Mountain Part 21

"Sounded very close--that first ramp, perhaps----"

He went for the car; it would be quicker, and it might be needed.

As he cut through the gap, on the road just under the summit in front, parallel to the old dummy line, he noticed that the gap workings, and the second ramp, were deserted. The road turned sharply to the north, circling the long squat storehouse. He slowed mechanically, as a quick side squint caught the group on the steps: McArdle, the clerk, his anemic face, under the spa.r.s.e scrub of beard, flushed from his emotional exertion, hectoring the dozen frightened negroes in front of him.

"What's wrong, Mac?"

The white man cursed the panicky negroes, the explosion, his job which kept him tied to the building.... "I can't get 'em to go back, Mr.

Judson, the----" He was off again.

"Leave the store, come on with me----" He snapped open the door of the car.

"Got to watch the phone. The hospitals are sending doctors----"

"It's that bad?"

Pelham turned on the power again, and turned up the front of the hill.

The air was clear here of the sickly odor that had reached the house--the wind swept this slope clear of the reminder of what lay beyond. Just before the ramp buildings showed beyond the trees, it came to him again--the stabbing, strangling odor of exploded dynamite. The tendency to nausea twisted his face into grotesque inhumanity; he held his breath as well as he could, and shoved on.

Now he had a view of the head of the ramp, and the shacks on both sides.

His first impression was that it looked strangely usual: same houses, same isolated scrags of trees, all the familiar slopes and rises. A cloudy, half-hysterical belief fought within him that nothing had happened; surely exploding death and stifling horrors had not torn this kindly hill, these humble workers!

His vision cleared. The shacks were not the same; there was only a torn dilapidation on the farther side of the opening, only the vacuous sh.e.l.ls of buildings stood on the nearer side. Horror visible, a wavering fog of dust and gray-smoky vapor, hovered over the top of the ramp. The huddling activity of the figures grouping and scattering above the opening, this was all unusual.

Running the car against a mound of red earth, he climbed clumsily out.

His legs trod an unreal soil; it was as if he had forgotten how to articulate their use. The hurrying men descending the artificial slope did not notice him; they were intent on what was below.

On the third level he pa.s.sed four figures lying parallel, motionless, dreadfully relaxed. He pressed his hands madly against his face, to clear the dust from his eyes, the punis.h.i.+ng ache from his nostrils. He stopped, unable to proceed; dead men even this high up! One of the men shuddered, raised himself sideways. He saw that they were merely resting, recovering. The rescue work must be going on, then! He hurried lower.

Here was Tom Hewin, eyes bloodshot, a blackened bandage bulging out from his forehead. "You too?"

Hewin came closer, peering emptily into Pelham's face. He muttered something.

"What's 'at?"

"h.e.l.l." The manager held to his arm, as a rock to cling to, and, walking painfully, led him down the cluttered ramp, deeper into the dizzying mist. Every few feet he stopped to shout disjointed explanations or profanity into Pelham's ear. Grotesque shapes appeared suddenly, flowed both sides of them, were gone. Flickering lanterns bobbed horribly around the entrances; they stumbled over two p.r.o.ne figures, their wavering lantern lights sputtering out, like star-headed deities fallen and expiring. Wild bursts of imaginative activity rocked Pelham's perceptions; there was nothing real in the whole thing. The only living creatures were himself and this shrunken, dirtied being who shouted in his ear, descending ever into a darkening pit.

"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. n.i.g.g.e.rs, maybe."

"They're digging in?"

"They got into six. Working on eight--the whole mountain's caved down."

"What did it?"

"Overcharge--d.a.m.n' carelessness--G.o.d knows. At this time of all others--the d.a.m.n' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked--an'

then they overcharge! The d.a.m.n'----"

"Shall I take eight?"

"I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope.

Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside.

The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without.

Pelham went at the job quickly--Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight."

The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown.

He saw Jane Lauderdale at the other end of the long drab room, busily directing the emergency workers the United Charities had sent. Deaf to the questions of the company doctor at his side, he stood for a long moment. Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress--mother or wife--clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern suns.h.i.+ne drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death.

Jane did not see him. He returned to the grim task of providing for what new bodies were borne into the temporary morgue.

He could not find time to think; here was all that he could do.

XIII

The morning's mail included one letter of importance for Pelham. It was a form announcement of a directors' meeting of the mining company, at ten.

Judge Florence was calling the group to order, when Pelham arrived. The young mining engineer took one comprehensive look around the ma.s.sive directors' table, a plate-gla.s.s-covered stretch centering the sumptuous gray office. Slowly he let himself into the one vacant chair. Paul Judson sat next to the head; Henry Tuttle, of Tuttle and Mabry, general counsel for the corporation, was talking earnestly to him. Kane, one of Judson's directors, was grouped with two of the younger men from the other interest. Sam Ross, John and Stephen Birrell, Randolph, Pelham nodded to each in turn: their faces seemed to him carved into a new heartless savagery,--a huddled group of soul-squeezing masters of men.

As general manager, Paul reported briefly the facts of the accident, with evidence, gathered by company detectives, that the blow-up originated in a miner's criminal carelessness in seriously overcharging in number six entry. This was due to wilful misunderstanding of the company's haste to get out iron, to take advantage of war prices; haste, but not carelessness, was demanded.

Two of the fourteen in the entry most affected were still alive; one had given his deposition at the hospital, telling of the conversation between the miner and his foreman immediately preceding the explosion, in which the dead miner had boasted of the overheavy charge.

"There are, according to the latest reports," Paul concluded, "twenty-two dead, and about thirty injured in greater or less degree.

Spence and Jacks have filed already the first damage suits. If we pay these claims, it will cost the company from a quarter of a million to a million dollars. Since the company is not at all responsible, I recommend that we make no settlement whatever." His thin lips lifted together, and contracted. He sat down.

"Can you give us the legal side, Henry?" Jeremiah Florence had lifted Henry Tuttle from Choctaw Falls to Adamsville, and started him on the driving career that made him the worst-feared corporation lawyer in this part of the South. He regarded him now with fatherly admiration.

Tuttle rose lankly, his thin watery eyes staring with fixed impa.s.sivity.

His voice was soft and malleable; he was never hurried, never vehement; he possessed a tact that caught the idea of the more creative type, then carried it to unerring completion. "Paul's suggestion would hold, if we decided to follow it. There is no liability in this state for such an accident; it would be a different matter if the legislature had pa.s.sed that additional liability act last fall. That is the legal side."

He took his feet more slowly in answer to the chairman's second question. "Public policy? That is perhaps different. It might be well to make some sort of settlement. It's never hard to buy off Spence and Jacks; three or four hundred apiece--a thousand at the most--they'd keep half, or more----"

John Birrell, the older of the two boys, who retained much of the implacable push that had carried old Stephen Birrell to the heads.h.i.+p of the local mining industry, spoke sharply from his seat. "I agree with Mr. Judson. This is no time to yield; ore's high enough to pay for any unpleasantness. Give them an inch, they'll demand the whole plant. They were restless before, in our mines as well as the Judson; even the furnaces report union talk. This is the chance to step on the whole matter."

Three or four expressions of similar vigor were too much for Pelham. He took the floor unsteadily; the glances bent on him were curious, almost pitying. The table's circle had read of the pa.s.s with his father at the labor convention; there was an uneasy t.i.tillating expectancy as to how much of a fool he would make of himself, how long he could hang on to the fringes of business, while he nourished a sprouting radicalism.

"I represent only two shares as a stockholder," he began painstakingly.

"I am only one director. But I wonder if you gentlemen know what you are doing. Thirty of your workers lie seriously injured; twenty-two families are deprived of their bread-winners through an accident not their fault, but yours; yours, and other mining employers' who have fought all safety legislation, even as late as last week----" His eye caught a side glimpse of his father's unperturbed profile, as he rolled an unlighted cigar around the rim of his teeth. "It is not enough to say that these were convicts, or negroes; many were hired white workers. I don't know how well you have the law sewed up; but every idea of justice ent.i.tles them to full settlement. Any other decision would be an outrage."

The aged chairman, while disavowing any sympathy with the spirit of the young man's remarks, wondered if a proper regard for public opinion would not dictate some middle course. The younger Birrell sided with him, as did Sam Ross, Tuttle, and several others. At length Paul Judson was asked again for his opinion.

"Gentlemen, you understood what I said before. I have told you what you must do--refuse to pay one cent to any claimant, no matter how strongly the claim is pressed. Any other course, in the long run, will be suicide. Unless you want ultimate bankruptcy, you will treat this as a business matter." He gathered into a portfolio the papers before him. "I have some matters to attend to. I have shown you how to handle the matter. You can call me in for a vote."