unionists—pfui!" He spat in scorn, and went back to his splintered gavel.
Jack Bowden, of the Miners', tied up with the Big Pooley gang, finished his inconclusive remarks. At once Serrano's orotund Italian voice shot out into the crowd. "Now you've heard what you're getting. And you've heard what you're entitled to. How many miners are in this crowd? Raise your hands."
Amid general neck-stretching, the hands went up—almost a third of the vociferous audience. There was a rattle of applause at the good showing.
"Are you going to stand being treated as dirt, or will you act like men? How many of you miners vote strike? Let's hear your voices!"
The shout of approval showed how avid they were for some direct expression of their accumulated resentment. Bowden, a worried look on his face, rose to protest; the ecstatic chairman waved him down.
"I'm going to do an unusual thing. I'm going to call on one of your employers to tell what he really thinks about you. I call on Comrade Pelham Judson, assistant manager of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company."
There was no applause. Pelham, tremendously alone, walked down to the front of the big platform. His mind registered random impressions—the faded tawdriness of the cheap bunting below the dirty footlights, the smell of fetid cigars and pipes, bulging necks above dirty unstarched collars, the fierce resentment and shining hunger for better things flaring in the eyes just below him. The irresistible contrast with the suave gray fittings of the directors' room flooded him.
He summoned all his knowledge of speaking, and stood silent, his eyes ranging the vast pit and the jammed galleries.
"Fellow laborers—comrades——" His voice choked. "Many of you know how I think about this. What happened two days ago on that red mountain I love was murder—definite, systematized murder. The danger has always been known; and when every effort to wipe out that danger by law has been fought, and the deaths occur, I call that deliberate murder!"
There was a startled pelt of applause in one corner of the room. It did not spread; the others were too interested, too surprised, to pass judgment.
"What ought you to do? Your referendum will decide. If I were in your places, there is only one thing I could do—and that is, strike! Strike against the company, and me—yes! Strike for the enforcement of the weak-kneed mining law, and for a better one! Strike for more pay, shorter hours, and your organization! Fight back! Unite"—his long, tense arms reached out, and drew in together in a clenching grasp—"bring together your force as one man, and there is no power in the world that can stand against you!"
This was familiar. They howled agreement.
"There are two ways you must strike. Part of the blame lies with that legislature at Jackson. You elected them; you can retire 'em. Strike politically. Unite at the polls—there'll be a labor ticket, the socialist ticket, for every office—drive it home to victory! Then you will have laws which would make such an explosion an impossibility!"
There were a few mock groans from theVoice of Laborcrowd, but the majority still sat silent.
"You have a quicker weapon, on the industrial field—a strike. We've all read the announcement of the company's action; my vote was the only one against it at the directors' meeting. You must strike to teach your masters what they can't do! Strike for justice to the thirty men maimed and crippled in the cause of profits! Strike for the twenty-three families who are the worst sufferers from this hell. Yes, twenty-three, Mr. Chairman; I received phone word that Hank Burns died of his injuries at six-thirty to-night." There was a faintly rising moan of anger at this. "If you unite, as I believe you will, there is no power in the world that can stop you!"
He went back to his seat, trembling, his forehead moist with frigid sweat. Jane's rapturous hands caught his; he felt fully repaid.
The meeting broke up in an uproar of enthusiasm.
As he started for the Andersons' with Jane, the mad spell of a June moon-bright night caught and tortured him, until it was pain to think of letting her go. The cool darkness rushed by on both sides. Out of the crevasses of big buildings they passed into the more open stretches of low urban homes. The country club road invited; they slid over gentle rises until they had their fill of tree rustle and moon shimmer. Against the sky they traced the soft outlines of the swan and the lyre swung to the East over the dull rose glow of unsleeping furnaces; but the persistent flood from the moon dulled even Vega to a mild glimmer. At length the car whirred up the last hill, and stopped in front of the darkened house where she was to sleep.
There was so much to be said. The beauty of the night was throat-catching, and lifted them away from the hectic scene at Arlington Hall, and the bitter fight that to-morrow must bring. He felt her full sympathy with the attitude he must take; her first hand-grasp, as he took his seat after the speech, told him that. His hand, as the car waited before her house, lingered fearfully against hers; an electric current snapped between the two.
His fancy played fitfully with fantasies that started with his lifting that warm dear hand to his kiss ... then the yielding lips ... then the mutual surrender. But like a scourge memory listed over to him the mouths he had kissed, youthfully, poignantly, casually.... No, he had done with that. This must be no mere union of bodies; love should begin with a pure communion of kindred spirits. A kiss, a caress—these were the soft persuasive preludes to the swelling finale of mating; cheapen them, wear out their springbud freshness, and the blossom of mated love must remain stunted, like a frost-warped dogwood flower,—must henceforth be soiled, like a draggled pear-blossom mired by an April downpour. Hereafter he would hold his lips—and keep hers—inviolate, virginal; the miraculous event of love consummated should not be fouled by recollections of squandered embraces, of cheap philanderings.
The desire to touch and conquer the hand beside his almost overpowered him, despite his ascetic musing. Spasmodically he pulled his hand away. A force stronger than his will brought it slowly back, until it shivered against hers.
Quietly, with restrained and schooled abandon, his words breathed out. "Jane ... dear ... dearer—dearest——"
Her intuitive eyes read the words that were coming, before his own mind framed them. A sudden blossoming of joy surged within her, so great for a moment that it prevented speech; then, panic-stricken, she wished to postpone the inevitable question, to delay the rapture, to flee away, with the words unspoken, for just a little longer to consider the matter.... She said nothing of this; her silence, blent into the silence of the mountain at the end of the rise before them, was voluble with another message than delay or hesitation.
An agony of doubt racked him. Hadn't he been mistaken all along? Wouldn't she laugh at him, for his presumption in reading even toleration in her eyes, that radiated indifferently upon things unworthy, like himself, and worthy alike? Would he dare go on? He must—even if her laugh shattered the iridescent sphere of his hopes.
An impassioned eagerness to get the words out made his tone forced and unnatural. "Will you have me, Jane? Will you love me—a little? I know I've no right to speak—my affairs are so tangled, and all——"
Then she raised her arm, until the hand was above his head; and her fingers touched his hair gently, caressingly, soothingly.
"Jane...." His voice was rich with reverent unbelief.
"Pelham dear——"
In excess of happiness, he caught the hand beside him almost to his lips; and then, instead, pressed it against his breast, against his heart.
His laugh was almost incoherent. "I was so afraid you'd say 'no.'"
The light shone only on her averted cheek. "I was so afraid ... you wouldn't ask me!"
"Silly girl! When every infinitesimal part of me aches and cries out to you! I can't believe yet that you've said yes."
"Yes," in joyous affection.
"And I will aim a lifetime toward making you glad you've said it!"
"I'll always be glad, no matter what comes."
"I've got to let you go now—it must be almost three.... And I'm not going to kiss you, even now, dearest—dearest—dearest! I'll say it all night to myself; I'll never use another word——"
"Well, hardly ever," she amended prettily.
"When we can be married, then you'll let me kiss you. And don't put me off too long!"
He fingered the wheel thoughtfully; why let her out at all? No, he must help protect her now.
"Good night, Jane ... dearest mine."
"Good-night ... my man."
His car sliced the friendly night that lay heavy on the hill road. He whirled up the great half circle to the crest far to the east of the cottage, and muffled the engine at the highest point. To his left, too far away to be distinguished except as an irregular blackness against the softer gray of the valley behind, lay the black peak of Crenshaw Hill, the fatal shattered entries beyond it, the mourning shacks of Hewintown near it. There was no light in them. Behind was the blur of Shadow Valley, and the endless diminishing rollers of hills sloping slowly to the salt gulf monotonous miles away. Before him lay Adamsville, almost asleep; the symmetrical criss-cross of lights, like a vast checker-board blending into the far distance, caught his imagination. His heart sang aloud with his own happiness—an emotion so overcoming, that he forced himself to think of lesser topics, to regain mental balance before returning to the rapture of Jane again....
The iron city, an iron checker-board of lights.... The will-less men moved here and there by great hands hidden in the opposing darknesses—by capital's sleek and pudgy paw, by labor's grimed and toil-stained fingers: behind these, moved by the greater mastery of the forces of nature; by the mountain, and the iron grip it embodied; by the touch of the golden god that was to-day its master. A futile game, for the poor pawns ... where one in a thousand became king; and kingship brought no joy, but only division and unrest. The blasted, furnace-punished ore was material for the painful alchemy that made it gold: more than this, the miners themselves, the stooped laborers, the slatternly starved wives, the thin children, the corpses lifted from the ruptured bowels of the hill, to a final scattering in some cheap pine house of decay—all these were part of the horrid modern alchemy that made them gold for his father's sake. That he had ever been a part of it! Well, with Jane his, he was through with the old horrors....
Jane ... with an effort he brought his mind again to the scene before him. The sleeping homes of the iron city, black in the darkness before him! Each of those tiny houses held situations, problems, as complex as that storm that must soon break over the cottage beyond the mining section. They were all asleep, gathering strength for fresh outbreaks of hatred and love.
What if they never woke? What if the sleep became a merciful finality, sponging out the aimless unrest men called life? Who could say which would be better?
For him, his problems simplified, glorified now by what Jane had said to-night, life, with all its zest and joyous restlessness, was infinitely preferable.
He must go on; he must make the complete break with his father, and soon. It was a perilous thing, this going alone; but he knew that he was able to do it, just as he had once roamed alone the hidden reaches of the mountain.
He stood out from his car, to be nearer to the mountain. It was an instinctive action he could not have explained. The soft strength of the soil rose through him; he felt refreshed. It was not only battlefield, but the cause of the struggle; it was the prize to be won by the angry puppets its iron strings pulled here and there. There was no other course he could follow; he felt a calm certainty that the mountain, the great dark mother with its bleeding iron heart of red, understood this, and was wholly in accord with it. The mountain understood it—and a dearer, nearer heart, his from henceforth.
He slept at length peacefully.
Paul Judson pushed the next morning's paper over to Mary without words, his stiff forefinger indicating the part he wished her to read. It was an account of the previous night's meeting, featuring a florid write-up of Pelham's emotional outburst.
She finished it without comment.
Her husband looked at her evenly. "There has never been any insanity in either side of the family, or I would think Pelham came by this naturally."
"He isn't a fool, Paul."
"Where does he think this will end? It's bad enough when we are united against the perpetual unrest of the ignorant mob. But to have my son turn against all that his ancestors fought for!"
Mary watched him thoughtfully. "You two cannot pull together, Paul. Why not help him get somewhere else?"
"You mean——"
"You mentioned that Governor Tennant wanted to do you a favor, and suggested Pell as mining inspector, or something. Wouldn't that straighten out this situation?"
Paul looked at her doubtfully. "One of us has to make the break. Of course, he'll make trouble wherever he is. But he is my son. A thing like that might make him behave."
Finishing his coffee, he pushed his chair back raspingly over the hardwood floor. Over in the boys' wing he called Ned. "Will you tell Pelham I would like to speak to him?"
Father and eldest son walked quietly out over the untouched portion of the outcrop before the house. "You don't want me to discuss with you the unusual line of activity you have taken up, Pelham...."
"It is only fair to tell you, father, that I have joined the socialist party."
"You don't intend to remain with the mining company."
Pelham gulped. This was what it must mean.
"I can get Bob Tennant to appoint you a State Mining Inspector. You can live on the salary."
"There is no work I would rather do.... Of course, I can not change my ideas."
"We'll regard it as settled. I'll wire him this morning."
Two days later, Pelham received the notification of the appointment, just before Spence, the labor lawyer, had him on the phone. The young mine-operator at once shared his information.
"That's splendid, Judson! I've got news too—the referendum was eight to one for strike—and the national's wired that John Dawson's on the way! Big John Dawson—now for some fireworks!"
This was progress, with a vengeance! Pelham was free at last of the company; the revolution—at least in Adamsville—was heartily on its way. With Jane's spirit backing him, and always beside him, he felt that this hectic week had justified itself. Now for the triumphant clash!
John Dawson, organizer of the National Federation of Miners, picked his way through the raw grayness of the Union Depot, in the muscle-cramped crowd that came in on the day coaches of the 5:10, until he reached the station itself. His eyes picked out the hesitant clot of four men off to one side. "You the committee?"
Serrano introduced them briefly: Jack Bowden, state agent of the miners; Ben Wilson and John McGue, of the strike committee. Dawson clenched each hand in a vast paw, then beckoned them away from his two grips. "Wait a minute." His alert eyes sieved the crowd. "See them two boys in gray hats? They've followed me all the way from Wilmington. Hope they've had a nice trip; I do love detectives...." He motioned them away. "Naw, I carry my own." Adjusting the two big valises carefully, he smiled, "Let's move."
They went out through the truck entrance, and across the gusty avenue, clanging with cars filled with early workers. Depot idlers stared at the group; the tall heavy-loaded man in the center would hold attention anywhere.
Serrano stopped half a block away, at a flamboyant entrance displaying "Mecca Hotel" in dirty white letters above. The clerk, a limp young man without a collar, shoved over the tobacco-stained page. Dawson signed it, forming each letter painstakingly. They walked up one flight to the room.
Dawson looked around critically.
"Biggest room they have. They'll put in the other two beds to-day."
"Some of the boys may have to spend the night here. I'm glad it's near the station, if any quick getaway has to be made." The organizer smiled, his lips curling back over big front teeth; there was something disquieting and unsmiling in the look.
Serrano got rid of the rest of the committee, and went into an elaborate detail of the situation.
Dawson was able to help him out. "You'll find I know the land pretty well. I worked three years in the West Adamsville mines; they ran me out in the strike of '04. Who can you count on?"
He listened attentively, checking certain names in a thick yellow notebook.
"I know this Jack Bowden kind. We find 'em all over. In West Virginia we amputated a bunch like that. We've got 'em in Chicago, Indianapolis, New York.... Give 'em a few days, and they'll show yellow; then it's easy to fire 'em. Bowden looked fishy. These labor tin Jesuses make me sick! Better than anybody else, and sold out in advance. Who's this Judson?"
The energetic bricklayer told of the recent convert, and the Arlington Hall meeting.
"He can talk? We'll use him. But you can't trust them fellows too far. I'm not a socialist, you know; don't believe in voting worth a damn. Never got nowhere, never will get nowhere. But in a strike, they help."
They went over the morning paper. "Mmm—only a few hundred out——What's the straight goods?"
"Over five hundred from the Judson mines, six fifty from the Birrell-Florence, and about four hundred others from the mines on either side. We haven't touched West Adamsville yet, or Irondale. If only the furnaces could be called out...."
"Won't come. We can try; but mine strikes don't get 'em. No organization. These men all joined?"
"Joined or joining."
"This says scabs from Pittsburgh.... No law to stop 'em?"
"Ben Spence, our lawyer, says there isn't. In the last street-car strike we tried the law; the courts wouldn't enforce it."
"How do the boys feel?"
"They want to fight like hell. They'll stop the scabs."
"Got to be careful there. That sort of thing is dynamite; it blows both ways. Company won't hear the committee?"
"Young Judson's father's the reason. Says he won't allow a union man in his shop hereafter. No committees, nor nothing."
"Let's see the place."
They walked from the end of the car line. The roads through the property had been made city streets, when Hillcrest Addition was thrown open to the public, and the party could not be stopped. Dawson paused to shake hands with the groups of pickets on the various cross roads. He had a personal word for each, and a concentrated way of getting the details he needed out of the incoherent members of the working body.
Joined by Ben Wilson and several of the pickets, they passed into the company estate, and by the entrances to the gap drifts and the second ramp. Only a few negroes were at work in the gap; it was not until the second big slope that the white workers appeared. Dawson looked a question at stocky Wilson, hardly up to his vest pocket.
"Convicts. Almost three hundred of them."
"Any niggers go out?"
"Half a dozen. You met one, Ed Cole, picketing by Thirtieth Street."
A red-faced Irishman walked out of a knot of workers and greeted the tall organizer. "Hello, Dawson. Remember me?"
"Your mug's familiar. Lemme see—your name's Hewin, ain't it?"
The superintendent grinned. "You ought to remember it. You beat hell out of me in the Coalstock strike for staying on as foreman."
"Scab then, eh, and still at it." Dawson's tolerance had a touch promising danger.
"That's what you'd call it. I'm in charge here. Mind your own business, or I'm not the one who'll get beat up this time." He turned with grinning ugliness and climbed back to the opening.
They cut over to the railroad track, and entered Hewintown by the back way. Dawson studied the land carefully. "That's the way they'd bring the train from Pittsburgh, of course. And that's a pretty narrow cut beyond that dinky little house. Who lives there?"
"Mr. Judson, the vice-president."
"This ain't no place for a mine-owner."
Dawson's comment on the shack town was a string of profanity. "Even in West Virginia they had better dumps than those! I wouldn't let my pig live there. Company houses, as always."
"Yes."
"This crew out?"
"All but two or three. The convict stockade is on the next hill; the niggers live in Adamsville, or in Lilydale, over yonder." His pudgy fingers pointed through the trees to the south.
They passed company detectives and guards, in clusters of two or three, at every corner. "These always here?"
"Most of them new."
"We'll help 'em earn their money.... Take me by number three, and the hospital you mentioned. I want to see it all."
They were not allowed to go down this ramp; guards with shotguns refused to allow any ingress. "You might get blowed up too, buddy."
Serrano left them, to pass around the word of the meeting that night. Dawson listened to the vivid hatred of the company all the way down the hill. A vigorous nod punctuated his opinion. "That's what they are; a bunch of lousy murderers. It's no worse here than other places; you've got to fight for what you get, anywhere. Pretty bunch of uglies here already! And when they try to run in Pittsburgh scabs——" He did not finish.
The momentum of the strike grew day by day. Most of the papers continued unfriendly; but theRegister, which made a point of claiming to stand for the man in the shop as well as the man in the office, insisted that public sentiment was with the strikers, especially because of the recent memory of the accident horror.
The packed meetings in Arlington Hall were reported favorably in this paper; and they were emotional successes. John Dawson was not a graceful speaker; but his harsh bellow meant business, and his imperative magnetism shone through the awkwardest gesturings. Bowden contributed suave appeals, and Big John Pooley, the state president, took the floor the second night to remind that organized labor stood behind their efforts. "I am sure," he boasted, "that you will win, and even sooner than you expect. You have the companies practically beaten now."
Serrano turned to Dawson, puzzled. "What's he getting at, with that stuff?"
The enormous organizer looked at him searchingly. "If you watch a snake hole, you're liable to see the snake crawl out sooner or later."
During the rest of Pooley's speech, the huge organizer, head sprawled back against the wall, chin upraised, studied the speaker with a hungry intentness, as if investigating for that weak spot he had found every man to possess. The bricklayer chairman phrased and rephrased to himself his introduction for the next speaker, one of the negro miners. It was always risky, this opening the union doors to the black workers. Of course, as a socialist Serrano always urged it, arguing that labor's only safety lay in having this convenient surplus labor force within its own ranks, as protection against black scabbing; but there was some division in the local about it, and the southern unionist took slowly to the idea; occasional revivals of racial intolerance, based upon dislike of sharing work with the darker cousin, split unions and federations, delaying solidified strength for years and decades.
Pooley ended with lame vehemence; and the voice of the Italian chairman thundered another plea for labor's unity, introducing a black man to show that no boundaries of nation or race counted in the centuries' long battle. "I'm going to call on Will Cole to speak to you. Will is a black man, who was in Number Eight entry when the dynamite murder took place. His dead comrades talk to you through his living lips. Come on, Will, tell us why you don't look for a pay check this week."
They laughed at the rude jesting at the invariable boomerang effect of their sole weapon of protest—a laugh that quieted to respect, as the grimy overalled negro was urged up the side steps and to the center of the stage. His eyes blinked at the dazzle of the lighting until the whites showed; his shoulders hunched deprecatingly. He could not speak to them as man to man, that he knew; the difference in color was ever in his mind, and in his audience's.
"Ah'm only a nigger," he began diffidently. "You-all white folks don't want niggers in yo' unions, you-all don't want us to wu'k whar you do. Some er you don't lak us havin' our own union. An' niggers is crazy too; Ah kaint make dat wu'thless gang in number two come out, nohow.
"But Ah come out. You-all know Jim Cole was in Number Six when de mine oxploded; you-all know he's dead now. Ah live on dat mountain, same as Mister Judson. Dere ain't no more reason why me 'n' mah brudder should a got killed in dem mines dan why he should'a. Ah done jined dis union, an' Ah'll die befo' Ah'll scab. An' any scab dat comes mah way had better have his ears all aroun' his haid!"
They chuckled at the conclusion, but it made its effect. "When you all unite, white and black, you can snap your fingers at all the Paul Judsons in the world!" Serrano never lost a chance to drive home a point.
Next afternoon's headlines promised the arrival of a trainload of workers during the night. This lent an added air of uncertainty to the meeting following. Dawson's pleas to the men to hold fast, to convert the scabs with arguments, not bricks, were as strong as ever; but despite the ample audience, even he was a little upset by the fact that the whole Bowden-Pooley crowd were absent from their stage seats.
When he got around to Machinists' Hall later in the same evening, for the conference over the next day's activities, he found the state labor organization present in full force. The ornate double rows of mahogany-stained chairs, arranged in a hollow diamond shape, to accommodate the fraternities that met in the hall, with raised seats at the four points of the diamond for the officers, were half filled with the Pooley followers. Dawson called the meeting to order.
Jack Bowden rose, spit carefully into the shiny brass cuspidor, placed there to preserve the long-haired red carpet, and began. "Men, the strike is won! We've been in consultation with Mr. Judson and Mr. Kane, and the whole thing is to be called off to-morrow morning! They agree to consider every one of our demands, provided only we don't insist on the demand for unionization. We can't win, with this trainload of detectives and workers from up north; I think we're lucky to beat 'em this way." He turned to Dawson. "You've done mighty fine work, John Dawson; and the state treasury of the mining union will be glad to foot your bill comin' here and goin' back."
Dawson was out of the chair, his throat palpitating, almost too choked to get out a word. "I've been waiting for you and your kind to show your hands, Bowden. I'm glad you've done it this soon. Did Mr. Judson say he would grant all demands, except unionization?"
Pooley shifted his lame leg, and spoke up. "Mr. Kane it was we talked to to-night."
Dawson's clear-thrown tones fired the next question at him. "Did Mr. Kane promise to grant every demand, except only unionization?"
"He said they'd consider 'em. It's the best——"
"It's nothing, and you know it! Fire me and the real union men who are making the trouble, and turn the whole thing over to you yellow-livered double-dealers—a fine way to run a strike! With us gone, and the strike broken,thenyour Mr. Kane, who isn't even a boss, would agree toconsiderthe demands. Are you damned fools, or plain ordinary crooks?"
He paused for a moment. Bowden started to reply, but was checked by fear of injury, as Dawson took one tremendous step toward him. Pelham Judson, seated to the right, caught his eye. "If that there Judson's son had spilled this soft-soap, I could get it; you might expect it from he and his class." Pelham winced at the scorn. "But you—a union card dirtied in your pocket, you, a Judas to your kind—you got no place in a room with decent men."
Pooley tried to bolster up Bowden's pallid protest, blustering, "You look here, Dawson. The State Federation of Labor——"
"Damn the State Federation of Labor! If any organization, labor or otherwise, stands in the way of our beatin' a fight, we'll smash it! We're going to win, do you get me? You keep out. As for you, Bowden——" He came close to the local agent, bending down from his towering six feet and a half to bring his face near the other's. "You better get out, before I have the national office down on your neck. This is final: from now on, you stay out. We'll run the strike without any talk from you. Go back and tell your Mr. Kane that there's a bunch here he can't double cross, or buy out! Now git!"
Three times the suave agent started to speak. His fingers wandered uncertainly up and down the shiny buttons of his fancy vest, his eyes glanced away from the brutal dominance in the huge face before him. At last he turned to Pooley. "Goin', John?"
Pooley noted the cringe, and his nostrils lifted slightly. He spoke definitely. "There's no hard feelin' about this, Dawson? You understand that——"
"Yes, I understand." The sudden burst of anger had gone; there was a vast patience in every syllable. "I understand; you needn't explain." He turned dispassionately to the others. "Now, boys, what's the reports for to-day?"
The work was finally done; they started out. At the door they were stopped by half a dozen newspaper men, who had been held up by the doorman until the conference was over. "Anything special for to-morrow, Mr. Dawson?"
The big miner grinned amicably. "You might say everything's coming our way. With twenty two hundred men out, and five of the mines stopped, things are lookin' up."
The reporter for theAdvertiserpushed out a question. "Did you advise violence in stopping these workers from the North?"
"Good God, no, man! That's the very thing I'm fighting against. You heard me—in every speech. We're law abiding. If there's any lawbreaking to be done, let the companies do it." He smiled grimly. "They're itching for us to give 'em an excuse to bring on the militia, as they did in '04, when they massacred the miners. They'll fail; we'll fight within the law."
He scribbled vigorously. "Is it true you were driven out of Montana and West Virginia, and almost lynched in Michigan?"
Dawson's neck swelled, his eyes smouldered. "Yes, it's true, every bit of it. And I was driven out of this state in '04. I expect it in my business. You might say things is changing, and it may be Mr. Paul Judson who's driven out next time."
There was a chorus of appreciation from the committee.
"I guess that's all."
One reporter—it was Charley Brant, of theRegister—called Pelham aside. "Gotten any word from the mountain recently ... to-night?"
"No; why?"
"That trainload of workers is arriving; there's trouble, rioting or something."
"Are you sure?" Excitement blazed in his face. "Tell John Dawson so."
He called him over at once.
"We got a phone message from a man on the ground. It's on the mineral line, halfway between Mr. Judson's house and the viaduct, if you know where that is. Our man said it was serious."
"I'm going." Dawson sliced his words off briskly.
"Use my car; it's quicker," snapped Pelham.
Jensen, McGue, Dawson, and the reporter got inside; two others of the committee hung to the running boards.
Pelham drove at top speed out the Thirty-Eighth Street road, and circled around the crest. "I know the place," he explained. "We'd better come up from behind, if anything's doing. They might stop us."
He turned from the county road to a cool country lane cutting through tall long-leaf pine, in the middle of Shadow Valley. The car's lights danced unreally on the crowding trunks ahead, the wheels slipped and skidded over the sprinkling of carpeting needles. He whisked to the right, and took the hill toward the mountain. They had heard no noise as yet.
Up a gravelly hogback to a level a hundred feet from the tracks,—and they were in the midst of it. The uncertain rumble from men massed blackly in front of and all around the stalled engine's headlight, broke over them; they saw the train, somber and illy lit, stopped midway of the deep cut through the next chert hill—an ideal place for an ambuscade.
They heard single voices, broken by the spurty wind. Then the men in front of the car dissolved, into the blackness on both sides of the track. Now they could see the piled mound of huge stones, cross ties, tree trunks, which had stopped the engine. Close below the headlight was a moving shadow they finally made out as company men, they could not tell how many. The red gleam of the headlight on dull metal shone on the far side. Before the mound of rocks and stumps two men still stood.
"Get off that track," the words came clearer now, from one of the men just below the headlight. "Or we shoot."
It happened so quickly that they hardly had time to get out of the car. A voice came from one of the two upon the track, the pleasant, velvety richness of a negro voice. "Ah reckon Ah kin walk on dis track ef Ah wants to."
"You black——"
He did not finish. From the deeper shadow below the tender, two rifles popped together, with a thin hollow noise, like playthings. There was a shrieking medley from all sides. For one instant, etched black against the light thrown by the unwinking eye of the engine, the two figures stood. One of the negroes plunged wildly to the side, clattering and tumbling down the seventy foot fill to the bottom of the sharp declivity. The other stood alone, a black break on the lighted area. He screamed once like a kicked dog. He slid to the ground. His body huddled across a rail.
"God!" Dawson exploded. Tumbling out of the car, they started pelting toward the track.
They stopped, still thirty feet from the lighted area, as half a dozen men plunged toward them, scattering to the safety of the woods. One came at them—Ben Wilson, who should have been with the committee.
"For God's sake, don't go there—they're shooting to kill——"
Dawson caught him by the collar, shook him bitterly. "What hell of a mess is this! We've got to stop it——"
Wilson made a gesture of hopeless exultation, touched with something sublime. "You can't stop it now!"
Dawson stared at him in amazement.
The cries became louder, from all around the motionless train; they looked back. Protected by the guns under the headlights, a line of hesitating men were cursed forward to where the obstacle lay crudely across the tracks. The leader of the guards, rifle cached on his left forearm, pointed this way and that.
The reluctant line of workers burrowed into the mound. Boulders of ore, a broken wagon, old cross-ties were pulled out and sent bounding into the seventyfoot gulley, each starting a rocketing train of pebbles and rocks after it. The front row of gunmen had moved silently forward, and menaced the threatening darkness.
Suddenly there was a shock of breaking glass, and a herd scream from the front car just behind the tender. A cloudburst of stones rained against the length of the train from the gap's crests on both sides. Windows were caved in, rocks bounced noisily off the roof, there were gulped outcries from the penned men inside the cars. At a command, the rifles flared wildly toward the tops of the cut.
Wilson pulled out a pistol, dropped to his knees, aimed carefully at the leader of the gunmen, standing awkwardly in the exposing glare.
Dawson jerked the pistol from his hand, and sent the man tottering sideways. "Not that way."
The track was cleared now. Even the first negro's body was laid hurriedly on the south-bound rail. But the wild bombardment of the train had had its effect. The bewildered engineer started backing into the gap, in whose deeper shadows the reinforced strikers had further advantage.
One boulder, two-thirds the height of a man, was sent lumbering down, gathering momentum. It leapt against the side of a car; for a moment the car tottered. The head gunman, seeing his men deserted by the train, stumbled down the cross-ties toward it.
"Hey, stop! Damn you, stop, I say!"
His voice cracked; he began again.
It was a rout for the company forces, a clear victory for the strikers.
Then with a whirr like giant mechanical wings the belated guard automobiles, four of them, swung around the curving crest of the road fifty feet behind and above the cut. The trees and underbrush had been cleared for just this purpose. The huge searchlights, one to each car, wavered, then poured their blinding flood on the dark gap summits.
"Oh, God! The deppities——"
The light itself seemed to stagger those who had been triumphant in the dark. They diverged sharply from the point of advantage. Those on the far side cleared back toward the east. Those on the near side halted uncertainly for a fatal second, before they ran toward the two ends of the cut.
"Let 'em have it!"
An intermittent sheet of flame broke from the guard automobiles. The defenseless workers stopped and tumbled grotesquely. To Dawson's horrified imagination it seemed that more than a dozen lay flat and twitching in the hellish flare of the searchlights.
"Come on!"
"Got 'im, Jim!"
"Take that, you damned——"
With savage yells the new attackers, firing whenever they saw a moving target, covered the slope, and halted above the train.
"Hey, there," bellowed the man in the lead, addressing the train crew below. "Whatcher stop for?"
"We're going on."
"Why 'n' cher go on, then?" he parroted in irritation.
The whistle wailed, the engine and cars shuddered forward toward Hewintown. The first attack was over.
"Well," Dawson led the way back to the low gray car hidden in the shadows. "Hell's loose this time!"