The Coal War (24 page)

But when the first wave of emotion had passed, Hal found himself thinking about Jessie with less happiness. He had put her out of his thoughts for several weeks; and now somehow when she came back she made trouble there. His thoughts had grown stern, hardly normal for a youth of twenty-three. He had cast in his lot with people who were braced for a life and death struggle, and he was growing familiar with the feelings of anguish and despair, with the sight of wounds and death. Somehow, in the presence of such things, a man's standards of value change; things which in the old days had a spell for him lose the spell and leave him cold.

Then too, he was working side by side with Mary Burke; her strong, erect figure was always before him, her willing hands were always at his service. Mary understood and shared his moods; she did not have to make any effort to do it, she did not have to be argued with. And so, every day, she came to fill a larger place in his consciousness. They were comrades and fellow-workers in a great cause, with no idea of anything else—so Hal told himself, and really believed it. But wise od Mother Nature will not permit two eager and healthy young people to be together all the time, and be nothing but comrades and fellow-workers in a cause—no matter how great the cause may be. Hal would look at Mary and think what a splendid girl she was, how true she was proving under this test; and then he would wonder what she was thinking about him. Was she altogether as satisfied with their relationship as she appeared to be? Did she never have impulses toward him, as in the old days? If she did, and was not letting him know it, it must be hard on her; on the other hand, if she had really become indifferent—well, it was not exactly flattering to a handsome and eligible young man. It was a certain thrill gone out of his life, a romantic interest he could not help missing.

He looked back upon those old days at North Valley, when he had first met “Red Mary”, and she had bared her heart, and he had seen the primrose path of dalliance stretching before him in the soft summer moonlight. Those old days somehow seemed happy days now—such is the power of life to throw a spell over itself! But then Jessie Arthur had come to North Valley and taken possession of Joe Smith, the miner's buddy, and Mary's class-feeling had blazed up like a flame; she had drawn back, and from that time on she had given no hint of anything but friendship for Hal. She asked nothing about Jessie; so far as Hal knew, she did not know whether Jessie was at home or abroad. Mary was living for the strike; and if she had been engaged in a subtle plot to lure Hal's interest to her, this would have been the wisest course she could have taken. A fine, straight girl, Hal would say to himself; a girl capable of forgetting herself! His admiration would be excited—and also his curiosity; he would be moved to spend hours with her, talking about the problems of the tent-colony and the cause.

Hal never forgot the bitter words with which “Red Mary” had once laid bare to him the soul of the class-war. She was a drunken miner's daughter, and he, who thought that he was really democratic, had shown that it was all play, that he was looking down at the working-people from a far-off height, across an unbridgeable chasm. This challenge came back to him every time he compared Mary with Jessie Arthur, as inevitably he was impelled to do. Was it so that he was in the deeps of him a snob—that he believed in those caste prejudices he was trying to force himself to fight? Was it true that a girl might have the soul of a Joan of Arc, and still be set one side all her life, because her hands were big and rough, because she spoke with a common brogue, and because no one had taught her the established way to hold a knife and fork? If so, then what was the use of a man's calling himself a revolutionist? In the days of the contest over chattel-slavery there was a test whereby the skeptic was wont to challenge the sincerity of those who professed affection for the downtrodden—“Would you let your sister marry a nigger?” And for Hal the situation had come to be summed up in a similar formula—“Would you let yourself fall in love with a drunken miner's daughter?”

[11]

There came a series of events which first postponed Hal's trip to Western City, and then quite suddenly made it unavoidable. These events hinged themselves about the personality of one of the mine-guards, who from the beginning had played an important part in Hal's affairs—Pete Hanun, the “breaker of teeth”. It had been Pete Hanun who had followed the miner's buddy when he had come down from North Valley, to try to save the men imprisoned by the mine-disaster. It had been Pete Hanun who, with Jeff Cotton, had chased the buddy into Percy Harrigan's car. And finally, it had been Pete Hanun who shot Tom Olson. Because of the prestige of this latter act, the “breaker of teeth” had become one of the leaders of the deputies, the right-hand man of Schultz; he had ridden about in the “death special”, “shooting up” one camp after another. Hal saw him several times in Pedro, walking down the street with his pal, Dirkett; each of the pair kept his right hand in the side pocket of his overcoat, where the muzzle of a revolver was plainly outlined.

Such was the tension to which things had come in the coal-towns! And now suddenly the “breaker of teeth” met the fate he had so long been challenging. Stepping out of a cigar-store one evening, he was lighting a cigar, an operation which took his hand off his revolver, when someone stepped up and put a bullet into his head.

No one saw the firing of the shot, but there was an Italian striker named Dinardo staggering by, three quarters drunk, and him the soldiers seized. They must have realized very quickly that they had not got the right man; but they must punish someone, for the sake of the moral effect. Pete Hanun had been a sort of officer among the deputies, and if he could be killed, no one was safe. It was resolved to make the killing an occasion for suppressing the “troublemakers” of the Horton tent-colony, of which Dinardo chanced to be a resident.

Next morning, when Hal was in the headquarters tent writing a letter to Lucy May, his friend Rovetta rushed in, pale with fright; the soldiers were after him! “I no got anything to do with it!” he cried. “All time I was here in camp! Mrs. Olson know, John Edstrom know!”

“What do they accuse you of?” Hal asked.

“They grab Jerry! They grab Kowalsky!”

“But what for?”

“Nothing! Nothing! We don't do nothing!” The young Italian was incoherent with terror.

“But what do they
say
you did?”

“They tell Jerry he help kill Pete Hanun! I was in next tent and I hear! I don't kill nobody, I was here in tent all time!”

“Why do they accuse you, Rovetta?”

“I don't know! He hit me that day in union hall when they make search! Maybe they think I got mad.”

“Well,” said Hal, “if you were here in the colony, it should be easy to prove it.”

He went outside of the tent, and saw two militiamen running up—one of them Lieutenant Stangholz. “That Dago in there?” he demanded; and when Hal answered, they sprang inside and collared their victim.

“Lieutenant,” said Hal, “this young man says he was in the tent-colony—he has witnesses to prove it—”

“When we want your testimony, young fellow,” said Stangholz, “we'll ask for it.” And with these words, and no more, they marched the frightened Italian down the street.

In front of the Minetti tent was Jerry, with a soldier holding him by the arm; and Rosa, his child wife, having the new baby in one arm, and with the other hand catching at the militiaman's sleeve, the tears streaming down her cheeks, her voice hysterical: “Mister, he don't kill nobody! Who tell you such thing about my Jerry?” There were two other guards searching the tent; as Hal drew near one of them hauled out a trunk, dumped its contents into the dirty snow, and began throwing things this way and that. Little Jerry flew at the man, hammering his legs with his tiny fists; the man kicked him to one side, and Mary Burke caught him and held him, screaming and trying to get away.

There came another guard with Kowalsky, a Polish miner, his wife and three children following behind clamoring. Why any man should suspect Kowalsky was beyond imagining, for he was a helpless and stupid wage-slave; but there was no use offering character-testimony, or even asking questions. The militiamen, having finished their search for papers or weapons, marched their three prisoners down the street and loaded them into automobiles and whirled them away.

[12]

Hal interviewed Mrs. Olson and Edstrom and a number of others, and made certain that Rovetta and Jerry had been in the tent-colony all the previous evening. Then he went for advice to his cousin, who knew the two Italians and admitted that they were decent men. But Appie did not see what anyone could do about it; he was strenuous in advising Hal to keep out of the mix-up, making no secret of the reason—that he was afraid of the extremes to which General Wrightman might go. “Wait a while,” he argued. “They're bound to realize your men had nothing to do with it, and let them off.”

But Hal was not to be held back. He first addressed a letter to the military commission, telling them of the evidence he had to offer; and when no answer came, he went up to the American Hotel, where the commission had its headquarters, and asked for an interview with the Judge-Advocate.

This was Barry Cassels, a lawyer of Western City, well known to Hal. He was legal adviser to the General, and in this capacity had just delivered an opinion, to which the newspapers attached great weight, that the Governor had no legal authority to enforce his policy of keeping strikebreakers out of the mines. Besides being Judge-Advocate of Militia, Cassels was an attorney with a salary from mine-operators—though, as he made haste to explain, it was the metal-mining industry, not the coal-mining industry, which paid him. If it was on a public platform, he would make this explanation with grave impressiveness; if it was over high-balls at the club, he would make it with a wink. The “metal men” of the state were perfectly good friends with the “coal men”. They shipped their product over the same railroads, they borrowed their money from the same banks, they used the same lawyers and the same politicians to hoodwink the public, and the same militia officers to break the strikes of their workingmen.

After an argument with a burly guard, Hal finally got his card taken in, but that was as far as he got; the answer came that Major Cassels was “busy”. Hal knew the Judge-Advocate for a gentleman with social ambitions, who ordinarily would not have declined intimacy with a member of the Warner family. Could it be that he was ashamed of his present job? Or was he sternly devoting himself to duty, refusing to be swayed by social favor?

He had every reason to call himself “busy”, Hal had to admit. He was judge, jailer and prosecuting attorney to twenty-five “military prisoners”, in addition to those he was now gathering in on the charge of having conspired to the murder of Hanun. General Wrightman had made announcement that none of these prisoners were to have a jury trial; the General would constitute himself a “military district”, and the prisoners would be attended to by his “military court”. In a country supposed to be a democracy, with a constitution providing that the military should at all times be subordinate to the civil authority, this naturally caused complications, and taxed the subtlety and legal learning of a Judge-Advocate of Militia.

This “military prisoner” idea had had its beginning ten years ago, when the president of the metal miners' union had been thrown into jail on a charge that he had “desecrated the American flag” by having union sentiments printed on it. The case had been carried to the Supreme Court of the state, a body put into office by the copper-trust for the purpose of putting its rivals out of business. This court had sustained the right of militia officers to set aside the civil authority; but it had happened that the Chief Justice of the court was an honest man, and he delivered a dissenting opinion which for its eloquence and dignity deserves to be written beside the Declaration of Independence, and taught to every school-child in America.

He declared that the court had not construed the Constitution, it had ignored it; that not one of the guarantees of personal liberty could any longer be enforced. “The accused may be guilty of the most heinous offenses. It may be that he deserves to linger in prison the remainder of his natural life; but he is entitled to his liberty unless someone, in proper form and before a proper tribunal, charges him with violation of the law. If one may be restrained of his liberty without charge being preferred against him, every other guarantee of the Constitution may be denied him. And when we deny to one, however wicked, a right plainly guaranteed by the Constitution, we take that same right from everyone. We cannot deny liberty today and grant it tomorrow; we cannot grant it to those heretofore above suspicion, and not grant it to those suspected of crime; for the Constitution is for all men—‘for the favorite at court; for the countryman at plow'—at all times and under all circumstances.”

And then, in grave and solemn words, he warned the people of his state concerning the perils involved in this precedent. “We cannot sow the dragon's teeth and harvest peace and repose; we cannot sow the whirlwind and gather the restful calm. Our fathers came here as exiles from a tyrant King. Their birthright of liberty was denied them by a horde of petty tyrants that infested the land, sent by the King to loot, to plunder and to oppress. Arbitrary arrests were made, and judges aspiring to smiles of the prince refused by pitiful evasions the writ of habeas corpus. Our people were banished; they were denied trial by jury; they were deported for trial for pretended offenses; and they finally resolved to suffer wrong no more, and pledged their lives, their property and their sacred honor to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and for us, their children. But if the law is as this court has declared, then our vaunted priceless heritage is a sham, and our fathers ‘stood between their loved homes and war's desolation' in vain.”