The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking
to him so frankly. He looked at her and said
what was in his mind. “I don’t like
the women,” he said, “but I liked you,
seeing you standing in the stairway and thinking you
had been doing as you pleased. I thought maybe
you amounted to something. I don’t know
why you should be bothered by what I think. I
don’t know why any woman should be bothered
by what any man thinks. I should think you would
go right on doing what you want to do like mother
and me about my being a lawyer.”
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had
met her and watched her go down the hill. “I’m
quite a fellow to have talked to her all afternoon
like that,” he thought and pride in his growing
manhood crept over him.
The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from
prosperous towns and cities of the middle west, from
Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east to New York or
Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside
thought of books they had read of life in hovels in
the old world. In chair-cars men and women leaned
back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
the journey would come to an end. If they thought
of the town at all they regretted it mildly and passed
it off as a necessity of modern life.
The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main
Street belonged to the mining company. In its
turn the mining company belonged to the officials
of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a
brother who was division superintendent. It was
the mine manager who had stood by the door of the
mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death.
He lived in a city some thirty miles away, and went
there in the evening on the train. With him went
the clerks and even the stenographers from the offices
of the mine. After five o’clock in the afternoon
no white collars were to be seen upon the streets
of Coal Creek.
In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with
toil they drank greedily in the saloon on Main Street
and went home to beat their wives. Among them
a constant low muttering went on. They felt the
injustice of their lot but could not voice it logically
and when they thought of the men who owned the mine
they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in their
thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and
Barney Butterlips, a thin little man with a cork leg,
stood on a box and made speeches regarding the coming
brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was
unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the
main street. The battery was made up of several
men in brown uniforms. They set up a Gatling
gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.
