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

[ INTRODUCTION ]

[ 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 ]

[ POSTSCRIPT ]

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!

SECTION 2.

Hal went back to Reminitsky's boarding-house; a heavy sacrifice, but not without its compensations, because it gave him more chance to talk with the men.

He and Jerry made up a list of those who could be trusted with the secret: the list beginning with the name of Mike Sikoria. To be put on a committee, and sent to interview a boss, would appeal to Old Mike as the purpose for which he had been put upon earth! But they would not tell him about it until the last minute, for fear lest in his excitement he might shout out the announcement the next time he lost one of his cars.

There was a young Bulgarian miner named Wresmak who worked near Hal. The road into this man's room ran up an incline, and he had hardly been able to push his “empties” up the grade. While he was sweating and straining at the task, Alec Stone had come along, and having a giant's contempt for physical weakness, began to cuff him. The man raised his arm—whether in offence or to ward off the blow, no one could be sure; but Stone fell upon him and kicked him all the way down the passage, pouring out upon him furious curses. Now the man was in another room, where he had taken out over forty car-loads of rock, and been allowed only three dollars for it. No one who watched his face when the pit-boss passed would doubt that this man would be ready to take his chances in a movement of protest.

Then there was a man whom Jerry knew, who had just come out of the hospital, after contact with the butt-end of the camp-marshal's revolver. This was a Pole, who unfortunately did not know a word of English; but Olson, the organiser, had got into touch with another Pole, who spoke a little English, and would pass the word on to his fellow-countryman. Also there was a young Italian, Rovetta, whom Jerry knew and whose loyalty he could vouch for.

There was another person Hal thought of—Mary Burke. He had been deliberately avoiding her of late; it seemed the one safe thing to do—although it seemed also a cruel thing, and left his mind ill at ease. He went over and over what had happened. How had the trouble got started? It is a man's duty in such cases to take the blame upon himself; but a man does not like to take blame upon himself, and he tries to make it as light as possible. Should Hal say that it was because he had been too officious that night in helping Mary where the path was rough? She had not actually needed such help, she was quite as capable on her feet as he! But he had really gone farther than that—he had had a definite sentimental impulse; and he had been a cad—he should have known all along that all this girl's discontent, all the longing of her starved soul, would become centred upon him, who was so “different,” who had had opportunity, who made her think of the “poetry-books”!

But here suddenly seemed a solution of the difficulty; here was a new interest for Mary, a safe channel in which her emotions could run. A woman could not serve on a miners' committee, but she would be a good adviser, and her sharp tongue would be a weapon to drive others into line. Being aflame with this enterprise, Hal became impersonal, man-fashion—and so fell into another sentimental trap! He did not stop to think that Mary's interest in the check-weighman movement might be conditioned in part by a desire to see more of him; still less did it occur to him that he might be glad for a pretext to see Mary.

No, he was picturing her in a new role, an activity more inspiriting than cooking and nursing. His “poetry-book” imagination took fire; he gave her a hope and a purpose, a pathway with a goal at the end. Had there not been women leaders in every great proletarian movement?

He went to call on her, and met her at the door of her cabin. “'Tis a cheerin' sight to see ye, Joe Smith!” she said. And she looked him in the eye and smiled.

“The same to you, Mary Burke!” he answered.

She was game, he saw; she was going to be a “good sport.” But he noticed that she was paler than when he had seen her last. Could it be that these gorgeous Irish complexions ever faded? He thought that she was thinner too; the old blue calico seemed less tight upon her.

Hal plunged into his theme. “Mary, I had a vision of you to-day!”

“Of me, lad? What's that?”

He laughed. “I saw you with a glory in your face, and your hair shining like a crown of gold. You were mounted on a snow-white horse, and wore a robe of white, soft and lustrous—like Joan of Arc, or a leader in a suffrage parade. You were riding at the head of a host—I've still got the music in my ears, Mary!”

“Go on with ye, lad—what's all this about?”

“Come in and I'll tell you,” he said.

So they went into the bare kitchen, and sat in bare wooden chairs—Mary folding her hands in her lap like a child who has been promised a fairy-story. “Now hurry,” said she. “I want to know about this new dress ye're givin' me. Are ye tired of me old calico?”

He joined in her smile. “This is a dress you will weave for yourself, Mary, out of the finest threads of your own nature—out of courage and devotion and self-sacrifice.”

“Sure, 'tis the poetry-book again! But what is it ye're really meanin'?”

He looked about him. “Is anybody here?”

“Nobody.”

But instinctively he lowered his voice as he told his story. There was an organiser of the “big union” in the camp, and he was going to rouse the slaves to protest.

The laughter went out of Mary's face. “Oh! It's that!” she said, in a flat tone. The vision of the snow-white horse and the soft and lustrous robe was gone. “Ye can never do anything of that sort here!”

“Why not?”

“'Tis the men in this place. Don't ye remember what I told ye at Mr. Rafferty's? They're cowards!”

“Ah, Mary, it's easy to say that. But it's not so pleasant being turned out of your home—”

“Do ye have to tell me that?” she cried, with sudden passion. “Haven't I seen that?”

“Yes, Mary; but I want to do something—”

“Yes, and haven't I wanted to do something? Sure, I've wanted to bite off the noses of the bosses!”

“Well,” he laughed, “we'll make that a part of our programme.” But Mary was not to be lured into cheerfulness; her mood was so full of pain and bewilderment that he had an impulse to reach out and take her hand again. But he checked that; he had come to divert her energies into a safe channel!

“We must waken these men to resistance, Mary!”

“Ye can't do it, Joe—not the English-speakin' men. The Greeks and the Bulgars, maybe—they're fightin' at home, and they might fight here. But the Irish never—never! Them that had any backbone went out long ago. Them that stayed has been made into boot-licks. I know them, every man of them. They grumble, and curse the boss, but then they think of the blacklist, and they go back and cringe at his feet.”

“What such men want—”

“'Tis booze they want, and carousin' with the rotten women in the coal-towns, and sittin' up all night winnin' each other's money with a greasy pack of cards! They take their pleasure where they find it, and 'tis nothin' better they want.”

“Then, Mary, if that's so, don't you see it's all the more reason for trying to teach them? If not for their own sakes, for the sake of their children! The children, mustn't grow up like that! They are learning English, at least—”

Mary gave a scornful laugh. “Have ye been up to that school?”

He answered no; and she told him there were a hundred and twenty children packed in one room, three in a seat, and solid all round the wall. She went on, with swift anger—the school was supposed to be paid for out of taxes, but as nobody owned any property but the company, it was all in the company's hands. The school-board consisted of Mr. Cartwright, the mine-superintendent, and Jake Predovich, a clerk in the store, and the preacher, the Reverend Spraggs. Old Spraggs would bump his nose on the floor if the “super” told him to.

“Now, now!” said Hal, laughing. “You're down on him because his grandfather was an Orangeman!”

SECTION 3.

Mary Burke had been suckled upon despair, and the poison of it was deep in her blood. Hal began to realise that it would be as hard to give her a hope as to rouse the workers whom she despised. She was brave enough, no doubt, but how could he persuade her to be brave for men who had no courage for themselves?

“Mary,” he said, “in your heart you don't really hate these people. You know how they suffer, you pity them for it. You give their children your last cent when they need it—”

“Ah, lad!” she cried, and he saw tears suddenly spring into her eyes. “'Tis because I love them so that I hate them! Sometimes 'tis the bosses I would murder, sometimes 'tis the men. What is it ye're wantin' me to do?”

And then, even before he could answer, she began to run over the list of her acquaintances in the camp. Yes, there was one man Hal ought to talk to; he would be too old to join them, but his advice would be invaluable, and they could be sure he would never betray them. That was old John Edstrom, a Swede from Minnesota, who had worked in this district from the time the mines had first started up. He had been active in the great strike eight years ago, and had been black-listed, his four sons with him. The sons were scattered now to the four parts of the world, but the father had stayed nearby, working as a ranch-hand and railroad labourer, until a couple of years ago, during a rush season, he had got a chance to come back into the mines.

He was old, old, declared Mary—must be sixty. And when Hal remarked that that did not sound so frightfully aged, she answered that one seldom heard of a man being able to work in a coal-mine at that age; in fact, there were not many who managed to live to that age. Edstrom's wife was dying now, and he was having a hard time.

“'Twould not be fair to let such an old gentleman lose his job,” said Mary. “But at least he could give ye good advice.”

So that evening the two of them went to call on John Edstrom, in a tiny unpainted cabin in “shanty-town,” with a bare earth floor, and a half partition of rough boards to hide his dying wife from his callers. The woman's trouble was cancer, and this made calling a trying matter, for there was a fearful odour in the place. For some time it was impossible for Hal to force himself to think about anything else; but finally he overcame this weakness, telling himself that this was a war, and that a man must be ready for the hospital as well as for the parade-ground.

He looked about, and saw that the cracks of Edstrom's cabin were stopped with rags, and the broken windowpanes mended with brown paper. The old man had evidently made an effort to keep the place neat, and Hal noticed a row of books on a shelf. Because it was cold in these mountain regions at night, even in September, the old man had a fire in the little cast-iron stove, and sat huddled by it. There were only a few hairs left on his head, and his scrubby beard was as white as anything could be in a coal-camp. The first impression of his face was of its pallor, and then of the benevolence in the faded dark eyes; also his voice was gentle, like a caress. He rose to greet his visitors, and put out to Hal a trembling hand, which resembled the paw of some animal, horny and misshapen. He made a move to draw up a bench, and apologised for his unskillful house-keeping. It occurred to Hal that a man might be able to work in a coal-mine at sixty, and not be able to work in it at sixty-one.

Hal had requested Mary to say nothing about his purpose, until after he had a chance to judge for himself. So now the girl inquired about Mrs. Edstrom. There was no news, the man answered; she was lying in a stupor, as usual. Dr. Barrett had come again, but all he could do was to give her morphine. No one could do any more, the doctor declared.

“Sure, he'd not know it if they could!” sniffed Mary.

“He's not such a bad one, when he's sober,” said Edstrom, patiently.

“And how often is that?” sniffed Mary again. She added, by way of explanation to Hal, “He's a cousin of the super.”

Things were better here than in some places, said Edstrom. At Harvey's Run, where he had worked, a man had got his eye hurt, and had lost it through the doctor's instrument slipping; broken arms and legs had been set wrong, and either the men had to go through life as cripples, or go elsewhere and have the bones re-broken and reset, It was like everything else—the doctor was a part of the company machine, and if you had too much to say about him, it was down the canyon with you. You not only had a dollar a month taken out of your pay, but if you were injured, and he came to attend you, he would charge whatever extra he pleased.

“And you have to pay?” asked Hal.

“They take it off your account,” said the old man.

“Sometimes they take it when he's done nothin' at all,” added Mary. “They charged Mrs. Zamboni twenty-five dollars for her last baby—and Dr. Barrett never set foot across her door till three hours after the baby was in my arms!”

SECTION 4.

The talk went on. Wishing to draw the old man out, Hal spoke of various troubles of the miners, and at last he suggested that the remedy might be found in a union. Edstrom's dark eyes studied him, and then turned to Mary. “Joe's all right,” said the girl, quickly. “You can trust him.”

Edstrom made no direct answer to this, but remarked that he had once been in a strike. He was a marked man, now, and could only stay in the camp so long as he attended strictly to his own affairs. The part he had played in the big strike had never been forgotten; the bosses had let him work again, partly because they had needed him at a rush time, and partly because the pit-boss happened to be a personal friend.

“Tell him about the big strike,” said Mary. “He's new in this district.”

The old man had apparently accepted Mary's word for Hal's good faith, for he began to narrate those terrible events which were a whispered tradition of the camps. There had been a mighty effort of ten thousand slaves for freedom; and it had been crushed with utter ruthlessness. Ever since these mines had been started, the operators had controlled the local powers of government, and now, in the emergency, they had brought in the state militia as well, and used it frankly to drive the strikers back to work. They had seized the leaders and active men, and thrown them into jail without trial or charges; when the jails would hold no more, they kept some two hundred in an open stockade, called a “bull-pen,” and finally they loaded them into freight-cars, took them at night out of the state, and dumped them off in the midst of the desert without food or water.

John Edstrom had been one of these men. He told how one of his sons had been beaten and severely injured in jail, and how another had been kept for weeks in a damp cellar, so that he had come out crippled with rheumatism for life. The officers of the state militia had done these things; and when some of the local authorities were moved to protest, the militia had arrested them—even the judges of the civil courts had been forbidden to sit, under threat of imprisonment. “To hell with the constitution!” had been the word of the general in command; his subordinate had made famous the saying, “No habeas corpus; we'll give them post-mortems!”

Tom Olson had impressed Hal with his self-control, but this old man made an even deeper impression upon him. As he listened, he became humble, touched with awe. Incredible as it might seem, when John Edstrom talked about his cruel experiences, it was without bitterness in his voice, and apparently without any in his heart. Here, in the midst of want and desolation, with his family broken and scattered, and the wolf of starvation at his door, he could look back upon the past without hatred of those who had ruined him. Nor was this because he was old and feeble, and had lost the spirit of revolt; it was because he had studied economics, and convinced himself that it was an evil system which blinded men's eyes and poisoned their souls. A better day was coming, he said, when this evil system would be changed, and it would be possible for men to be merciful to one another.

At this point in the conversation, Mary Burke gave voice once more to her corroding despair. How could things ever be changed? The bosses were mean-hearted, and the men were cowards and traitors. That left nobody but God to do the changing—and God had left things as they were for such a long time!

Hal was interested to hear how Edstrom dealt with this attitude. “Mary,” he said, “did you ever read about ants in Africa?”

“No,” said she.

“They travel in long columns, millions and millions of them. And when they come to a ditch, the front ones fall in, and more and more of them on top, till they fill up the ditch, and the rest cross over. We are ants, Mary.”

“No matter how many go in,” cried the girl, “none will ever get across. There's no bottom to the ditch!”

He answered: “That's more than any ant can know. Mary. All they know is to go in. They cling to each other's bodies, even in death; they make a bridge, and the rest go over.”

“I'll step one side!” she declared, fiercely. “I'll not throw meself away.”

“You may step one side,” answered the other—“but you'll step back into line again. I know you better than you know yourself, Mary.”

There was silence in the little cabin. The winds of an early fall shrilled outside, and life suddenly seemed to Hal a stern and merciless thing. He had thought in his youthful fervour it would be thrilling to be a revolutionist; but to be an ant, one of millions and millions, to perish in a bottomless ditch—that was something a man could hardly bring himself to face! He looked at the bowed figure of this white haired toiler, vague in the feeble lamplight, and found himself thinking of Rembrandt's painting, the Visit of Emmaus: the ill-lighted room in the dirty tavern, and the two ragged men, struck dumb by the glow of light about the forehead of their table-companion. It was not fantastic to imagine a glow of light about the forehead of this soft-voiced old man!

“I never had any hope it would come in my time,” the old man was saying gently. “I did use to hope my boys might see it—but now I'm not sure even of that. But in all my life I never doubted that some day the working-people will cross over to the promised land. They'll no longer be slaves, and what they make won't be wasted by idlers. And take it from one who knows, Mary—for a workingman or woman not to have that faith, is to have lost the reason for living.”

Hal decided that it would be safe to trust this man, and told him of his check-weighman plan. “We only want your advice,” he explained, remembering Mary's warning. “Your sick wife—”

But the old man answered, sadly, “She's almost gone, and I'll soon be following. What little strength I have left might as well be used for the cause.”

SECTION 5.

This business of conspiracy was grimly real to men whose living came out of coal; but Hal, even at the most serious moments, continued to find in it the thrill of romance. He had read stories of revolutionists, and of the police who hunted them. That such excitements were to be had in Russia, he knew; but if any one had told him they could be had in his own free America, within a few hours' journey of his home city and his college-town, he could not have credited the statement.

The evening after his visit to Edstrom, Hal was stopped on the street by his boss. Encountering him suddenly, Hal started, like a pick-pocket who runs into a policeman.

“Hello, kid,” said the pit-boss.

“Hello, Mr. Stone,” was the reply.

“I want to talk to you,” said the boss.

“All right, sir.” And then, under his breath, “He's got me!”

“Come up to my house,” said Stone; and Hal followed, feeling as if hand-cuffs were already on his wrists.

“Say,” said the man, as they walked, “I thought you were going to tell me if you'd heard any talk.”

“I haven't heard any, sir.”

“Well,” continued Stone, “you want to get busy; there's sure to be kickers in every coal-camp.” And deep within, Hal drew a sigh of relief. It was a false alarm!

They came to the boss's house, and he took a chair on the piazza and motioned Hal to take another. They sat in semi-darkness, and Stone dropped his voice as he began. “What I want to talk to you about now is something else—this election.”

“Election, sir?”

“Didn't you know there was one? The Congressman in this district died, and there's a special election three weeks from next Tuesday.”

“I see, sir.” And Hal chuckled inwardly. He would get the information which Tom Olson had recommended to him!

“You ain't heard any talk about it?” inquired the pit-boss.

“Nothing at all, sir. I never pay much attention to politics—it ain't in my line.”

“Well, that's the way I like to hear a miner talk!” said the pit-boss, with heartiness. “If they all had sense enough to leave politics to the politicians, they'd be a sight better off. What they need is to tend to their own jobs.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Hal, meekly—“like I had to tend to them mules, if I didn't want to get the colic.”

The boss smiled appreciatively. “You've got more sense than most of 'em. If you'll stand by me, there'll be a chance for you to move up in the world.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stone,” said Hal. “Give me a chance.”

“Well now, here's this election. Every year they send us a bunch of campaign money to handle. A bit of it might come your way.”

“I could use it, I reckon,” said Hal, brightening visibly. “What is it you want?”

There was a pause, while Stone puffed on his pipe. He went on, in a business-like manner. “What I want is somebody to feel things out a bit, and let me know the situation. I thought it better not to use the men that generally work for me, but somebody that wouldn't be suspected. Down in Sheridan and Pedro they say the Democrats are making a big stir, and the company's worried. I suppose you know the 'G. F. C.' is Republican.”

“I've heard so.”

“You might think a congressman don't have much to do with us, way off in Washington; but it has a bad effect to have him campaigning, telling the men the company's abusing them. So I'd like you just to kind o' circulate a bit, and start the men on politics, and see if any of them have been listening to this MacDougall talk. (MacDougall's this here Democrat, you know.) And I want to find out whether they've been sending in literature to this camp, or have any agents here. You see, they claim the right to come in and make speeches, and all that sort of thing. North Valley's an incorporated town, so they've got the law on their side, in a way, and if we shut 'em out, they make a howl in the papers, and it looks bad. So we have to get ahead of them in quiet ways. Fortunately there ain't any hall in the camp for them to meet in, and we've made a local ordinance against meetings on the street. If they try to bring in circulars, something has to happen to them before they get distributed. See?”

“I see,” said Hal; he thought of Tom Olson's propaganda literature!

“We'll pass the word out,—it's the Republican the company wants elected; and you be on the lookout and see how they take it in the camp.”

“That sounds easy enough,” said Hal. “But tell me, Mr. Stone, why do you bother? Do so many of these wops have votes?”

“It ain't the wops so much. We get them naturalised on purpose—they vote our way for a glass of beer. But the English-speaking men, or the foreigners that's been here too long, and got too big for their breeches—they're the ones we got to watch. If they get to talking politics, they don't stop there; the first thing you know, they're listening to union agitators, and wanting to run the camp.”

“Oh yes, I see!” said Hal, and wondered if his voice sounded right.

But the pit-boss was concerned with his own troubles. “As I told Si Adams the other day, what I'm looking for is fellows that talk some new lingo—one that nobody will ever understand! But I suppose that would be too easy. There's no way to keep them from learning some English!”

Hal decided to make use of this opportunity to perfect his education. “Surely, Mr. Stone,” he remarked, “you don't have to count any votes if you don't want to!”

“Well, I'll tell you,” replied Stone; “it's a question of the easiest way to manage things. When I was superintendent over to Happy Gulch, we didn't waste no time on politics. The company was Democratic at that time, and when election night come, we wrote down four hundred votes for the Democratic candidates. But the first thing we knew, a bunch of fellers was taken into town and got to swear they'd voted the Republican ticket in our camp. The Republican papers were full of it, and some fool judge ordered a recount, and we had to get busy over night and mark up a new lot of ballots. It gave us a lot of bother!”

The pit-boss laughed, and Hal joined him discreetly.

“So you see, you have to learn to manage. If there's votes for the wrong candidate in your camp, the fact gets out, and if the returns is too one-sided, there's a lot of grumbling. There's plenty of bosses that don't care, but I learned my lesson that time, and I got my own method—that is not to let any opposition start. See?”

“Yes, I see.”

“Maybe a mine-boss has got no right to meddle in politics—but there's one thing he's got the say about, and that is who works in his mine. It's the easiest thing to weed out—weed out—” Hal never forgot the motion of beefy hands with which Alec Stone illustrated these words. As he went on, the tones of his voice did not seem so good-natured as usual. “The fellows that don't want to vote my way can go somewhere else to do their voting. That's all I got to say on politics!”

There was a brief pause, while Stone puffed on his pipe. Then it may have occurred to him that it was not necessary to go into so much detail in breaking in a political recruit. When he resumed, it was in a good-natured tone of dismissal. “That's what you do, kid. To-morrow you get a sprained wrist, so you can't work for a few days, and that'll give you a chance to bum round and hear what the men are saying. Meantime, I'll see you get your wages.”

“That sounds all right,” said Hal; but showing only a small part of his satisfaction!

The pit-boss rose from his chair and knocked the ashes from his pipe. “Mind you—I want the goods. I've got other fellows working, and I'm comparing 'em. For all you know, I may have somebody watching you.”

“Yes,” said Hal, and grinned cheerfully. “I'll not fail to bear that in mind.”

SECTION 6.

The first thing Hal did was to seek out Tom Olson and narrate this experience. The two of them had a merry time over it. “I'm the favourite of a boss now!” laughed Hal.

But the organiser became suddenly serious. “Be careful what you do for that fellow.”

“Why?”

“He might use it on you later on. One of the things they try to do if you make any trouble for them, is to prove that you took money from them, or tried to.”

“But he won't have any proofs.”

“That's my point—don't give him any. If Stone says you've been playing the political game for him, then some fellow might remember that you did ask him about politics. So don't have any marked money on you.”

Hal laughed. “Money doesn't stay on me very long these days. But what shall I say if he asks me for a report?”

“You'd better put your job right through, Joe—so that he won't have time to ask for any report.”

“All right,” was the reply. “But just the same, I'm going to get all the fun there is, being the favourite of a boss!”

And so, early the next morning when Hal went to his work he proceeded to “sprain his wrist.” He walked about in pain, to the great concern of Old Mike; and when finally he decided that he would have to lay off, Mike followed him half way to the shaft, giving him advice about hot and cold cloths. Leaving the old Slovak to struggle along as best he could alone, Hal went out to bask in the wonderful sunshine of the upper world, and the still more wonderful sunshine of a boss's favour.

First he went to his room at Reminitsky's, and tied a strip of old shirt about his wrist, and a clean handkerchief on top of that; by this symbol he was entitled to the freedom of the camp and the sympathy of all men, and so he sallied forth.

Strolling towards the tipple of Number One, he encountered a wiry, quick-moving little man, with restless black eyes and a lean, intelligent face. He wore a pair of common miner's “jumpers,” but even so, he was not to be taken for a workingman. Everything about him spoke of authority.

“Morning, Mr. Cartwright,” said Hal.

“Good morning,” replied the superintendent; then, with a glance at Hal's bandage, “You hurt?”

“Yes, sir. Just a bit of sprain, but I thought I'd better lay off.”

“Been to the doctor?”

“No, sir. I don't think it's that bad.”

“You'd better go. You never know how bad a sprain is.”

“Right, sir,” said Hal. Then, as the superintendent was passing, “Do you think, Mr. Cartwright, that MacDougall stands any chance of being elected?”

“I don't know,” replied the other, surprised. “I hope not. You aren't going to vote for him, are you?”

“Oh, no. I'm a Republican—born that way. But I wondered if you'd heard any MacDougall talk.”

“Well, I'm hardly the one that would hear it. You take an interest in politics?”

“Yes, sir—in a way. In fact, that's how I came to get this wrist.”

“How's that? In a fight?”

“No, sir; but you see, Mr. Stone wanted me to feel out sentiment in the camp, and he told me I'd better sprain my wrist and lay off.”

The “super,” after staring at Hal, could not keep from laughing. Then he looked about him. “You want to be careful, talking about such things.”

“I thought I could surely trust the superintendent,” said Hal, drily.

The other measured him with his keen eyes; and Hal, who was getting the spirit of political democracy, took the liberty of returning the gaze. “You're a wide-awake young fellow,” said Cartwright, at last. “Learn the ropes here, and make yourself useful, and I'll see you're not passed over.”

“All right, sir—thank you.”

“Maybe you'll be made an election-clerk this time. That's worth three dollars a day, you know.”

“Very good, sir.” And Hal put on his smile again. “They tell me you're the mayor of North Valley.”

“I am.”

“And the justice of the peace is a clerk in your store. Well, Mr. Cartwright, if you need a president of the board of health or a dog catcher, I'm your man—as soon, that is, as my wrist gets well.”

And so Hal went on his way. Such “joshing” on the part of a “buddy” was of course absurdly presumptuous; the superintendent stood looking after him with a puzzled frown upon his face.

SECTION 7.

Hal did not look back, but turned into the company-store. “North Valley Trading Company” read the sign over the door; within was a Serbian woman pointing out what she wanted to buy, and two little Lithuanian girls watching the weighing of a pound of sugar. Hal strolled up to the person who was doing the weighing, a middle-aged man with a yellow moustache stained with tobacco-juice. “Morning, Judge.”

“Huh!” was the reply from Silas Adams, justice of the peace in the town of North Valley.

“Judge,” said Hal, “what do you think about the election?”

“I don't think about it,” said the other. “Busy weighin' sugar.”

“Anybody round here going to vote for MacDougall?”

“They better not tell me if they are!”

“What?” smiled Hal. “In this free American republic?”

“In this part of the free American republic a man is free to dig coal, but not to vote for a skunk like MacDougall.” Then, having tied up the sugar, the “J. P.” whittled off a fresh chew from his plug, and turned to Hal. “What'll you have?”

Hal purchased half a pound of dried peaches, so that he might have an excuse to loiter, and be able to keep time with the jaws of the Judge. While the order was being filled, he seated himself upon the counter. “You know,” said he, “I used to work in a grocery.”

“That so? Where at?”

“Peterson & Co., in American City.” Hal had told this so often that he had begun to believe it.

“Pay pretty good up there?”

“Yes, pretty fair.” Then, realising that he had no idea what would constitute good pay in a grocery, Hal added, quickly, “Got a bad wrist here!”

“That so?” said the other.

He did not show much sociability; but Hal persisted, refusing to believe that any one in a country store would miss an opening to discuss politics, even with a miner's helper. “Tell me,” said he, “just what is the matter with MacDougall?”

“The matter with him,” said the Judge, “is that the company's against him.” He looked hard at the young miner. “You meddlin' in politics?” he growled. But the young miner's gay brown eyes showed only appreciation of the earlier response; so the “J. P.” was tempted into specifying the would-be congressman's vices. Thus conversation started; and pretty soon the others in the store joined in—“Bob” Johnson, bookkeeper and post-master, and “Jake” Predovich, the Galician Jew who was a member of the local school-board, and knew the words for staple groceries in fifteen languages.

Hal listened to an exposition of the crimes of the political opposition in Pedro County. Their candidate, MacDougall, had come to the state as a “tin-horn gambler,” yet now he was going around making speeches in churches, and talking about the moral sentiment of the community. “And him with a district chairman keeping three families in Pedro!” declared Si Adams.

“Well,” ventured Hal, “if what I hear is true, the Republican chairman isn't a plaster saint. They say he was drunk at the convention—”

“Maybe so,” said the “J. P.” “But we ain't playin' for the prohibition vote; and we ain't playin' for the labour vote—tryin' to stir up the riff-raff in these coal-camps, promisin' 'em high wages an' short hours. Don't he know he can't get it for 'em? But he figgers he'll go off to Washington and leave us here to deal with the mess he's stirred up!”

“Don't you fret,” put in Bob Johnson—“he ain't goin' to no Washin'ton.”

The other two agreed, and Hal ventured again, “He says you stuff the ballot-boxes.”

“What do you suppose his crowd is doin' in the cities? We got to meet 'em some way, ain't we?”

“Oh, I see,” said Hal, naïvely. “You stuff them worse!”

“Sometimes we stuff the boxes, and sometimes we stuff the voters.” There was an appreciative titter from the others, and the “J. P.” was moved to reminiscence. “Two years ago I was election clerk, over to Sheridan, and we found we'd let 'em get ahead of us—they had carried the whole state. 'By God,' said Alf. Raymond, 'we'll show 'em a trick from the coal-counties! And there won't be no recount business either!' So we held back our returns till the rest had come in, and when we seen how many votes we needed, we wrote 'em down. And that settled it.”

“That seems a simple method,” remarked Hal. “They'll have to get up early to beat Alf.”

“You bet you!” said Si, with the complacency of one of the gang. “They call this county the 'Empire of Raymond.'”

“It must be a cinch,” said Hal—“being the sheriff, and having the naming of so many deputies as they need in these coal-camps!”

“Yes,” agreed the other. “And there's his wholesale liquor business, too. If you want a license in Pedro county, you not only vote for Alf, but you pay your bills on time!”

“Must be a fortune in that!” remarked Hal; and the Judge, the Post-master and the School-commissioner appeared like children listening to a story of a feast. “You bet you!”

“I suppose it takes money to run politics in this county,” Hal added.

“Well, Alf don't put none of it up, you can bet! That's the company's job.”

This from the Judge; and the School-commissioner added, “De coin in dese camps is beer.”

“Oh, I see!” laughed Hal. “The companies buy Alf's beer, and use it to get him votes!”

“Sure thing!” said the Post-master.

At this moment he happened to reach into his pocket for a cigar, and Hal observed a silver shield on the breast of his waistcoat. “That a deputy's badge?” he inquired, and then turned to examine the School-commissioner's costume. “Where's yours?”

“I git mine ven election comes,” said Jake, with a grin.

“And yours, Judge?”

“I'm a justice of the peace, young feller,” said Silas, with dignity.

Leaning round, and observing a bulge on the right hip of the School-commissioner, Hal put out his hand towards it. Instinctively the other moved his hand to the spot.

Hal turned to the Post-master. “Yours?” he asked.

“Mine's under the counter,” grinned Bob.

“And yours, Judge?”

“Mine's in the desk,” said the Judge.

Hal drew a breath. “Gee!” said he. “It's like a steel trap!” He managed to keep the laugh on his face, but within he was conscious of other feelings than those of amusement. He was losing that “first fine careless rapture” with which he had set out to run with the hare and the hounds in North Valley!

SECTION 8.

Two days after this beginning of Hal's political career, it was arranged that the workers who were to make a demand for a check-weighman should meet in the home of Mrs. David. When Mike Sikoria came up from the pit that day, Hal took him aside and told him of the gathering. A look of delight came upon the old Slovak's face as he listened; he grabbed his buddy by the shoulders, crying, “You mean it?”

“Sure meant it,” said Hal. “You want to be on the committee to go and see the boss?”

“Pluha biedna!” cried Mike—which is something dreadful in his own language. “By Judas, I pack up my old box again!”

Hal felt a guilty pang. Should he let this old man into the thing? “You think you'll have to move out of camp?” he asked.

“Move out of state this time! Move back to old country, maybe!” And Hal realised that he could not stop him now, even if he wanted to. The old fellow was so much excited that he hardly ate any supper, and his buddy was afraid to leave him alone, for fear he might blurt out the news.

It had been agreed that those who attended the meeting should come one by one, and by different routes. Hal was one of the first to arrive, and he saw that the shades of the house had been drawn, and the lamps turned low. He entered by the back door, where “Big Jack” David stood on guard. “Big Jack,” who had been a member of the South Wales Federation at home, made sure of Hal's identity, and then passed him in without a word.

Inside was Mike—the first on hand. Mrs. David, a little black-eyed woman with a never-ceasing tongue, was bustling about, putting things in order; she was so nervous that she could not sit still. This couple had come from their birth-place only a year or so ago, and had brought all their wedding presents to their new home—pictures and bric-a-brac and linen. It was the prettiest home Hal had so far been in, and Mrs. David was risking it deliberately, because of her indignation that her husband had had to foreswear his union in order to get work in America.

The young Italian, Rovetta, came, then old John Edstrom. There being not chairs enough in the house, Mrs. David had set some boxes against the wall, covering them with cloth; and Hal noticed that each person took one of these boxes, leaving the chairs for the later comers. Each one as he came in would nod to the others, and then silence would fall again.

When Mary Burke entered, Hal divined from her aspect and manner that she had sunk back into her old mood of pessimism. He felt a momentary resentment. He was so thrilled with this adventure; he wanted everybody else to be thrilled—especially Mary! Like every one who has not suffered much, he was repelled by a condition of perpetual suffering in another. Of course Mary had good reasons for her black moods—but she herself considered it necessary to apologise for what she called her “complainin'”! She knew that he wanted her to help encourage the others; but here she was, putting herself in a corner and watching this wonderful proceeding, as if she had said: “I'm an ant, and I stay in line—but I'll not pretend I have any hope in it!”

Rosa and Jerry had insisted on coming, in spite of Hal's offer to spare them. After them came the Bulgarian, Wresmak; then the Polacks, Klowoski and Zamierowski. Hal found these difficult names to remember, but the Polacks were not at all sensitive about this; they would grin good-naturedly while he practised, nor would they mind if he gave it up and called them Tony and Pete. They were humble men, accustomed all their lives to being driven about. Hal looked from one to another of their bowed forms and toil-worn faces, appearing more than ever sombre and mournful in the dim light; he wondered if the cruel persecution which had driven them to protest would suffice to hold them in line.

Once a newcomer, having misunderstood the orders, came to the front door and knocked; and Hal noted that every one started, and some rose to their feet in alarm. Again he recognised the atmosphere of novels of Russian revolutionary life. He had to remind himself that these men and women, gathered here like criminals, were merely planning to ask for a right guaranteed them by the law!

The last to come was an Austrian miner named Huszar, with whom Olson had got into touch. Then, it being time to begin, everybody looked uneasily at everybody else. Few of them had conspired before, and they did not know quite how to set about it. Olson, the one who would naturally have been their leader, had deliberately stayed away. They must run this check-weighman affair for themselves!

“Somebody talk,” said Mrs. David at last; and then, as the silence continued, she turned to Hal. “You're going to be the check-weighman. You talk.”

“I'm the youngest man here,” said Hal, with a smile. “Some older fellow talk.”

But nobody else smiled. “Go on!” exclaimed old Mike; and so at last Hal stood up. It was something he was to experience many times in the future; because he was an American, and educated, he was forced into a position of leadership.

“As I understand it, you people want a check-weighman. Now, they tell me the pay for a check-weighman should be three dollars a day, but we've got only seven miners among us, and that's not enough. I will offer to take the job for twenty-five cents a day from each man, which will make a dollar-seventy-five, less than what I'm getting now as a buddy. If we get thirty men to come in, then I'll take ten cents a day from each, and make the full three dollars. Does that seem fair?”

“Sure!” said Mike; and the others added their assent by word or nod.

“All right. Now, there's nobody that works in this mine but knows the men don't get their weight. It would cost the company several hundred dollars a day to give us our weight, and nobody should be so foolish as to imagine they'll do it without a struggle. We've got to make up our minds to stand together.”

“Sure, stand together!” cried Mike.

“No get check-weighman!” exclaimed Jerry, pessimistically.

“Not unless we try, Jerry,” said Hal.

And Mike thumped his knee. “Sure try! And get him too!”

“Right!” cried “Big Jack.” But his little wife was not satisfied with the response of the others. She gave Hal his first lesson in the drilling of these polyglot masses.

“Talk to them. Make them understand you!” And she pointed them out one by one with her finger: “You! You! Wresmak, here, and you, Klowoski, and you, Zam—you other Polish fellow. Want check-weighman. Want to get all weight. Get all our money. Understand?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Get committee, go see super! Want check-weighman. Understand? Got to have check-weighman! No back down, no scare.”

“No—no scare!” Klowoski, who understood some English, explained rapidly to Zamierowski; and Zamierowski, whose head was still plastered where Jeff Cotton's revolver had hit it, nodded eagerly in assent. In spite of his bruises, he would stand by the others, and face the boss.

This suggested another question. “Who's going to do the talking to the boss?”

“You do that,” said Mrs. David, to Hal.

“But I'm the one that's to be paid. It's not for me to talk.”

“No one else can do it right,” declared the woman.

“Sure—got to be American feller!” said Mike.

But Hal insisted. If he did the talking, it would look as if the check-weighman had been the source of the movement, and was engaged in making a good paying job for himself.

There was discussion back and forth, until finally John Edstrom spoke up. “Put me on the committee.”

“You?” said Hal. “But you'll be thrown out! And what will your wife do?”

“I think my wife is going to die to-night,” said Edstrom, simply.

He sat with his lips set tightly, looking straight before him. After a pause he went on: “If it isn't to-night, it will be to-morrow, the doctor says; and after that, nothing will matter. I shall have to go down to Pedro to bury her, and if I have to stay, it will make little difference to me, so I might as well do what I can for the rest of you. I've been a miner all my life, and Mr. Cartwright knows it; that might have some weight with him. Let Joe Smith and Sikoria and myself be the ones to go and see him, and the rest of you wait, and don't give up your jobs unless you have to.”

SECTION 9.

Having settled the matter of the committee, Hal told the assembly how Alec Stone had asked him to spy upon the men. He thought they should know about it; the bosses might try to use it against him, as Olson had warned. “They may tell you I'm a traitor,” he said. “You must trust me.”

“We trust you!” exclaimed Mike, with fervour; and the others nodded their agreement.

“All right,” Hal answered. “You can rest sure of this one thing—if I get onto that tipple, you're going to get your weights!”

“Hear, hear!” cried “Big Jack,” in English fashion. And a murmur ran about the room. They did not dare make much noise, but they made clear that that was what they wanted.

Hal sat down, and began to unroll the bandage from his wrist. “I guess I'm through with this,” he said, and explained how he had come to wear it.

“What?” cried Old Mike. “You fool me like that?” And he caught the wrist, and when he had made sure there was no sign of swelling upon it, he shook it so that he almost sprained it really, laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks. “You old son-of-a-gun!” he exclaimed. Meantime Klowoski was telling the story to Zamierowski, and Jerry Minetti was explaining it to Wresmak, in the sort of pidgin-English which does duty in the camps. Hal had never seen such real laughter since coming to North Valley.

But conspirators cannot lend themselves long to merriment. They came back to business again. It was agreed that the hour for the committee's visit to the superintendent should be quitting-time on the morrow. And then John Edstrom spoke, suggesting that they should agree upon their course of action in case they were offered violence.

“You think there's much chance of that?” said some one.

“Sure there be!” cried Mike Sikoria. “One time in Cedar Mountain we go see boss, say air-course blocked. What you think he do them fellers? He hit them one lick in nose, he kick them three times in behind, he run them out!”

“Well,” said Hal, “if there's going to be anything like that, we must be ready.”

“What you do?” demanded Jerry.

It was time for Hal's leadership. “If he hits me one lick in the nose,” he declared, “I'll hit him one lick in the nose, that's all.”

There was a bit of applause at this. That was the way to talk! Hal tasted the joys of his leadership. But then his fine self-confidence met with a sudden check—a “lick in the nose” of his pride, so to speak. There came a woman's voice from the corner, low and grim: “Yes! And get ye'self killed for all your trouble!”

He looked towards Mary Burke, and saw her vivid face, flushed and frowning. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Would you have us turn and run away?”

“I would that!” said she. “Rather than have ye killed, I would! What'll ye do if he pulls his gun on ye?”

“Would he pull his gun on a committee?”

Old Mike broke in again. “One time in Barela—ain't I told you how I lose my cars? I tell weigh-boss somebody steal my cars, and he pull gun on me, and he say, 'Get the hell off that tipple, you old billy-goat, I shoot you full of holes!'”

Among his class-mates at college, Hal had been wont to argue that the proper way to handle a burglar was to call out to him, saying, “Go ahead, old chap, and help yourself; there's nothing here I'm willing to get shot for.” What was the value of anything a burglar could steal, in comparison with a man's own life? And surely, one would have thought, this was a good time to apply the plausible theory. But for some reason Hal failed even to remember it. He was going ahead, precisely as if a ton of coal per day was the one thing of consequence in life!

“What shall we do?” he asked. “We don't want to back out.”

But even while he asked the question, Hal was realising that Mary was right. His was the attitude of the leisure-class person, used to having his own way; but Mary, though she had a temper too, was pointing the lesson of self-control. It was the second time to-night that she had injured his pride. But now he forgave her in his admiration; he had always known that Mary had a mind and could help him! His admiration was increased by what John Edstrom was saying—they must do nothing that would injure the cause of the “big union,” and so they must resolve to offer no physical resistance, no matter what might be done to them.

There was vehement argument on the other side. “We fight! We fight!” declared Old Mike, and cried out suddenly, as if in anticipation of the pain in his injured nose. “You say me stand that?”

“If you fight back,” said Edstrom, “we'll all get the worst of it. The company will say we started the trouble, and put us in the wrong. We've got to make up our mind to rely on moral force.”

So, after more discussion, it was agreed; every man would keep his temper—that is, if he could! So they shook hands all round, pledging themselves to stand firm. But, when the meeting was declared adjourned, and they stole out one by one into the night, they were a very sober and anxious lot of conspirators.

SECTION 10.

Hal slept but little that night. Amid the sounds of the snoring of eight of Reminitsky's other boarders, he lay going over in his mind various things which might happen on the morrow. Some of them were far from pleasant things; he tried to picture himself with a broken nose, or with tar and feathers on him. He recalled his theory as to the handling of burglars. The “G. F. C.” was a burglar of gigantic and terrible proportions; surely this was a time to call out, “Help yourself!” But instead of doing it, Hal thought about Edstrom's ants, and wondered at the power which made them stay in line.

When morning came, he went up into the mountains, where a man may wander and renew his moral force. When the sun had descended behind the mountain-tops, he descended also, and met Edstrom and Sikoria in front of the company office.

They nodded a greeting, and Edstrom told Hal that his wife had died during the day. There being no undertaker in North Valley, he had arranged for a woman friend to take the body down to Pedro, so that he might be free for the interview with Cartwright. Hal put his hand on the old man's shoulder, but attempted no word of condolence; he saw that Edstrom had faced the trouble and was ready for duty.

“Come ahead,” said the old man, and the three went into the office. While a clerk took their message to the inner office, they stood for a couple of minutes, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, and turning their caps in their hands in the familiar manner of the lowly.

At last Mr. Cartwright appeared in the doorway, his small sparely-built figure eloquent of sharp authority. “Well, what's this?” he inquired.

“If you please,” said Edstrom, “we'd like to speak to you. We've decided, sir, that we want to have a check-weighman.”

“What?” The word came like the snap of a whip.

“We'd like to have a check-weighman, sir.”

There was a moment's silence. “Come in here.” They filed into the inner office, and he shut the door.

“Now. What's this?”

Edstrom repeated his words again.

“What put that notion into your heads?”

“Nothing, sir; only we thought we'd be better satisfied.”

“You think you're not getting your weight?”

“Well, sir, you see—some of the men—we think it would be better if we had the check-weighman. We're willing to pay for him.”

“Who's this check-weighman to be?”

“Joe Smith, here.”

Hal braced himself to meet the other's stare. “Oh! So it's you!” Then, after a moment, “So that's why you were feeling so gay!”

Hal was not feeling in the least gay at the moment; but he forebore to say so. There was a silence.

“Now, why do you fellows want to throw away your money?” The superintendent started to argue with them, showing the absurdity of the notion that they could gain anything by such a course. The mine had been running for years on its present system, and there had never been any complaint. The idea that a company as big and as responsible as the “G. F. C.” would stoop to cheat its workers out of a few tons of coal! And so on, for several minutes.

“Mr. Cartwright,” said Edstrom, when the other had finished, “you know I've worked all my life in mines, and most of it in this district. I am telling you something I know when I say there is general dissatisfaction throughout these camps because the men feel they are not getting their weight. You say there has been no public complaint; you understand the reason for this—”

“What is the reason?”

“Well,” said Edstrom, gently, “maybe you don't know the reason—but anyway we've decided that we want a check-weighman.”

It was evident that the superintendent had been taken by surprise, and was uncertain how to meet the issue. “You can imagine,” he said, at last, “the company doesn't relish hearing that its men believe it's cheating them—”

“We don't say the company knows anything about it, Mr. Cartwright. It's possible that some people may be taking advantage of us, without either the company or yourself having anything to do with it. It's for your protection as well as ours that a check-weighman is needed.”

“Thank you,” said the other, drily. His tone revealed that he was holding himself in by an effort. “Very well,” he added, at last. “That's enough about the matter, if your minds are made up. I'll give you my decision later.”

This was a dismissal, and Mike Sikoria turned humbly, and started to the door. But Edstrom was one of the ants that did not readily “step one side”; and Mike took a glance at him, and then stepped back into line in a hurry, as if hoping his delinquency had not been noted.

“If you please, Mr. Cartwright,” said Edstrom, “we'd like your decision, so as to have the check-weighman start in the morning.”

“What? You're in such a hurry?”

“There's no reason for delay, sir. We've selected our man, and we're ready to pay him.”

“Who are the men who are ready to pay him? Just you two”

“I am not at liberty to name the other men, sir.”

“Oh! So it's a secret movement!”