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.