XVIII
Jim Hewin picked his satisfied way over the ramp's top and along the road below, toward the gap and the gap offices. He eyed the midnight stars with unseeing animal contentment, sluggishly at peace with the world.
A voice from the watchman's hut blurred upon his hearing. "Hey, where you going?" The man peered closer. "Where the hell have you been? The old man's been looking for hours——"
"I been right over in Hewintown."
"He wants you, now."
"What's up?" Reawakened briskness bristled in his tones.
"Bringing in them carloads of miners."
"Oh!"
"He's in the guard auto by the machine house. Better hump yourself."
Jim idled off, then changed his gait to a run as he heard the preliminary whirr of the engine. "Hai!" he shouted, as the lighted nose turned up the hill. "Hai! Wait! It's Jim!"
Tom Hewin made room for him on the front seat. "Take this rifle. Got your automatic?"
They joined the three other cars, ran on too far by the viaduct, and doubled back. The thin pop of fire-arms reached them, then the distant crackle of a volley. The men hunched together excitedly, blood tingling at the prospective ambuscade of the man-hunt.
The wash of the headlight on the tall pines beyond the cut located the engine.
"There!" came Tom's stabbing whisper.
The cars coursed to the curve, and turned parallel, facing the tracks. The angry glare of four searchlights burned against the black figures huddled above the stalled train.
The startled crowd eddied together, then scattered in headlong panic. Gunfire thunder and pelting lead poured from the rows of rifles toward the fleeing bodies.
Jim sprang out, crouched beside the searchlight, blazed away. He ran forward, stumbling against a pungently resinous stump. He rested his rifle on it to aim. Crack! The clumsy figure halted, raised wild arms grotesquely, fell spinning toward him. He caught up with the foremost guards, and stood with them for a volley across the narrow railroad gulch.
"Come on," boomed Huggins, the deputy sheriff in charge, running to the top of the cut.
Jim followed.
A wounded miner on the left trembled to his knees; his pistol aimed uncertainly at the man ahead. Jim's automatic plupped; the man's face butted against the rocky ground.
"Hey, there," Huggins bellowed, "Whatcher stop for?"
"We're goin' on," a gunman below shouted back. "We're goin' on, I say."
"Go on, then," he replied, disgustedly.
"Don'cher hear him, Ed?" to the engineer. "Go on, he says."
"Ain't I going?"
The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at Hewintown.
"None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest.
"A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main office. It's been a morgue afore."
The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make us all swing?"
"We could manage a get-away——"
Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing, fiercely resentful.
"God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter.
Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun——"
"No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last thing.... They'd call out their soldiers—where'd we be then? Oh hell! If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin' to us——"
"Can you?" whispered Pelham.
"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."
Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams.
The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty.
The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow.
Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me," said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head.
This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the Advertiser and the Times-Dispatch warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.
"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."
The young mining inspector, as yet unassigned to his duty by the State, preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale, and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get! Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office, out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone; why not make it your government?"
In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.
"He don't do any harm," Dawson confided to John McGue who had attached himself as the big man's private guard. "Let him spit fire if he wants to. My God, man! A state mining inspector as organizer! We'll have Paul Judson in the local yet!"
Sullenly the strikers held to their Hewintown homes, cowed by the armed guards from interfering with the spasmodic attempts of the convicts, negroes, and strike-breakers to keep the mine product up to normal. Formal notices of eviction came to them; but Ben Spencer reassured the disheartened committee. "They've got to follow the state law; that means delay. Tell the boys to sit steady till hell freezes over. They're sewed up."
Henry Tuttle rendered an exhaustive report upon the same matter to the managing committee of the directors. "We can go ahead, if you say——"
Paul Judson, at Judge Florence's nod, shook his decisive head. "Wait. We're not quite ready. When we are——"
After a thoughtful pause, the vice-president went on. "It's a good time to appropriate enough to outfit the State National Guard. We can't pay them directly, as the companies did in Colorado; the law's against that, Henry?"
The counsel nodded corroboration.
"But they'll appreciate new uniforms and guns.... You can never tell, you know.... I had a talk with Adjutant-General Rice last week; he approves heartily."
The matter was left to the vice-president, for action.
During these weeks of comparative inactivity, in spite of the details of strike work, Pelham found time to debate "Socialism the Remedy" with Burke Horton, an energetic lawyer-politician of near-radical views. The debate was the first of a newly opened community forum, under the auspices of Dr. Gulley's Free Congregation, which met in Edlin's Hall. The crowd was packed with Horton's followers, but the young Judson made his points tell.
This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him. Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm. Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love.
They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung dreams and precious intimacies.
In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet.
"You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating."
"I'd be sick of the whole bloody business," she smiled indulgently, "if it wasn't for you."
"Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair possessively.
"Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?"
"Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy."
"It was only taffy?"
"I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I should think your father would have to be proud of you!"
"The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim oxfords print."
"Not even wings?"
"We are forging them together."
Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be. Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue.
Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background. Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.
But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him—hatred that turned this silver heaven into an iron-red hell. No; he was pledged fighter in the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to welcome him at war's end.
The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.
"Your car woke us up at three last night."
"It was shortly after two when I got here."
"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys. Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."
Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.
"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to imagine you are keeping bad company—of both sexes——"
The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking—last night was the debate—you know I've been busy——"
His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it. They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll have to leave the mountain."
Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on. "I'll leave by Saturday."
Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."
His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Saturday, mother."
"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."
Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."
"Yes ... that too...."
The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"
"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."
"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.
"What do you mean?" The unrehearsed query came against her will.
"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother—to go to the Red Light district—to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"
Her face assumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."
This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact. Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function—persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things—presumably to her royal husband's advantage—before each breakfast.
Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, "There's no use not believing me. You know I am not lying; those were my father's words."
The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. "I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further." Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. "I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage."
There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. "God only knows, my son, how much I love you...." She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, passed up the steps, and through the screen door—for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.
Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.
Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. "Young Judson left home?"
"Last week."
"Squabbled with his old man?"
"I reckon so.... He just left." She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.
At length her moping could not be ignored. "What's the matter, gal? What's on your mind?" He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.
She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was entitled to know.
And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side—what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.
She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had "got out of her spell." She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.
A spirit of lassitude lay over the mountain activities, with the departure of Pelham and the cumulative effect of drenched days of torrid July sunshine. The dusty mornings were dry and crackly, the sullen summer air clung within the house at night. Futile breezes spurted uncertainly, emphasizing the arid discomfort. Twice thunder clouds massed over the nervous swelter, but were swept on before they could spill their desired comfort. Dust-weighted leaves hung limp, shrubs sickened and browned; only the weeds pushed blatantly upward.
Paul came out early the second day of the spell. The weight of the weather was unbearable. It was as if heavy blankets of heat were continually drifting down from the blazing heaven, too piercingly hot to be drowsy; it was as if he walked through these thick palpable layers of living, seering fire ... like walking undersea of a vast liquid ocean of seething heat.
"You'd better get out of this," he announced shortly to Mary. "How would the Thousand Islands do?... The girls, and Ned too; his school doesn't open till late in September. Hollis had better stay with me; I need some help.... Shall I make reservations for Tuesday?"
Paul took Hollis with him, ten days later, for a run up to Washington connected with the delivery of steel to supply Allied orders, a mission in which all of his driving sympathies were enlisted. Nor was he out of key with his home city in this. Adamsville was one of the few Southern cities whose sympathies had been against the Central Powers from the beginning of the war. For the first two years the rest of the South fussed and thundered against English interference with the profitable pre-war cotton trade with Germany; an anti-English "freedom of the seas" became the day's slogan in the one section of the country where English blood still predominated. But the iron city never joined in this clamor; its spokesmen, its suave senators and publicists, could waive the blockaded deflection of cotton, when the iron and steel demands of the Entente doubled the output of the mineral region. As the warring months marched on, quick shipments commanded untold bonuses; as of old, where a man's purse was, there was his heart. For commercial and patriotic reasons the company fretted impotently at the continuance of the strike at this time, especially when rail congestion became serious throughout the country. Paul's trip was one of many that the metal magnates had to make, to keep the wheels running as smoothly as possible upon the twice interrupted tracks.
This trip left the mountain home in the care of old Peter, who stayed on in his cluttered servant's room behind the kitchen. Diana Cole came in to clean up once or twice a week. Jim Hewin's persistent curiosity about the movements of the Judsons found full answer in her.
Two days after the master's departure, Peter hitched up and drove into town, to bring out two boxes of books from the office, and some sacks of cotton seed meal and oats. He dawdled around from store to store, showing off his temporary responsibility and dignity. The hot hours passed; he found relief in the cool shade of a side of the ice factory, where frequent squabbles among intent young negro crap-shooters were referred to him for his ponderous adjustments.
Diana, late in the afternoon, brought a pan of peas out to the mended yellow rocker on the front porch of the Cole shack, and commenced popping the viscid spheres out of the parched pods. At length her hands slowed; she stared into the red sunset beyond Hillcrest Cottage on the hill across.
She was struck by the odd reflection of the fiery glow in the kitchen windows. It was as if the late sun shone clear through the house. She rose agitatedly to her feet, the peas littering the steps, the pan halting against the wilted morning-glory vines. "Maw!" she cried, panic in her voice. "Maw! Will! Come here——"
A thin shimmer of smoke jerked restlessly above the kitchen end of the big house. "That ain't—fire?"
"An' Mr. Paul an' ev'ybody gone!"
"Will," she turned hurriedly, "run to Hewintown—the men can save lots. I'll phone the Fire Department——"
She raced up the familiar road, her mind working feverishly. Far behind Stella panted. There had been no fire in the kitchen range since morning, when Peter cooked his own bacon and coffee. At noon it had been cold; she had seen it; Peter had started then for town.... Unless he had come back.
The sun had almost gone down; it was dark in the hall. She threw open the doors, and started frantically tugging at Miss' Mary's chiffonier and washstand. The men arrived, coatless, willing. They piled furniture around the big cedar north of the house. The heat of this burning wing became blistering; the things had to be moved down the road.
Diana remembered the telephoning.
"We got an alarm," a gruff voice scolded. "Engines ought to be there now."
Two neighbors from the base of the mountain came up, and began helping. Armed guards at the entrances to the estate kept many away; these watched the holocaust from beyond the gap, or from their own homes. Dried wooden walls flamed up against the dark sky like giant fireworks; massed smoke bellied and spit sparks as if the mountain vomited in fiery discomfort.
Someone led a group of helpers up to the dim door of the garret, crowded with carefully covered family treasures from Jackson days. The dusty packing-cases promised little. "Nothing here," he said, closing the door.
The north end was an oven now; the rescuers turned to the dining room, parlors, and the boys' rooms on the south.
Diana ran back to the closet where Miss' Mary's silver was locked. She left this to hurry to the window, and then the door.
Huggins, Jim Hewin, and a knot of guards stared at the hectic activity. "Hey, niggers," one called to Will Cole and another, who were steering the hall clock from the Jackson home through the door, "drop that clock. You can't steal Mr. Judson's things."
Will and the other reached the porch.
"Drop it, I say," rang out Jim's ugly voice, as he balanced his pistol tentatively. "You bastards, burnin' down the house, to steal the stuff!"
"That's a lie," Will called, shortly. Others took up the cry.
The guards raised menacing pistols.
A striker, his temper on fire from continuing irritations, dropped behind the nearest steps, levelled his pistol, and shot toward the armed group.
Diana ran out flying, shielding Will. "Don't shoot my brother, you scoundrels——"
Jim's pistol, carefully aimed at the black striker, crackled viciously. Tongues of flame spoke from the armed deputies.
"You plugged the gal," Huggins grinned casually, aiming again. "We got both coons."
The astounded citizens ran between the sudden murderous combatants. "This won't do!"
"The house is burning, while you're killing each other!"
The chemical engine swung around the southern curve of the road, jetting ineffectually against the greedy insanity of the flames. The strikers took up the four bodies, and carried them somberly to Hewintown, Stella Cole following, dry-eyed and shivering with uncomprehending hatred.
Pelham and Jane walked among the smouldering ruins the next day, their hearts bitter at the headlines which blamed the strikers for the burning. "There's no dirtiness they won't stoop to," he raged. "Hanging's too good for those editors."
When Paul Judson arrived, to what had been home, in answer to Mr. Kane's wire, it was to find that Tom Hewin, whose sub-contract still controlled this part of the estate, had begun removing the rich outcrop where the north end of the cottage had rested.
"This is outrageous, Hewin! We don't want this touched——"
"It's the contract, Mr. Judson. In section seven. I supposed——"
Paul left him, agonized at heart.
An injunction the next day stopped the theft of the outcrop, and removed the Hewins from their connection with the property and the strike.
Only Ed was left to his mother to arrange for the burial of Diana and Will. Neither of them knew, although Stella suspected, that there were three dead in the two graves.