XXVIII
Governor Tennant—his pet name among friends and enemies alike was "Whiskey-barrel Tennant"—dismissed the committee with a few curt platitudes 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-fashioned 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 class and the Paul Judson class will go on until classes 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 document 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!"
Cries of "Shame!" "Shame!" "Throw him out!"
He kept his place. As he waved the mysterious document before their faces, the cries weakened; curiosity hushed them.
"One member of that committee, a man who had no right on it, for he had no union card——"
"As Paul Judson has!" Jensen cut in sharply, amid indignant demands to keep quiet.
"One member of that committee has been—a scab! As he may be a scab again, when he pleases to. I have here," he opened the paper, so that the large red seals were displayed to all, "—affidavits from Connecticut, proving that 'Mister' Pelham Judson, 'Comrade' Judson if brother Jensen wants to call him that, in October, 1913, in New Haven, acted as a scab during a strike of conductors and motormen on the New Haven Electric Company, and helped to break that strike. He's kept quiet about it; I can't. And I say that such a man should be kicked out of all affiliation with the labor movement, here or elsewhere!"
"It's not true," shrieked Jensen and a score of fervid socialists. One brawny Norwegian started for the platform. "I'll tear out dat dam' liar's tongue." The sergeant-at-arms pulled him back.
Pelham rose, pale and trembling.
The chair picked him out. "Does brother Judson desire the floor?"
There was an intent silence, as he stood, alone, surrounded by the hostile hundreds of the men and women he had fought for. He tried to begin.
Bowden walked across the platform, toward him. "Is it true, or not?"
Pelham's swollen tongue licked his lips. At length he spoke, quietly, yet so penetratingly that every syllable reached his audience. "I can explain——" he began.
"Is it true?" Bowden led the demand of hundreds of angered throats.
He faced them unflinchingly. "It is true. I can explain——"
The hooting and jeering broke with savage, almost bestial fury. Doggedly Pelham kept to his feet, in spite of the efforts of Serrano and others to drag him down. "This is terrible, comrade," whispered Serrano. "You'd better leave——"
At length Bowden got the eye of the chair again. "I move that we give five minutes to Mr. Judson to 'explain', as he calls it, his scabbing."
In simple language Pelham told of his training in a home dedicated to the fight against labor; of his acts at New Haven, while a college student; of his conversion to socialism and the cause of labor. He did not mention what it had cost him; a few remembered this. When he came to his New Haven experiences, the hissing began, swelled in volume. All of the chair's entreaties could not stop it.
"If you think, comrades, that my usefulness on this committee is over, I hereby resign. But I can assure you that nothing will shake my efforts in the cause for which I have fought, am fighting, and will continue to fight."
No eloquence could have moved them. The mass psychology of the meeting demanded a victim; here was one before them. The shrivelling strike months of turmoil and undernourishment had thrown them back into a lower, more barbarous state; their sense of justice was perverted from ultimate social equality and order into a primitive condemnation of the accursed thing that had brought them into this predicament. They were only too ready to throw a Jonah to the deep, as an expiatory sacrifice to the omnipotent god who doled out bi-weekly pay-envelopes. They were in a starving panic to get back to the skimpy flesh-pots of a darker Egypt.
It was moved and seconded that the resignation be accepted. An earburst of "ayes" were for the proposition; one or two scattering voices registered weak negatives.
"The motion is carried."
The sudden blow had crushed all opposition. The resolutions to end the strike were accepted without debate.
Jack Bowden, highly satisfied with the night's work, went over to the state office with Bob Bivens and John Pooley. "Reckon I better destroy that?" he grinned, handing a letter out to the big State president.
It was from Henry Tuttle, on the company's legal stationery, enclosing the affidavits relating to Pelham's activities in the New Haven strike.
The letter was burned, the ashes scattered.
The next afternoon's Register informed Pelham of the company's terms, which were to take back all except the ringleaders, some twenty in number—he noticed the names of Jensen and the committeemen heading it—at the old rate, with an agreement from each man binding him not to join the union. The strikers under arrest, continued the account, would be discharged in all probability, except in cases of serious nature.
The same paper contained the sparse outline of another story, which Pelham read with a growing horror.
At three-thirty the previous afternoon, an old man had entered the mining company's office, and asked for Paul Judson.
"What name?"
His watery blue eyes danced peculiarly beneath stringy white hair. "He doesn't know me. It's important."
"We must have your name."
Fumbling first on one foot, then the other, he eyed the uninterested clerk closely. At length he made up his mind. "My name is Duckworth—Christopher Duckworth, tell him. I've come about the settlement of the strike."
She marked down the name, snapping to the drawer. "He's out of town to-day."
"When does he return?"
"Maybe late this evening ... maybe not until to-morrow."
Suspicious old eyes searched her face. "Sure he isn't in?"
"I told you once, didn't I?"
"He may return to-day?"
"Maybe."
"I'll wait."
Passers in and out of the offices remembered his shoving a paper hurriedly into his pocket as they neared.
About an hour later, when the information clerk left for a few minutes, he rose, and started to open the door marked "Paul Judson: Private."
"Where you going?" an accounting clerk demanded, watching his unusual movements.
"Mr. Judson wants to see me."
"He isn't there."
He caught the old man roughly by the arm, as he tried to push past.
The enfeebled socialist retreated to the center of the room.
"Give him this," his quavering tones insisted, pushing a piece of paper into surprised hands.
The clerk looked up hurriedly, some warning of the unexpected, the dangerous, reaching him. His eyes caught the rusty glint of metal.
He jumped. At the same moment, the roar of the shot rattled the windows, acrid smoke swirled throughout the room, the old man's legs buckled up. He fell quietly to the floor; his shoes scraped the flooring once. He lay still.
The clerk read the note aloud, after the morgue had been phoned, and the body covered.
"To Paul Judson:
"This act is my punishment, for living on the earth your presence scars; a just God will punish you in another world.
"This act will bring home to your conscience your responsibility for murder:
"Murder of twenty-three miners in the mine explosion;
"Murder of John Dawson, and fifty innocent strikers, by the guns of your gunmen;
"Murder of your guards by your own acts;
"Murder of the bodies, hearts and souls of starving strikers. Murder of good in all people. Murder of justice in your courts.
"Murder of me, as a warning of what you deserve.
"Christopher Duckworth."
"Can you beat it?" the clerk whistled. "A plain nut."
"I seen how crazy he looked," said the information clerk. "Good thing he didn't miss an' hit you, Courtney."
A little stenographer fainted. One of the telephone operators discussed it with a chummy runner. "I wouldn't work here now, not if you paid me! It's awful bad luck."
"Gee, if I was afraid of stiffs!" he said, pityingly.
The scrubwomen grumbled at having to clean up the floor again. "Ought to be extra pay for this.... Bad enough to clean them floors once."
Paul Judson, returning from Jackson on the morning train, did not learn about the grim protest until he reached the office.