The Coal War (18 page)

[25]

Next morning Hal set out as a distributor of pamphlets; one of those wistful, pathetic persons, with the pockets of their overcoats bulging, who encounter you timidly, and try to accomplish their purpose without letting you know that they are out especially to save your soul. At least, that was the picture of the situation which Bob Creston took into the Merchants' Club, to the vast hilarity of the younger crowd—excepting Appie Harding, who happened to be the wistful propagandist's cousin, and Garret Arthur, who happened to be his prospective brother-in-law.

But in the course of the day Hal lost his wistfulness and timidity. He took a copy of his pamphlet to Larry Pringle, and found the “Gazette” office in a state of excitement, owing to the arrival of a telephone message from Keating. A stenographer had taken it down, and Hal sat by this man's typewriter and read the words as they popped into view on the machine.

There had been another “battle of Horton” that morning, and Keating had been present, and gave his description as an eye-witness. A mile or so down the railroad-track from the colony was a steel bridge where the county road crossed, and under this bridge three gunmen had concealed themselves and opened fire on the tents. There were at this time about twelve hundred people in the colony, and probably two hundred of the men had weapons of some sort, most of them shot-guns and cheap revolvers. As before, they rushed out and began firing blindly—the little Italian had fired his shot-gun into a pile of steel-rails and nearly blinded himself. Pretty soon one of the men, who had gone in the direction of the firing, came back with one eye knocked to a pulp by a spent bullet; and then came a second man, with his hand to his cheek, and blood pouring in a stream through his fingers. The account gave the name of this last man—Klowowski; it was the Paul Revere of the coal-camps, the little Polack who had met Hal and Jim Moylan on the first night of their coming to Horton! Hal saw in a swift vision his pitiful, eager face; above the click of the typewriter keys he heard the shrill voice: “Big men from union come make talk! Ever'body come! Tell ever'body!”

The shooting had continued for a couple of hours; and in the course of it a ranchman who lived near-by had ridden out to try to bring his horses to a place of shelter. He had a wife and three children, who besought him to stay at home, but he insisted that no one would hurt him. He rode toward the steel bridge, not knowing the gunmen were there, and one bullet pierced him through the forehead, and two others through the body. Billy explained that this man had earned the enmity of the guards by leasing to the union the property on which the tent-colony stood.

Later on the reporter had gone over to the railroad-station, and heard one of the mine-guards denouncing the three sharp-shooters under the bridge. They were hardly hitting the strikers at all, he said; they were filling the water-tank of the railroad full of holes!

With the receipt of this news, Hal set out on the jump for the white marble State House. This time the secretary declared that the Governor was very busy; finally he took Hal's card, but the answer was that the Governor could not possibly see anyone that day. Hal, however, was not to be put off; he laid siege to the office, and late in the day caught his victim trying to escape by a side-door. He literally held him up on the grounds of the State House, where they had another vehement argument.

Hal knew his man by this time—he had got to the desk-pounding stage! He told the Governor that civil war was coming in the strike-district; there would be wholesale murder if he did not go at once. He kept at the distracted official until he went back to his office and ordered his secretary to get ready, and telephoned his wife to get his grip packed. He would take the train that night.

Whether it was the secretary that leaked, or the wife, Hal never found out; but it was a fact that Peter Harrigan knew about that decision within fifteen minutes after it was taken. The first thing he did was to get Hal's brother on the telephone and give him a tongue-lashing; the second thing was to get hold of his general manager in Pedro and order him to meet the Governor, and never let him out of his sight while he was in the field.

Hal went down in the same train with the Governor and secretary, and his heart was so full of hopes and his head so full of plans that he could not sleep. But in the morning all these hopes and plans were dashed. When the party alighted from the train, there was Schulman, the general manager, with a “G.F.C.” automobile; and in this automobile there was room for the Governor and the secretary, but no room for Hal! The young man saw the trap in an instant, and made protest in no timid language. Had the Governor come down here to make his investigation under coal-company supervision? If so, his visit would be a farce—his time worse than wasted.

It was very awkward; for there was a crowd of people on the station-platform, and the populace is not supposed to be present at the settling of grave affairs of state. The Governor hesitated; but Schulman, a manager who was used to managing, was at his side, with matters of very great importance to lay before the chief executive at once. And so the Governor stepped into the car, and Schulman and the secretary followed, and they rode off with a rush—leaving Hal standing there like a fool.

And so it was that the visit, for which Hal had worked so hard, came to nothing. The Governor rode about and interviewed company-marshals and guards; he never met one of the strikers, nor heard a word of their story. When Mother Mary got word of his being in Sheridan, she called on him, and when he refused to see her, she organized a procession of women and children, and marched them to the hotel where he sat at dinner. The poor little man had to leave his meal, and make his escape by a back door!

[26]

Meantime Hal had returned to Horton, where he found the spirit of things much changed. One no longer heard from pacifists; one heard a cry for men who knew how to shoot. Even Billy Keating had become military. He was going on sending in stories, but merely from loyalty to his chief, and without much faith in the work. All one could accomplish by writing stories was to stir up a few softhearted women—while meantime the hard-headed men went on with their bloody work! Billy was a new kind of “Ironside”—with a reporter's note-book in one hand and a gun in the other. There were fellows in this tent-colony, Greeks and Bulgarians, who had been fighting each other at home; get them some real rifles, and they would teach these mine-guards a lesson!

There was no rest for anyone in the colony these nights. At the Barela mine, a couple of miles away, a searchlight was kept playing all night, the light streaming into the tents and making them bright as day. This light made it possible for any vengeful or drunken man to fire into the tents from the darkness; also it kept the women terrified, for there was a machine-gun mounted beside the searchlight, and they knew that their enemy, Stangholz, was in charge of that gun; they could see, in their nightmares, his devilish face leering at them, as he shouted what he was going to do with his “baby”. Some of the strikers took to digging holes in the ground for the women and children to hide in; others, under Billy Keating's advice, were studying the terrain, planning what students of military science know as the “offensive defense”. Why not occupy the heights which commanded Barela? Why not send a raiding party some dark night, and shoot that searchlight to pieces?

Hal had not forgotten his promise to Mary; but when he inquired he learned that Tommie Burke was one of the unnamed casualties of the second “battle”. Running to a near-by arroyo to hide, the trapper-boy had been shot through the foot; the bones were badly shattered, the doctor said, and he might be more or less lame all his life. At present he had a fever, and it was out of the question to move him.

So Hal called up Mary, and told her the bitter news. The girl declared instantly that she would come to Horton; she would take the train that night. Hal said that he would meet her, if he could. One never knew, in setting out for the railroad-station, whether one would get there or not.

There were two guards on hand when the train came in, but they only glowered, and stood by to watch what Hal did. When they saw a fresh, handsome girl with a treasure of auburn hair and a neat grey travelling suit step from the train, and talk to him with great intensity, and then begin to cry, and have to be led away by the arm, they understood suddenly the solution of a mystery which had troubled them—why a rich young fellow should have come to this tent-colony to live with Dagos and Hunkies and “wops”. One of them uttered his thoughts with a guffaw; and Hal turned upon him, exclaiming, “You go to hell!”

—Which, one must admit, was not exactly a pacifist utterance. “That's all right, young rooster,” was the guard's reply. “We'll get you before we quit!”

Hal had not foreseen this consequence of Mary's coming, but there was no help for it, and they did not talk about it. He tried to console her by saying that John Harmon had gone that day to have an interview with the Governor in Sheridan, to try to have orders issued to the sheriff to provide guards for the tent-colonies. At this time it was still impossible for Hal to believe that the forces of law could be continuously used in the service of anarchy.

But when the sheriff-emperor came to Horton, it was not to guard it. Two or three days after Mary's arrival, there was an uproar down at the railroad-track; a box-car with seventeen Mexicans in it, the sheriff-emperor in charge, and a crowd of strikers jeering and shouting. At first Hal supposed the Mexicans were strike-breakers; but soon the situation was explained to him—they were men brought in from the state of New Mexico, in order to be turned into deputy-sheriffs! The strikers had stopped the train, and the sheriff-emperor fled to one of the passenger cars.

There were Mexicans among the strikers, who talked to the would-be deputies, and learned that they had not even been told there was a strike! They were told it now, with the result that they declared their wish to join their brothers, and descended from the box-car, and marched to the tent-colony amid hilarious rejoicing. The sheriff-emperor retired, vowing vengeance upon the enemies of “law and order”. In order to appreciate the humor of his indignation, one would need to be reminded of the law of the state providing that no man should serve as deputy-sheriff until he had been a citizen of the state for a year, and lived for sixty days in the county!

[27]

A couple of days later occurred another incident. There were rumors that carloads of strike-breakers were being taken into the Northeastern, and a party of strikers was told to do picket-duty. The union leaders were most strenuous that no man should be armed while on the picket-line, and on this occasion every member of the party had to submit to a search in the tent-colony before he set out for the mine. News of the disarming must have got to the gunmen; for while the men were parading up and down the road in front of the stockade, there appeared Schultz and his “death special” on one side, and a party of a dozen men on horseback on the other. They held up the pickets and marched them away—forty-eight workingmen driven eight or ten miles along a public highway, with armed horsemen in front and on each side, and an armored automobile with machine-guns in the rear! The procession came into the town of Pedro, which was swarming with strikers; but in spite of all the uproar, the prisoners were landed in jail; after which, under the personal escort of the sheriff, two carloads of strike-breakers were run into the mine.

The “Gazette” wanted some photographs of these scenes, and Billy Keating employed a photographer, who made so bold as to snap the “death special”, with Schultz at the machine-gun; whereupon Schultz leaped from the car and took away the man's camera. The photographer came back to Pedro, demanding from judges and police-officials the arrest of his assailant. Having failed in all his attempts, he went out on the street, and encountering Schultz, Hanun and Dirkett, made a demand for his property. He thought that he was safe, there on Main Street, with scores of witnesses present; but at Schultz's command the two gunmen held him up and searched him, and after they had made sure he had no weapon, Schultz struck him over the head with his cane, and beat him in the face with his fists.

Next day came another “battle”, this time at Harvey's Run. The “death special” was turned loose for a quarter of an hour, and a couple of thousand shots were fired into the tents. One man was shot through the head, and a boy running down the street was shot through the foot; he fell, and attempted to crawl away, but the machine-gun followed him, until he had got five bullets through one foot and four through the other. Billy Keating, who hurried over to Harvey's Run in an automobile, counted a hundred and forty-five bullet-holes in one tent.

Not content with this achievement, next night the “death special” came again, with reinforcements; three other machine-guns, posted at commanding points, and more than a hundred deputies. They surrounded the colony, ordered out the strikers, and with kicks and blows and curses drove them down the road, herding them like sheep into a distant arroyo. Meantime the under-sheriff, with Schultz and a crowd of deputies, were searching the tents for arms. They tore up the platforms, they chopped open trunks with axes, and scattered the possessions of families in the mud. They confiscated about a dozen rifles and revolvers, and incidentally helped themselves to pocketbooks and jewelry and whatever else they fancied.

It was to be the turn of the Horton colony next, so all rumors declared. There was especially bitterness against Horton, as it commanded the roads to half a dozen important mines, and was a strategic point for “picketing”. There was never an hour of the day that guards were not to be seen prowling about; at night you heard men shouting from the neighboring hills, cursing the strikers and threatening them with annihilation. It was impossible to find these men, but the men could always find the tent-colony, because of the searchlight; until a raiding-party of strikers, adopting Billy Keating's suggestion, crawled up and shot this searchlight to pieces.