The Coal War (35 page)

She laid her hand on the younger one's arm, and Hal, watching them from the corner where he sat, saw the girl gazing in front of her with a rapt look on her face. “I'll try, Mother, I'll try,” she said; and Hal realized what this little scene meant to her—it was like Samuel anointing King David, Elisha laying his mantle upon the shoulders of the new prophet.

“Keep your heart clean,” said the old woman; “like John Harmon, here. You see, he can go about, not caring what lies they tell about him, what plots they frame up on him—because he knows he's never done wrong to man or woman in his life.”

“Now, now, mother!” said Harmon, breaking into the conversation. “You're putting it on thick!”

But Mother Mary would not be diverted. “You can see it in his face,” she said. “He looks it, doesn't he?”

And Harmon glanced at Hal, with a twinkle in his eyes. “He looks like a statue of George Washington!”

[3]

Jerry Minetti came out of jail. The authorities were proceeding to try Dinardo for the murder of Pete Hanun, but they had given up their idea of proving a “conspiracy”, and let the last of the supposed-to-be conspirators go. Jerry came to Horton unannounced, driving from the station in a hack, and Hal saw him coming up the street of the tent-colony, walking very slowly, as if dazed; Hal stared, recognizing him, yet unable to believe his eyes. The Milanese had the horrible pallor of prison, grey and ghastly; he was thin, and so weak that he walked like an old man. There was left no trace of the verve and energy which had made Jerry notable among miners; the spring was gone from his step, the fire from his eyes.

Hal was so deeply moved that he caught the poor fellow in his arms; and then came others, including Rosa and the children, crying out in a mixture of delight and fear. They led Jerry to his tent, and the neighbors crowded inside, while he sat upon the bed, his wife kneeling at his feet, pressing his hands, sobbing, asking questions. Jerry answered feebly, and not always to the point; before long they realized that he did not hear well—he had got a blow over one ear which had caused what the doctor called an abscess. The doctor did not seem to know just what to do about it, and Jerry suffered agonies; he had horrible dreams—he would begin screaming and struggling in his sleep, and would have to be waked up and soothed like a baby half a dozen times in the night.

And here in the tent stood Little Jerry, staring at this wreck of a man who was his father. Hal saw the terror on the face of the Dago mine-urchin; he went and put his arms about him, and the little fellow burst into weeping on Hal's shoulder.

Such things as this put a strain upon the self-control of an amateur sociologist; they made it difficult to find contentment in observing and classifying the facts of the labor problem. Hal Warner lost the last trace of his lightheartedness, the spirit of adventure in which, at the beginning, he had gone up to North Valley. This grim struggle had got its roots into the very deeps of his being. It was the spectacle which has driven good men mad through the ages—“truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne”. It was the strangling of justice, the exalting of greed and violence—and he set his teeth together and flung himself into the war against it. Day and night he brooded over the situation, he made new efforts, he launched new campaigns—and in the process he became, without realizing it, a grown man. There were lines of care in his face, a grim, desperate look about the corners of his mouth.

And of course all this drew him nearer to Mary Burke. Mary was going through the same experience, only still more intensely, because her occupation kept her in close contact with physical suffering. When someone's head was broken, it was Mary's task to wash away the blood and stand by while the doctor sewed up the cut. If a man had an eye mashed by a spent bullet, or a woman lost an ear from a cavalryman's sabre, Mary Burke saw the raw, quivering flesh, and heard the moans of suffering. She held little orphaned children in her arms, stilling their sobbings and rocking them to sleep. She nursed and fed the men and women who came out from General Wrightman's dungeons of torture.

So Mary was one of those of whom the poet sings—“whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died”. She was thin; the roses seemed gone forever from her cheeks; her lips were set and her look that of battle. How she hated the militiamen! Oh, how she hated them! Sometimes she would curse them; but there seemed nothing of the mining-camp about this cursing, it was not shocking to hear such language from beautiful feminine lips. It was a pious cursing, a religious rite!

“Someone ought to kill them!” she declared. “To begin at the top and shoot them down, one by one!”

John Harmon happened to be in the tent when she expressed this sentiment, and Hal was interested in the argument between them. “Tut, tut, Mary!” said Harmon. “Don't let yourself talk like that. Someone might say you meant it.”

“I do mean it!” cried the girl, and went on to tell what was in her mind. Groping about for a way of deliverance, she had come upon the thought of a secret revolutionary tribunal to pass sentence of death upon the tormentors of labor! Let it once be known that men who committed such crimes would be killed, and one would see the end of them.

“Has it never occurred to you,” said Harmon, “that the other side might take up the same idea?”

“They've taken it up now!” cried Mary. “Aren't they killing people?”

“Some, Mary, but not so many as they'd like to. They'd like to kill you and me, and Joe Smith here, but you see they haven't dared.”

“We'd win in the end,” she exlaimed. “They've more to lose than we have, they're more afraid to die.”

“I'm not so sure of that,” answered the other. “You can be sure that if we put them in the right, they'd be just as determined as anybody. Don't forget that, Mary—if we keep the right on our side, help will come in the end.”

“I can't stand it!” she cried.

“I know how you feel, Mary. I had it out with myself when I was your age. It's the great temptation we have to face. If you give way to it, you're no good all the rest of your life—no good to the labor movement, I mean. Don't you see that?”

“No,” she answered. “I don't.”

“We're working for organization, Mary; and that has to be done in the open. We have to say exactly what we're doing, and why. If we resort to conspiracy, we are lost, because the enemy will have spies among us, and we can't know whom to trust. So our organization goes to pieces, our work comes to nothing.”

“That's all very nice for talk,” argued Mary. “But are we going to tell these militiamen they can do whatever they please to us? How do we get the world outside even to hear about us—except by raising a row?”

“That's true, Mary, that's true,” answered the other. His face was grave, for it was a grave problem. But Hal made them both laugh by telling of something Tom Olson had said to him. “No, Joe, no violence! No violence—until you've got enough of it!”

[4]

The prophesy which Hal had made to Congressman Simmons had been fulfilled. The militiamen resumed their old tactics, and with especial vindictiveness towards those who had dared to testify against them. It seemed as if they must have a list—and every day someone on this list encountered a painful fate. There had come a number of witnesses from the Harvey's Run colony; and the very day the congressmen took their departure, the troopers fell upon this settlement. The body of a colored man was found upon the railroad-track, having been run over by a train, and the militiamen pretended to believe that the strikers had murdered him. By way of punishing the crime, they tore down thirty-eight tents and scattered the contents about in the snow, giving the inhabitants forty-eight hours in which to get out of the district. One family happening to be away, they wrecked the home and left a six-year-old child crying in the midst of the ruins. Two infants died from exposure as a result of the raid.

Another of the strikers who testified before the Congressional Committee was John Edstrom, who had been made treasurer of the Horton colony, and was one of the pillars of the union. One morning as the old man was coming up from the village, in company with nine other strikers, the party was stopped by soldiers and marched up to the North Valley mine, beaten all the way. Upon their arrival a party of drunken militiamen and mine-guards proceeded to amuse themselves by standing them up against a stone wall and going through all the preliminaries of an execution, bringing out a cannon and training it upon them, compelling the terrified men to stand motionless while the cannon swung back and forth before their faces.

This amusement went on at intervals through the day; tiring of it at last, some of the troopers got rawhide whips and drove their victims out of the camp on a run, following them on horseback and lashing them back to the tent-colony. Old Edstrom being unable to run far, the soldiers fell upon him and beat him to insensibility; he crawled into the tent-colony that night on his hands and knees.

Hal happened to be in the hospital-tent when his friend was brought in; he went that same night to see his cousin, and there was one last argument, ending in a bitter quarrel. It was Hal's contention that by remaining in the militia, Appie was making himself responsible, lending the prestige of his name and social position to those who were committing outrages.

“There is Stangholz! You admit that he's a ruffian—you have said that the proper place for him would be a home for the criminal insane. But what do you do about it?”

“You talk as if I had the power to turn him out!” exclaimed the other.

“You have!” insisted Hal. “Write a letter to the Governor, offering your resignation and stating your reason. If you were to give that letter to the press, it would have an effect, wouldn't it?”

“Not very much.”

“At least it would clear your conscience—it would be a duty done. The public has no suspicion of these conditions, no idea how the militia is being prostituted. And you are a lawyer, with a duty to society—you've no right to think only of your career.”

“I resent your insinuation,” replied the Captain, haughtily.

“Well,” said Hal, “you admit the facts, but you refuse to do anything. There must be some reason.”

“It's not for you to judge the reason.”

Appie wished to stand upon his dignity; but Hal had the advantage of him, and pressed it, and presently the Captain was goaded into revealing that he had already gone to Cassels and Wrightman with a threat of resignation. They had tried to brow-beat him, but had been badly frightened; finally they had asked for time to consider the matter, and that day they had given him an answer—in the form of a notice that the militia was to be withdrawn from the field.

“But what does that mean?” cried Hal. “You know they won't leave these mines without protection!”

But Harding could not answer this. Wrightman and Cassels had not gone into their plans.

“It's evident enough what they're up to!” said Hal. “They're going to get you out of the way without a scandal—you and your fellow-officers who will no longer stand for their deviltry! You're offered the chance to go back to your law-practice, and you're going to pocket the bribe and hold your tongue!”

It was not many days before the meaning of this new move had become clear to everybody in the strike-country. One militia company after another was put on the train and shipped out—all save a part of their membership, the ex-mine-guards and other coal-company employes. These were put into a new organization, under the command of Major Curran, the saloon-keeper politician from Western City, with Lieutenant Stangholz as his right-hand man.

“Troop E” was the name of this organization, and the greatest secrecy was maintained concerning it; there were plenty of rumors, but definite facts were not to be obtained. General Wrightman himself made false statements about this troop, not merely at this time, but throughout the subsequent troubles. He refused to furnish the roster of the troop, even when the legislature of the state demanded it; until at last the legislature appointed a committee to wait upon the Adjutant-General of Militia at his office, with instructions to stay until he yielded the point. So at last the truth was exposed—of the hundred and thirty members of this troop, a hundred and twenty-two were coal-company employes, remaining upon coal-company pay-rolls at the same time that they were paid as members of the state militia!

The news about this new troop which filtered in from the coal-camps broke down even John Harmon's resolve for peace. There was a conference in the headquarters tent, and at the end of it Harmon and Hal Warner took the midnight train for Western City. Hal had the thrills of a real revolutionist now, for the enemy must have had a pretty good idea what his trip signified; two coal-company detectives went on the same train, and two others met the party when they arrived in the morning. Hal took a cab and drove to Perham's Emporium, and after buying some neckties and collars, he lost himself in the crowd at a “bargainday” sale, and so managed to throw his pursuers off the track and escape by another door. After which he went to the nearest telephone-booth and got Adelaide Wyatt on the phone, instructing her to wire immediately for a varied assortment of musical instruments, to be expressed to her home from the East. There was to be a surprising amount of musical activity in the tent-colonies, it appeared; the shipment would include two “pianos”—which in the code adopted signified machine-guns.

[5]

Jessie Arthur had written that she must see Hal the next time he came to the city. Her father had forbidden her to meet him; a whole week of hysterics had failed to break down this command; so now for the first time in her life Jessie would commit an act of disobedience. Hal must have some other person telephone to her home, and she would drive to the park in her electric, and pick him up at a certain unfrequented place. More revolutionary thrills!