Marching Men eBook

The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent.  The long valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness.  Out of the darkness sounds emerge.  Coal cars creak and protest as they are pushed along rails.  Voices cry out.  With a long reverberating rattle one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car standing on the railroad tracks.  In the winter little fires are started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows of coke ovens.

With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play with his spirit.  The love for the figure of his mother that had come to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.

The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker’s daughter hard against his own body.  The woman, understanding his mood, picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved.  When he became conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive strength and virility.

“It is a job.  It is something big I can try to do,” he whispered to himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening with their bodies a song of new life.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits of its influence.  It stands at the heart of America almost within sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields of the Mississippi Valley.  It is inhabited by hordes of men of all nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn—­shipping towns to make their fortunes.  On all sides men are busy making fortunes.

In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, “In America one gets much money,” and adventurous souls have set forth only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow ill—­smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.

In American villages the tale has been told.  Here it has not been whispered but shouted.  Magazines and newspapers have done the job.  The word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind among the corn.  The young men listen and run away to Chicago.  They have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no tradition of devotion to anything but gain.