Mountain Part 53

"We'd better," insisted McGue, perspiring from heat and excitement.

"They ain't got anything on us. You can't fight rifles with bare hands."

"h.e.l.l, no! You saw what they did to Ed McGuire. Let's kill the uglies----"

"Kill 'em!" Ray adopted a new slogan. "Kill 'em! Kill 'em, I says."

They wavered. The blistering sun beat fiercely on the metallic barrels of the menacing rifles.

A dreadful tumult of shots, shouts, indescribable noises, broke out in the rear. The shuddering sound of machine guns pelted whistling hail through the spa.r.s.e tree leaves above.

Out of the blind turmoil came running figures, blaspheming in horrible rage. "They're there too!"

"It's another regiment!"

"They're killing everybody!"

The noise grew louder.

Major Grinnell halted at the head of his men. McGue, surrounded by a cowed hundred of the strikers, walked quietly out. "Do you want to arrest us?"

Methodically the houses and alleys were combed, until close to five hundred men, women and children had been herded into the trampled square. One by one they were marched before the guards and deputies; a hundred and nine were pointed out largely at random, as having had some part in the attack. The rest who were involved had slipped away between the two lines of attackers. Wailing and lamenting, the former were herded away into the overcrowded jails.

That night the militia encamped in the remains of the settlement. Fire had destroyed the western third of the houses, a fire which the soldiers made no attempt to put out.

Not a striker was permitted to enter the barred area.

Jim Hewin, back on duty as a sheriff's deputy, led one of the squads that scoured the surrounding woods the next morning for fugitives and bodies. "Hey, 'Red,'--they pipped somebody here," he explained.

It was the rocky road behind the settlement, which led above the wet-weather falls of the brook that eased away into Shadow Creek. The oasis of gra.s.s in the middle of the sandy road was darkly muddied by a mixture of dirt and blood. A cap, crumpled, the visor torn loose, lay in the clawed sand beside it.

"Red" Jones ran up. Hewin's quick eyes zigzagged eagerly. "Look, 'Red'--he went here!"

The trail of blood began again a few feet beyond the road. A heavy body had been dragged over succulent pokeberry plants: moist pithy leaves swung crushed, oozing their thick sap; dark berries lay mashed upon a soil purple with their blood.

They parted the sumach and haw bushes screening the falls.

The slimed slope of gray rocks was darkened by a muddy reddish trickle of water. It was a broken stretch of seventy feet to the green stagnancy below.

"Hey, 'Red'----" Jim's voice dropped; his shaking hand pointed to an awkward ma.s.s half way down the incline.

They slid cautiously, clutching the rough crag edges beside the water.

Caught in one of the shelf-flaws of the rock, his miner's s.h.i.+rt coagulated with blackened blood, his stained overalls soggy with the water, lay a dead negro.

Hewin turned the body over; his fingers shrank and slipped at the moist unpleasantness.

They peered into the dead face of Ed Cole. A clinging mould of leaves half obscured the deputy's badge on his greasy lapel.

Jim's eyes expanded. "Cole, you know--he shot John Dawson."

They regarded the face for a few minutes.

"Got any terbaccer, Jim?"

"Red" lit up his pipe.

"Guess we'll tote 'im back--down that way, huh?"

The dank and dripping bundle was carried and dragged through the scratching underbrush. When they reached the road at last, they rested it on a scaly-bark's littered knees.

Jim rubbed the sweat off from his forehead with his soaked sleeves.

"h.e.l.l, he's heavy, ain't he? This'll do.... You see Huggins; he'll send a wagon." His hands pushed throughout his trousers pockets. "Did you gimme them matches back?"

XXVIII

Governor Tennant--his pet name among friends and enemies alike was "Whiskey-barrel Tennant"--dismissed the committee with a few curt plat.i.tudes about law and order. When they reached Adamsville, they found the shack colony sacked, the strikers and their dependents either jailed or scattered. The militia had done a thorough job.

Wearily Pelham dragged himself to the meeting at Arlington Hall.

Jack Bowden, of the local miners' organization, who always came like a bird of carrion at evil news, secured the floor, and moved that the strike committee be discharged and the strike settled on whatever terms could be secured. "They've bashed in our heads," he said vigorously. "Do we want 'em to cut our throats as well?"

There was no John Dawson to reply to him. From many groups of the strikers came discouraged support for the motion. Most of the old tried unionists saw nothing to be gained in wasting energy on a dead struggle.

"Makes mighty little difference now," Pelham whispered hopelessly to Serrano, seated in explosive agitation beside him.

"_You'll_ never quit!"

"Not quit.... But start a newer fight, with some chance of winning it."

One violent industrial unionist demanded the floor, and pounded out that the strike must continue, with a general tie-up of every trade, organized and unorganized, in Adamsville.

"One big union!" he continued to shout, even after the ready ushers had pushed him into his seat.

"That's the sort of fool advice," Jack Bowden said, "that's lost this strike. For it is lost; and I'll tell you who's lost it. Not the company, nor Paul Judson's money, not his murdering gunmen; but----" and his lean arm pointed straight to Pelham, "but crazy radicals in and out of the union movement; lounge Socialists, lemonade trade-unionists, men who claim to be with us, but were born with scab hearts. It's them and their kind have led to this smash-up. And the sooner we reckernize it, the better!"

There was a tossing roar of applause at this. The crowd, Pelham grasped at once, was ready to quit, and only wanted someone to blame for the failure.

Nils Jensen, still under bond pending the decision of his case by the Supreme Court, answered the charge at once. "Men, brothers," his voice rang out, "I've been a miner, and a member of this local, for thirteen years. I don't know who is to blame, but I know who isn't--and that's the Socialists among us. We've fought, in the union and at the polls, day in, day out, while your old-fas.h.i.+oned unionists have been pulling down fat jobs under Democratic sheriffs,----" a hit at Pooley, who had been first deputy under the previous official. "I'm not in favor of going on now, if the crowd's ready to stop. I can get work, here or somewhere else, in or out of jail,----" There was a friendly smile at this. "I know that the war between our cla.s.s and the Paul Judson cla.s.s will go on until cla.s.ses are ended. If you're to blame anybody, blame ignorant laborers, who can't see that scabbing against their fellows cuts their own throats, and betrays their wives and children. Blame the labor fakers, the crooked bunch who 'lead' you so that their pockets are lined for delivering your votes to the old parties, while you get nothing. And when Jack Bowden says that Comrade Pelham Judson, as good a socialist as any one of us, is a lounging lemonade socialist, with a scab heart, he lies, and he knows he lies!"

The chair's rappings were lost in the outcries. "Order!" "Order!" broke all over the hall. An uproar circled around Jensen and also Bowden; for a minute the meeting threatened to break into a riot.

Jack Bowden jumped up to the platform, a doc.u.ment waving over his head.

"Brothers!... Brothers!... Let me answer him!" He paused, while they quieted. "I'll answer him. When I moved that the committee be discharged without thanks, I knew what I was doing. When I charged that 'Mister'"

(with an ugly sneer) "Pelham Judson, son of the vice-president of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Iron and Steel Company, was born with a scab heart, I knew what I was doing!"