XXVII
It was just after ten, in the dry heat of a July day six weeks later, when four of the deputies appeared on the road at the entrance to the miners' shack village, and started to enter. They were backed by a squad of the new Home Guard, who had come to help out the militia, now in process of gradual federalization.
"What d'ye want?" called out John McGue, the only committeeman at the moment in the informal town. Pelham, Joe Mullins, the new national organizer, and a committee were visiting the governor, to protest against two exceptionally brutal clubbings by the restlessly inactive guards. It was a hopeless trip, except as a protest.
"You hold things down, McGue," Mullins had told him. "It's coming, by God! They'll consent to arbitrate before the middle of August, or the federal government'll step in! Four new camps, man, in three weeks—they can't get any more men, either, for love or money. We've got 'em!"
Things were looking serious for the company. The Ed Cole verdict had reacted against it; defections from the ranks of the strike-breakers were frequent, and the output was hardly a third of that of the summer before the strike.
McGue wondered if the visit of the guards and militiamen had been timed to fit in with the absence of most of the strike leaders in Jackson. "What d'ye want?" he repeated.
"We got warrants for six men." The deputy—it was Huggins—started to walk on in; McGue kept his place.
"Get out of the way, there," Huggins warned him shortly.
"Gimme the names; we'll git the men fer you. No need to go trampling through people's houses and gardens, as you guards did last week."
"I'll give you nothin'."
The voices in dispute resounded down the vacant roads. Men, hungry men, their natures warped with the long unequal struggle, massed in a shifting background behind the rugged committeeman.
"Get out of my way, or I'll jug you too."
Silently McGue stepped aside. The crowd flattened back against the flimsy walls. The armed guards, grinning at one another, jostling and joking, penetrated deeper and deeper into the straggly irregularity of the settlement.
All at once Huggins caught sight of an undergrown, misshapen boy scowling from the back of the men and women. Pushing them aside, he shoved to the spot, the guards close behind. His hand gripped the boy's arm, until he winced.
"Hey—whatcher——"
"What's your name?"
"Aw, you lemme 'lone! I ain't done a thing."
"Take him, there." He shook the boy savagely. "Your name's McGuire, ain't it? Frank McGuire—I know you."
McGue came up again, holding in his irritation. "What do you want this boy for?"
"None of your damn' business! We got a warrant for him, see? You keep out, or——"
Several of the deputies in the rear clicked their hammers suggestively, snickering at the one-sided joke. A disturbed buzz wavered up and down the massed strikers. As Huggins turned up the wider road again, it grew in volume into a subdued stream of boohs, catcalls, hisses, low threats. He turned incautiously, facing them.
"Don't you follow me, you gutter trash, or I'll jug the lot of you!"
A weak satiric voice came from behind a house. "Aw, will you, though!"
McGue's eyes grinned; but his face remained set, as he doggedly kept pace with the head of the marching guards.
Two more men were taken in the same methodical fashion. The surging procession was now near the open center of the location, where a square had been left as a common, with the artesian well at one end.
Girls and women quietly replaced the men in the front line, jeering and cursing at the flushed faces of the soldiers, occasionally stumbling awkwardly against them. There was a scream as a soldier turned suddenly on a pretty red-haired girl, and caught her wrist. An old Irish virago beside clutched his shoulder and flung him sideways.
"Touch my daughter, you dirty bastard, and I'll tear your heart out!"
Huggins re-formed his men at the entrance to the square. There were only fifty soldiers in line; there were already several hundred of the tenters, and their number swelled constantly. Of course, they couldn't do anything.... He had his orders.
The stage was set for trouble. Over the heads of the women and girls, from the shelter of the nearest house, a rock whished—an apple-sized ore boulder from the iron heart of the hill. It crunched into one of the guards, square on his cheek. He grunted. An uncertain hand patted his dazed face. When he drew it away, it was smeared with blood; the stain widened over his collar and breast.
A second stone came from the opposite side. Then another ... another....
Two deputies fired wildly in the direction of the hidden throwers.
Out of the dissolving panorama of frightened strikers came a spurted crack, a spit of smoke. One of the deputies screamed, was supported, writhing terribly, by the men on either side of him. His head hung limp.
"Back to that building, there," boomed Huggins, pointing to the distributing store at the mountain end of the square.
The retreat began. The strikers eddied backward from the cleared place. From houses along the way unexpected bursts of rocks, an occasional shot, crashed into the close ranks of the law-enforcers.
Four or five revolvers puffed off to the left. A guard dropped his gun, shaking his hand in agony. The left third of the soldiers at a command raised their rifles, and blazed away at the infuriated welter of retreating humanity. A madhouse of screams, men and women running, two bodies settling onto the stained July grass....
Another volley, this toward the right.
"Take that, you——" screamed a deputy, as the startled face at a window was met by the blaze of a rifle. The woman hung swaying over the ledge; choking horribly, she trembled further and further out, dropped hideously upon the ground.
At the storehouse now. "Hey, you, get out of that," Huggins commanded the strikers' distributors.
"This is our——"
The sight of the rifles settled the matter. The two dead guards were stretched on the floor, the wounded were roughly bandaged. Huggins phoned the facts to the militia headquarters on the mountain.
"Said for us to wait here," he explained to the army lieutenant in charge. "It 'ud be suicide, trying to get out. For all we know, all them houses is full of strikers. There'll be two companies here inside of an hour. By God, we'll do for 'em this time!" His tone shook in fierce rapture—the man hunt was on!
The main bulk of the rifles covered the big open field in front; small parties watched toward west, south and north, to warn if any activity showed in the houses fifty feet away.
There was no water; the wounded cursed continually for it. Huggins sent a party, well protected, over to the well, seventy feet away, to bring back two bucketfuls. One of the detail was shot in the collar bone, but managed to make his way back with the bearers of the precious drink.
There was a shouting from in front. "Hey," came a voice, waving a white towel raised high on a clothes-pole. "Can we talk with your man in charge?"
It was Edward McGuire, the father of little hump-backed Frank, who had been arrested, but had slipped away in the disorderly retreat to the store. He had been selected as one of the older, more law-abiding of the miners, to bring the flag of truce.
"What d'ye want?" Huggins demanded belligerently. "Ain't no use to talk; I got a regiment comin' in half an hour, will clean up this whole damned nest of rats."
"Can I come closer?" called McGuire.
There was no answer. He came over to where the lieutenant of the guard stood, clutching the pole with its white symbol high above his head.
"Well?"
"Can we pick up those bodies out on the field? You can get any of your men there. We'll carry this flag, sir—one of 'em 's my son, I think."
The deputy beside Huggins stepped two feet forward. His revolver reversed, he brought it down with all his force on the undefended grizzled head. McGuire dropped in a heap.
All the while, down the dusty July road, Major Grinnell, of the State Guards, had double-quicked his men. They reached the railroad spur just out of sight of the shack village. Here he divided his force. The company automobiles, equipped with searchlights and machine guns, had gone by the county road to the eastern end of the colony, behind the sand ridge, to cut off possible retreat. The motley mass of deputies, mine guards and special police cut in after them, to work back with the machines. The militia marched above the camp, close to the store held by Huggins. After a fifteen minutes' wait, they proceeded in open formation, converging toward the common.
The strikers, stunned by the brutal killing of McGuire, swirled together beyond the well, hidden by the jerry-built shacks.
"We gotter rush 'em," "Micky" Ray insisted, weaving in and out of the perturbed herd, followed by several adherents as violent. "Damn it, why doncher rush 'em, before they sneak out?"
McGue confronted him again. "Still at it, you fool? They'd shoot us down like dogs——"
"They'll shoot us anyway. 'Fraid of 'em, are you, Johnny?" another taunted.
"We gotter rush 'em. Get your guns ready," commanded Ray. "All that aren't afraid, line up behind Bill there."
He turned his back to round up others. The line doubled on him, an excited commotion shaking it. He tried to break his way clear, to understand what they were saying.
"What the——"
"Aincher heard her?"
"Nellie seed 'em!"
"All the soldiers is come! They're right behind the store!"
"They're everywhere!"
"You see?" stormed McGue, shoving Ray to the side. "Everybody below the common."
They made the change. The militia assembled before the storehouse, extended their wings, beat down the open space and the lanes parallel with it. Undetermined, the strikers waited, poorly armed, but sheltered behind friendly walls.
Huggins' big voice came faintly. "Lay down your guns," he shouted. "The first man who shoots, we'll fire. Do you surrender?"
There was no answer.
"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."
"Hell, 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 sparse 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 grass 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 mass 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 shirt 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. "Hell, 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?"